PREFATORY NOTE. THIS is the Fourth of a series of volumes which have appeared at long intervals under the same name and bearing the common title of "Addresses and Speeches." It need hardly be said that it will be the last. In a friendly notice of one of the previous volumes, an anonymous writer, many years ago, spoke pleasantly of it as "an unconscious Autobiography." The present volume contains quite as much as either of its predecessors of the sort of material to which such a designation might perhaps not unjustly be applied. It certainly furnishes a somewhat substantial idea of my way of life during the years which it covers. But it has a far higher value as supplying occasional notices of the lives of others, and of important public events in which others. have been the actors. The Orations, prepared by the order of Congress, on the Centennial Commemoration of the Surrender at Yorktown, and on the Completion of the National Monument to WASHINGTON; the Addresses at the Unveiling of the Statue of Colonel Prescott on Bunker Hill, at the Centennial Anniversary of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and at the Celebration of the Hundredth Birthday of Daniel Webster; the Memoir of |