WILLIAM ELLERY CHANNING, a grandson of William Ellery, one of the signers of the Declaration of Independence, was born at Newport, R. I., April 7, 1780. He was graduated with honors at Harvard College, at eighteen years of age, and first thought of studying medicine, but decided to enter the ministry. After spending some time as private tutor in Richmond, he returned to Cambridge and studied theology. In 1803 he was ordained, and became pastor of the Federal Street Church in Boston, where he remained during his ministerial life. He was associated with Ralph Waldo Emerson and a welcome guest at his house. His writings show freedom of thought, wide interests, and love of literature. His death occurred at Bennington, Vt., April 2, 1842. SUCH was Napoleon Bonaparte. But some will say he was still a great man. This we mean not to deny. But we would have it understood that there are various kinds or orders of greatness, and that the highest did not belong to Bonaparte. There are different orders of greatness. Among these, the first rank is unquestionably due to _moral_ greatness, or magnanimity; to that sublime energy by which the soul, smitten with the love of virtue, binds itself indissolubly, for life and for death, to truth and duty; espouses as its own the interests of human nature; scorns all meanness and defies all peril; hears in its own conscience a voice louder than threatenings and thunders; withstands all the powers of the universe which would sever it from the cause of freedom and religion; reposes an unfaltering trust in God in the darkest hour, and is ever “ready to be offered up” on the altar of its country or of mankind. Of this moral greatness, which throws all other forms of greatness into obscurity, we see not a trace in Napoleon. Though clothed with the power of a god, the thought of consecrating himself to the introduction of a new and higher era, to the exaltation of the character and condition of his race, seems never to have dawned on his mind. The spirit of disinterestedness and self-sacrifice seems not to have waged a moment’s war with self-will and ambition. His ruling passions, indeed, were singularly at variance with magnanimity. Moral greatness has too much simplicity, is too unostentatious, too self-subsistent, and enters into others’ interests with too much heartiness, to live an hour for what Napoleon always lived, to make itself the theme, and gaze, and wonder of a dazzled world.