so peculiar, that, realizing the fairest fable of antiquity,
its parallel could scarcely be found in the authentic records of human
history.

"You deliberately and perseveringly preferred toil, danger, the endurance
of every hardship, and privation of every comfort, in defence of a holy
cause, to inglorious ease, and the allurements of rank, affluence, and
unrestrained youth, at the most splendid and fascinating court of Europe.

"That this choice was not less wise than magnanimous, the sanction of half
a century, and the gratulations of unnumbered voices, all unable to
express the gratitude of the heart, with which your visit to this
hemisphere has been welcomed, afford ample demonstration.

"When the contest of freedom, to which you had repaired as a voluntary
champion, had closed, by the complete triumph of her cause in this country
of your adoption, you returned to fulfil the duties of the philanthropist
and patriot, in the land of your nativity. There, in a consistent and
undeviating career of forty years, you have maintained, through every
vicissitude of alternate success and disappointment, the same glorious
cause to which the first years of your active life had been devoted, the
improvement of the moral and political condition of man.

"Throughout that long succession of time, the people of the United States,
for whom and with whom you have fought the battles of liberty, have been
living in the full possession of its fruits; one of the happiest among the
family of nations. Spreading in population; enlarging in territory; acting
and suffering according to the condition of their nature; and laying the
foundations of the greatest, and, we humbly hope, the most beneficent
power, that ever regulated the concerns of man upon earth.

"In that lapse of forty years, the generation of men with whom you
co-operated in the conflict of arms, has nearly passed away. Of the
general officers of the American army in that war, you alone survive. Of
the sages who guided our councils; of the warriors who met the foe in the
field, or upon the wave, with the exception of a few to whom unusual
length of days has been allotted by Heaven, all now sleep with their
fathers. A succeeding, and even a third generation, have arisen to take
their places; and their children's children, while rising up to call them
blessed, have been taught by them, as well as admonished by their own
constant enjoyment of freedom, to include in every benison