hibited, missed commensurate recognition or responsive plaudits from
his countrymen. His career shows no step backward, the places he filled
were all of the highest, the services he rendered were the most
difficult as well as the most eminent. If, as the preacher proclaims,
"time and chance happeneth to all," the times in which Mr. Chase lived
permitted the widest scope to great abilities and the noblest forms of
public service; and the fortunes of his life show the felicity of the
occasions which befell him to draw out these abilities, and to receive
these services. Not less complete was the round of public honors which
crowned his public labors, and we have no occasion, here, to lament any
shortcomings of prosperity or favor, or repeat the authentic judgment
which the voices of his countrymen have pronounced upon his fame.

The simple office, then, which seems to me marked out for one who
assumes this deputed service in the name of the college and for the
friends of good learning, is, in so far as the just limits of time and
circumstance will permit, to expose the main features of this celebrated
life, "to decipher the man and his nature," to connect the true elements
of his character and the moulding force of his education with the work
he did, with the influence he wielded in life, with the power of the
example which lives after him, and always to have in view, as the most
fruitful uses of the hour, his relations to the men and events of his
times, and, not less, his true place in history among the lawyers,
orators, statesmen, magistrates of the land. _Vera non verba_ is our
maxim to-day; truth, not words, must mark the tribute the college pays
to the sober dignity and solid worth of its distinguished son.

Born of a lineage, which on the father's side dates its American descent
from the Puritan emigration of 1640, and on the mother's, finds her the
first of that stock native to this country, the son of these parents
took no contrariety of traits from the union of the blood of the English
Puritans and the Scotch Covenanters, but rather harmonious corroboration
of the characteristics of both. These, sturdy enough in either, combined
in this descendant to produce as independent and resolute a nature for
the conflicts and labors of his day, as any experience of trial or
triumph, of proscription or persecution suffered or resisted, had
required or supplied in the long history of the contests of these two
congenial races