In a lecture on "The Expatriated Irish in Europe and America," delivered in Boston, February 11, 1858, the Hon. Caleb Cushing thus alludes to this subject: "In another of the dramatic incidents of that field, a man of Celtic race (Jefferson Davis) at the head of the Rifles of Mississippi, had ventured to do that of which there is, perhaps, but one other example in the military history of modern times. In the desperate conflicts of the Crimea, at the battle of Inkermann, in one of those desperate charges, there was a British officer who ventured to receive the charge of the enemy without the precaution of having his men formed in a hollow square. They were drawn up in two lines, meeting at a point like an open fan, and received the charge of the Russians at the muzzle of their guns, and repelled it. Sir Colin Campbell, for this feat of arms, among others, was selected as the man to retrieve the fallen fortunes of England in India. He did, however, but imitate what Jefferson Davis had previously done in Mexico, who, in that trying hour, when, with one last desperate effort to break the line of the American army, the cavalry of Mexico was concentrated in one charge against the American line; then, I say, Jefferson Davis commanded his men to form in two lines, extended as I have shown, and receive that charge of the Mexican horse, with a plunging fire from the right and left from the Mississippi Rifles, which repelled, and repelled for the last time, the charge of the hosts of Mexico." These puerile criticisms, however, were unavailing against the concurrent testimony of Taylor, Quitman, and Lane, and the grateful plaudits of the army, to shake the popular judgment, which rarely fails, in the end, to discriminate between the false glare of cheaply-earned glory and the just renown of true heroism. The term of enlistment of his regiment having expired, Colonel Davis, in July, 1847, just twelve months after the resignation of his seat in the House of Representatives, returned to the United States. His progress toward his home was attended by a series of congratulatory receptions, the people every-where assembling _en masse_ to do honor to the "Hero of Buena Vista." Mississippi extended a triumphant greeting to her soldier-statesman, who, resigning the civic trust which she had confided to his keeping, had carried her flag in triumph amid the thunders of battle and the wastes of carnage, carving the name of Mississippi in an inscription of enduring renown.