in every intellectual and moral development of which this country has been the scene, without fainting or weariness they have borne their part, and in the conclusive triumph of the principles of the Puritans and their policies over all discordant, all opposing elements, which enter into the wide comprehension of American nationality, theirs be the praise which belongs to such well-doing.

The son of a farmer—a man of substance, and of credit with his neighbors, and not less with the people of his State—young Chase drew from his boyhood the vigor of body and of mind which rural life and labors are well calculated to nourish. Several of his father's brothers were graduates of this college, and reached high positions in Church and State. An unpropitious turn of the commercial affairs of the country nipped, with its frost, the growing prosperity of his father, whose death, soon following, left him, in tender years, and as one of a numerous family, to the sole care of his mother. With most scanty means, her thrift and energy sufficed to save her children from ignorance or declining manners; maintained their self-respect and independence; set them forth in the world well disciplined, stocked with good principles, and inspired with proud and honorable purposes. To the praise of this excellent woman, wherever the name of her great son shall be proclaimed, this, too, shall be told in remembrance of her: that a Christian's faith, and a mother's love, as high and pure as ever ennobled the most famous matrons of history, stamped the character and furnished the education which equipped him for the labors and the triumphs of his life. One cannot read her letters to her son in college without the deepest emotion. How many such women were there, in the plain ranks of New England life, in her generation! How many are there now! Paying marvelous little heed to the discussion of women's rights, they show a wonderful addiction to the performance of women's duties.

His uncle, Bishop Chase of Ohio, assumed, for a time, the care and expense of his education, and this drew him to the West, where, under this tutelage, he pursued academic studies for two years. At the end of this time he returned to his mother's charge, entered the junior class of Dartmouth College, and graduated in the year 1826, at the age of eighteen. The only significance, in its impression on his future life, of this brief guardianship of the Western Bishop, was as the determining influence which fixed the chief city of the West in his choice as the forum and arena of his professional and public life. After spending four years in Washington, gaining his subsistence by teaching, a law-student with Mr. Wirt—then at the zenith of his faculties and his fame—studying men and manners at the capital, watching the new questions then shaping themselves for political action, observing the celebrated statesmen of the day, conversant with the great Chief-Justice Marshall and his learned associates on the bench of the Supreme Court, and with Webster, and Binney, and other famous lawyers at its bar, he was admitted to practice, and, at the age of twenty-two, established himself at Cincinnati, transferring thus, once and forever, his home from the New England of his family, his birth, his education, and his love, to the ruder but equally strenuous and more expansive society of the West.

While yet of tender years, following up the earlier pious instruction of his mother, and his own profound sense of religious obligations under the inculcation of the Bishop, he accepted the Episcopal Church as the body of Christian believers in whose communion he found the best support for the religious life he proposed to himself. When he left your college he had not wholly relinquished a purpose, once held, of adopting the clerical profession. His adhesion to the Christian faith was simple and constant and sincere, and he accepted it as the master and rule of his life, in devout confidence in the moral government of the world, as a present and real supremacy over the race of man and all human affairs. He was all his life a great student of the Scriptures, and no modern speculations ever shook the solid reasons of his belief. When he entered the city of Washington, fresh from college, "the earnest prayer of his heart was, that God would give him work to do, and success in doing it." When he was laying out the plans of professional life, on his first establishment at Cincinnati, his invocation was, "May God enable me to be content with the consciousness of faithfully discharging all my duties, and deliver me from a too eager thirst for the applause and favor of men." All through the successive and manifold activities of his busy and strenuous life, when, to outward seeming, they were all worldly and personal, the same predominant sense of duty and religious responsibility animated and solemnized the whole.

At this point in his life we may draw the line between the period of education for the work he had before him and that work itself. What Mr. Chase was, at this time, in all the essential traits of his moral and intellectual character—in his views of life, its value, its just objects and aims, its social, moral, and religious responsibilities; in his views of himself, his duties, obligations, prospects, and possibilities; in his determinations and desires—such, it seems to me from the most attentive study of all these points—such, in a very marked degree, he continued to be at every stage of his ascent in life.

What, then, shall we assign as the decisive elements, the controlling constituents, of character—and what the assurance of their persistence and their force—which this youth could bring to the service of the State, or contribute to the advancement of society and the well-being of mankind?

These were simple, but, in combination, powerful, and adequate to fill out worthily the life of large opportunities which, though not yet foreseen to himself, was awaiting him.

The faculty of reason was very broad and strong in him, yet without being vast or surprising. It seized the sensible and practical relations of all subjects submitted to it, and firmly held them in its tenacious grasp; it exposed these relations to the apprehension of those whose opinion or action it behooved him to influence, by methods direct and sincere, discarding mere ingenuity, and disdaining the subtleness of insinuation. His education had all been of a kind to discipline and invigorate his natural powers; not to encumber them with a besetting weight of learning, or to supplant them by artificial training.

His oratory was vigorous, with those "qualities of clearness, force, and earnestness, which produce conviction." His rhetoric was ample, but not rich; his illustrations apposite, but seldom to the point of wit; his delivery weighty and imposing.

His force of will, whether in respect of peremptoriness or persistency, was prodigious. His courage to brave, and his fortitude to endure, were absolute. His loyalty to every cause in which he enlisted—his fidelity in every warfare in which he took up arms—were proof against peril and disaster.

His estimate of human affairs, and of his own relation to them, was sober and sedate. All their grandeur and splendor, to his apprehension, connected themselves with the immortal life, and with God, as their guide, overseer, and ruler; and the sum of the practical wisdom of all worthy personal purposes seemed to him to be, to discern the path of duty, and to pursue it.

His views of the commonwealth were essentially Puritan. Equality of right, community of interest, reciprocity of duty, were the adequate, and the only adequate, principles with him to maintain the strength and virtue of society, and preserve the power and permanence of the State. With these principles unimpaired and unimpeded he feared nothing for his countrymen or their government,