OF ARTS AND SCIENCES: MAY 30, 1865. 503 



Nor was the private life of Mr. Everett, when he finally withdrew 

 from all official position, a life of retii-ement or inaction. Indeed, it may 

 be doubted whether he was ever more actively or more successfully 

 employed in serving the public than during the last ten years of his 

 life, when he was free from all official obligations. As President of 

 the Board of Trustees of the Public Library of Boston, and as one of 

 the Overseers of the University at Cambridge, he continued to render 

 the most valuable aid to the cause of popular education. As a lecturer 

 before many of our mercantile, literary, and charitable associations, as 

 a speaker at almost all our great anniversary festivals and occasional 

 meetings, and as a contributor to the public journals of his own or other 

 cities, he found ample opportunities for expressing his views on the va- 

 rious questions of the day, (and he expressed them with more inde- 

 pendence and more weight as a private citizen of the highest accom- 

 plishments and largest experience, whom all honored and respected, 

 than if he had held the most important and distinguished office in the 

 gift of the people.) Among the public addresses delivered by him at 

 this period of his life, there is, perhaps, none of more commanding 

 excellence than the one which he pronounced in August, 1856, be- 

 fore the American Association for the Advancement of Science, on the 

 occasion of dedicating the Dudley Astronomical Observatory, — a dis- 

 course which for felicity and scope of illustration and for effisctive 

 oratory may well be ranked among the most brilliant of the contribu- 

 tions which science owes to literature and eloquence. During a por- 

 tion of this period of his private life he devoted himself particularly 

 and with the greatest success to the collection of a fund for the purchase 

 of Mount Vernon, 'and for securing the home and the grave of Wash- 

 ington as the property of the nation. To this end he visited almost all 

 the great cities of the Union, delivering a brilliant discourse on the 

 character of the Father of his Country wherever he went, and contribut- 

 ing the proceeds of every such occasion to the Mount Vernon Fund. 

 It was to him more than to any or all other persons that the ultimate 

 accomplishment of the object was due. On the breaking out of the 

 Rebellion, four years ago, Mr. Everett seemed to consecrate himself, 

 and with a new earnestness, to the service of his country, and his voice, 

 his pen, his personal influence and example, were of inestimable value 

 to the cause of the Union. He was not spared to see the final triumph 

 of that cause ; but he lived to be gladdened by not a few of those suc- 

 cesses wli'cli rendered the ultimate issue only a question of timp. He 



