CHARLES PICKERING. 441 



Minister to Austria, where he remained till 1867. In 1869, he 

 became Minister to England, but held that position only a little more 

 than a year. His third and last historical work was the " Life and 

 Death of John of Barneveld," published in 1874. The three histories 

 cover the three-quarters of a century, from about 1550 to about 1620, 

 and from this point he intended to go on with the History of the Thirty 

 Years' War. But his work was ended. Sorrow came, his strength 

 failed ; and, after a year or two of decline, he died peacefully. As a 

 historian, he is distinguished alike for his original researches and^r 

 the striking use of them, with loftiness of sentiment, and an ardent 

 devotion to great principles, but not for calmness or the judicial char- 

 acter which gives a history, in which it is prominent, the strongest 

 assurance of a lasting place in literature. No tribute to him, however 

 brief, should pass over his devotion to his country. A true American 

 notwithstanding his long years in Europe, a true republican in pres- 

 ence of all older institutions to which his historic tastes would be 

 naturally drawn, he changed his skies without changing his affections. 

 The very last recollection of him, with the present writer, is the ready 

 and even enthusiastic use he made of his great influence in Holland to 

 procure a government publication for one of our libraries. 



CHARLES PICKERING. 



Charles Pickering, M.D., died in Boston, of pneumonia, on the 

 17th of March, 1878, in the seventy-third year of his age. He was of a 

 noted New England stock, being a grandson of Colonel Timothy Picker- 

 ing, a member of Washington's military family and of his first Cabinet 

 as President ; and he was elected into this Academy under the Presi- 

 dency of his uncle, John Pickering. He was born on Starucca Creek, 

 on the Upper Susquehanna, in the northern part of Pennsylvania, at 

 a settlement made on a grant of land taken up by his grandfather, 

 who then resided there. His father, Timothy Pickering, Jr., died at 

 the age of thirty years, leaving to the care of the mother — who lived 

 to a good old age — the two sons, Charles and his brother Edward, 

 who were much united in their earlier and later lives, and were not 

 long divided in death, the subject of this notice having been for only a 

 year the survivor. 



Dr. Pickering was a member of the class of 1823 at Harvard Col- 

 lege, but left before graduation. He studied medicine, and took the 

 degree of M.D. at the Harvard Medical School in 1826. Living in 

 these earlier years at Salem, he was associated with the late William 



