-^LITERHRYfCDLTURE,^ 



sxj:En:Enoi_.:E^ ooxjistt^'. 



lON. "^OHN 



'EID. 



TO attempt a formal or extended address at this late hour would be an 

 inexcusable trespass upon your patient forbearance. In listening to 

 the elaborate, scholarly discourses which have occupied the day and 

 evening, you have faintly realized the ordeal to which the fathers were sub- 

 jected fifty-two times each year. Instead of our suggestive seven, their 

 sermons were divided into two parts. When audience and preacher were 

 exhausted, a brief respite was permitted for a frugal dinner; and then, re- 

 freshed and strengthened for their w'ork, the afternoon would be occupied 

 in completing the masterpiece and enforcing its precepts. 



The gentlemen who have for many hours entertained, instructed and, 

 I trust, not wearied you by their sermons, allow me the clerkly. office of 

 saying "amen" to their local ofterings — hence my talk must be passing 

 brief, even though it be iliscursive and obscure. I fully realize that even 

 a hurried glance at the topics consigned to my tender mercy, must be, to 

 adopt a Motleyism, a kind of Barmecide's feast in which my hearers have 

 to play the part of Shacabac and believe in the excellence of the lamb 

 stuffed wdth pistachio nuts, the flavor of the wines, and the perfume of the 

 roses, upon my prejudiced assertion and without assistance from their own 

 perceptions. 



The people of this county were so engrossed in subduing a wilderness 

 and substituting civilization for barbarism that during the early years of 

 their advent but few memorials of their progress have given jo}' to the his- 

 torim. They evidently ileemed their 'acts hostages for worldly fame and 

 failed to exhibit the egotism of making a written commendation of their 

 personal achievements. Indeed, we find this reticence one of the pecu- 

 liarities of our colonists, and they neither became their own trumpeters 

 nor paid a professional flatterer to make them — on paper — the grandest 

 gentlemen the world e'er saw. Fortunatel}' their children have outgrown 

 this inexQusable modesty, and the would-be great and good of the Nine* 



