Memorial Meeting. 15 



Hgent, patriotic effort in the present. The noblesse oblige of a patriotic 

 and substantial ancestry, not only for the individual but for the country 

 itself, is a power whose influence we can scarcely exaggerate. I have 

 thought, as I have visited the great universities of England and seen in 

 their common halls, where once a da}^ the students meet to partake of 

 one meal at least in common, as upon their walls I have seen in living 

 canvas the portraits of the great men of their special colleges — of Isaac 

 Barron, Thomas Babington Macaulay, and all the English bishops at 

 Trinity — and each exhibiting groups of those who have risen to useful- 

 ness and done great deeds in literature, in science, in public life, in war, 

 or in any of the elements and fields of English greatness, that there was 

 a mute appeal to every Englishman from those walls to be worthy of his 

 country and of his college. 



It must have been something of this idea that induced the old Roman 

 to place in the entrance to his house the effigies of every member of his 

 family who had borne a high office in the state. As his son came in and 

 out of that house, he passed between effigies, as lifelike as Roman art 

 could make them, of every member of that family who had held a high 

 office, or magistracy, in the Roman commonwealth. He was stimulated 

 to patriotism b}^ the examples of his fathers — of those who had led 

 armies, of those who had extended the limits of the empire, of those 

 who had triumphed on returning from foreign fields of conquest and vic- 

 tory, of those whose names were revered in the annals of his country — 

 and .so it must have been, consciously or unconsciously, some feeling of 

 this kind that seems almost from Doctor Goode's youth to have led him 

 into the field of genealogical inquiry and study, led him into the field of 

 historic study, grouping his studies, as he seems to have done, around 

 great and inspiring characters. 



Perhaps no family in this country has had so perfect a book, so com- 

 plete a study of all of its branches, as Doctor Goode gave to the family 

 whose name he bore in that book entitled Virginia Cousins, and it is 

 especially gratifying to me to know that Virginia history, so much 

 neglected, was perhaps the favorite field of Doctor Goode's study and 

 investigation. He was a student of the writings of Washington, and 

 gathered all the material he could find about that great Virginian. He 

 was a student of the writings of Jefferson; he was a student of the lives 

 of other distinguished men of that old Commonwealth, and I am told 

 that he had in contemplation the publication of a book to be called 

 Virginia Worthies, in which doubtless he would have tried to give 

 the proper standing to that minor and second class of Virginia's great 

 men of whom the country at large knows so much less to-day than it 

 ought to know. 



Not only, however, in the study of the men and the history of the 

 Commonwealth from which in one line of his ancestry he was sprung 

 was Doctor Goode a student. He was a student of American history at 



