Young and ambitious, full of enthusiasm and admiration for the principles of a free government, Mr. Monroe left the shores of his native land, whose liberty he had so recently assisted in establishing. He had entered the service of his country as a cadet in a corps under the command of the gallant General Mercer, of Virginia. Soon afterward he was appointed a lieutenant, and joined the army at New York. Following the fortunes of the Chief, he was with him at Trenton, Princeton, Brandywine, Germantown and Monmouth. Retiring from the staff of Lord Sterling, where he had served two campaigns, after being wounded in the shoulder at Trenton, he repaired to Virginia to raise a regiment. From various causes he failed in this undertaking, and did not return to the army, but entered Mr. Jefferson’s office as a student at law. A member of the Legislature, and at the age of twenty-four elected to the Continental Congress, from which he passed to the Congress of the United States, we find him from his earliest boyhood devoted to the land of his birth, and serving it in these various positions of honor and eminence. But glowing with youthful admiration for the Republic he had left behind, he was not careful to conceal his feelings in imperial France, and hence made himself unpopular with those in power. He was deemed too enthusiastically engaged in the feelings of revolutionary France to do justice to his own country, and he was recalled by Washington. In August, 1792, Lafayette was taken prisoner by the Austrians, and after being thrown like a criminal in the Prussian dungeon at Wesel on the Rhine, was transferred successively to Magdeburg, Glatz, Neisse, and finally to Olmutz. In this Austrian dungeon he was convinced by the rigor of his confinement and the brutal treatment of his captors that his fate was sealed. Down in his dark cell, ten paces deep, where the rain through the loop-holes poured, and the sun did not shine, the young defender of American liberty lay chained, while the weary months dragged by, and no word of hope or certainty of death came from his wife and children left behind in Paris. Wasted by disease, deprived of light, air, and decent food—the loathsome dampness and filth of his dungeon so reducing him that his hair fell from him entirely by the excess of his sufferings, his cruel tormentors cheered his gloom and oppression by no word or look of sympathy. America knew the fate of his loved ones, and while his estates were confiscated, his wife in the prison of La Force, and his little children, two of whom shared the confinement of their mother, awaiting the wrath of their oppressors, the agents of the country whose once hopeless cause he had espoused were actively employed in behalf of their former friend.