We hope for your assent to this request, and in performing this agreeable duty, we tender you our sentiments of respect and esteem. JNO. W. DEW, CHAS. H. KENNEDY, WM. T. FRENCH, JOHN MURDAUGH, _Professor Tucker_. _Committee_. * * * * * _Williamsburg, October 28, 1834_. _Gentlemen:_--I acknowledge the receipt of your polite note, and am happy to comply with the request which it conveys. Identified with the College of William and Mary by the early recollections and warm affections of youth, I have nothing so much at heart as a desire to be found worthy to aid in restoring that venerable institution to all its former prosperity and usefulness. Your approbation is dear to me, as encouraging a hope that my efforts may not be unavailing. If I shall be so fortunate as to send out into the world but one more, to be added to the list of illustrious men, who are every where found upholding, with generous, devoted and enlightened zeal, the free institutions inherited from our fathers, in their true spirit, I shall have my reward. If I can succeed in impressing on my class the conviction, that freedom has its duties, as well as its rights, and can only be preserved by the faithful discharge of those duties, I shall have my reward. If I can do no more than to furnish to the profession members devoted to its duties, and qualified to sustain its high character for intelligence and integrity, by diligence and fidelity even in its humblest walks, I shall still have my reward. In either case I shall have rendered valuable service, to you, to this venerable institution, to this scene of my earliest, happiest and best days, and to Virginia--my mother--the only country to which my heart has ever owned allegiance. Far as my feet have wandered from her soil, my affections have always cleaved to her, and as the faithful mussulman, in every clime, worships with his face towards the tomb of his prophet, so has my heart ever turned to her, alive to all her interests, jealous of her honor, resentful of her wrongs, partaking in all her struggles, exulting in her triumphs, and mourning her defeats. May she again erect herself to her former proud attitude and walk before the children of liberty in the pathless desert where they now wander, as a "cloud by day, and a pillar of fire by night."