myself the happiest of men, if I could be instrumental in restoring an entire esteem, confidence, and affection, or, in better words, the old good nature and the old good humor, between the different sections of this distracted and afflicted land. For out of such a restoration, I do believe, would come a better hope for all that is dear to us and to our posterity, and better, wiser, and juster views of even African slavery itself, at the South as well as at the North, than from all the criminations and contentions which are now shaking the capitol and the country to their foundations, and threatening to rend asunder the whole framework of American freedom.

17

THE INAUGURATION OF THE STATUE

OF FRANKLIN.

AN ADDRESS DELIVERED AT THE UNVEILING OF THE STATUE OF FRANKLIN, IN BOSTON, SEPTEMBER 17, 1856.

WE are assembled, Mr. Mayor and fellow-citizens, to do honor to the memory of one, of whom it is little to say, that from the moment at which Boston first found a local habitation and a name on this hemisphere-just two hundred and twenty-six years ago to-day — down even to the present hour of her mature development and her meridian glory, she has given birth to no man of equal ability, of equal celebrity, or of equal claim upon the grateful remembrance and commemoration of his fellowcountrymen and of mankind.

We come, on this birthday of our ancient metropolis, to decorate her municipal grounds with the image of that one of her native sons, whose name has shed the greatest lustre upon her history; proposing it as the appropriate frontispiece and figurehead, if I may so speak, of her Executive and Legislative Halls for ever.

We come, at this high noon of a new and noble exhibition of the products of New England industry and invention, to inaugurate a work of Art, in which the latest and best efforts of American genius and American skill-for it is all Americanare fitly and most felicitously embodied in the form and lineaments of the greatest American Mechanic and Philosopher.

We come, on this anniversary of the very day on which the Constitution of the United States was adopted and signed, to commemorate a Statesman and Patriot, who was second to no

one of his time in the services which he rendered to the cause of American Liberty and Independence, and whose privilege it was, at the advanced age of eighty years, to give his official sanction and signature to the hallowed instrument, by which alone that Liberty and Independence could have been organized, administered, and perpetuated.

I hail the presence of this vast concourse of the people, assembled in all the multiplied capacities and relations known to our political or our social state, mechanic, mercantile and agricultural, literary, scientific and professional, moral, charitable and religious, civil, military and masonic; not forgetting that "legion of honor," which has decorated itself once more, for this occasion, with the Medals which his considerate bounty provided for the scholastic triumphs of their boyhood, and which are justly prized by every one that wins and wears them beyond all the insignia which kings or emperors could bestow, I hail the presence of this countless multitude both of citizens and of strangers, from which nothing is wanting of dignity or distinction, of brilliancy or of grace, which office, honor, age, youth, beauty could impart, as the welcome and most impressive evidence, that the day and the occasion are adequately appreciated by all who are privileged to witness them.

"Thus strives a grateful country to display

The mighty debt which nothing can repay!”

Our city and its environs have not, indeed, been left until now, fellow-citizens, wholly destitute of the decorations of sculpture. WASHINGTON first always to be commemorated by every American community-has long stood majestically within the inner shrine of our State capitol, chiselled, as you know, by the celebrated Chantrey, from that pure white marble which is the fittest emblem of the spotless integrity and pre-eminent patriotism of a character, to which the history of mere humanity has hitherto furnished no parallel.

Bowditch, our American La Place, has been seen for many years, beneath the shades of Mount Auburn, portrayed with that air of profound thought and penetrating observation, which seems almost to give back to the effigy of bronze the power of piercing

the skies and measuring the mechanism of the heavens, which only death could take away from the ever-honored original.

Near him, in the beautiful chapel of the same charming cemetery, will soon be fitly gathered representative men of the four great periods of Massachusetts history: John Winthrop, for whom others may find the appropriate epithet and rightful designation, with the first charter of Massachusetts in his hand; James Otis, that "flame of fire" against writs of assistance and all the other earliest manifestations of British aggression; — John Adams, ready to "sink or swim" in the cause of "Independence now and independence for ever;" and Joseph Story, interpreting and administering, with mingled energy and sweetness, the constitutional and judicial system of our mature existence. Glorious quaternion, illustrating and personifying a more glorious career! God grant that there may never be wanting a worthy successor to this brilliant series, and that the line. of the great and good may be as unbroken in the future, as it has been in the past history of our beloved Commonwealth!

Aureus.

Primo avulso non deficit alter

Within the last year, also, the generosity and the genius of our city and country have been nobly combined, in adorning our spacious and admirable Music Hall with a grand embodiment of that exquisite composer, who would almost seem to have been rendered deaf to the noises of earth, that he might catch the very music of the spheres, and transfer it to the score of his magnificent symphonies.*

Nor do we forget, on this occasion, that the familiar and cherished presence of the greatest of the adopted sons of Massachusetts is soon to greet us again on the Exchange, gladdening the sight of all who congregate there with the incomparable front of Daniel Webster.

At the touch of native art, too, the youthful form of the martyred Warren is even now breaking forth from the votive block, to remind us afresh "how good and glorious it is to die for one's country."

But for BENJAMIN FRANKLIN, the greatest of our native-born

* The statue of Beethoven, by Crawford.

sons, and peculiarly the man of the people, has been reserved the eminently appropriate distinction of forming the subject of the first bronze, open-air statue, erected within the limits of the old peninsula of his birth, to ornament one of its most central thoroughfares, and to receive, and I had almost said to reciprocate, the daily salutations of all who pass through them.

Nor can any one fail to recognize, I think, a peculiar fitness in the place which has been selected for this statue.

Go back with me, fellow-citizens, for a moment, to a period just one hundred and forty-two years ago, and let us picture to ourselves the very spot on which we are assembled, as it was in that olden time. Boston was then a little town, of hardly more than ten or twelve thousand inhabitants. Her three hills, now scarcely distinguishable, were then her most conspicuous and characteristic feature, and I need hardly say that almost all the material objects which met the view of a Bostonian in this vicinity, at that day, must have been widely different from those which we are now privileged to look upon. No stately structures for city councils or for courts of justice were then standing upon this site. There was no Horticultural Hall in front, delighting the eye and making the mouth water with the exquisite flowers and luscious fruits of neighboring gardens and green-houses. There were no shops and stores, filled with the countless fabrics of foreign and domestic labor, facing and flanking it on every side. Yet all was not different. The fathers and founders of Boston and of Massachusetts-more than one, certainly, of the earliest ministers and earliest magistrates of the grand old Puritan colony were slumbering then as they are slumbering now, in their unadorned and humble graves at our side, in what was then little more than a village churchyard,

"Each in his narrow cell for ever laid;"

and yonder House of God, of about half its present proportions, was already casting its consecrated shadows over the mouldering turf which covered them. At the lower end of the sacred edifice, for the enlargement of which it was finally removed about the year 1748, there might have been seen a plain wooden building, of a story and a half in height, in which Ezekiel Cheever, of