Mr. BuckinshcuiiJ s Address. 



during his exile, through Egypt, Palestine, Syria, Mesopotamia, and ^o the borders of 

 Media and Persia, in which he was engaged for several years. On his return from his 

 travels he was instrumental in uprooting and destroying the very tyranny under which 

 his banishment tooli place; but this patriotic deed, instead of gaining for him the es- 

 teem and admiration of the populace, who had so largely benefitted by his labors, ex- 

 cited their envy and ill-will; so that he a second time left his native land, and then 

 visited Greece. It was there, at the great festival of the Olympic Games, about five 

 hundred years before the Christian era, being then in the fortieth year of his age, that 

 he stood up among assembled myriads of the most intellectual auditors of the ancient 

 world, to narrate, in oral discourses, drawn from the recollection of his personal travels, 

 the subject matter of his interesting history and description of the Countries of the 

 East ; and such was its effect upon the generous hearts and brilhant intellects of his 

 accomplished hearers, that while the celebrated Thucydides, then among them as a boy, 

 shed tears at the recital of the events of the Persian war, and his young bosom was 

 perhaps then first fired with the ambition which made him afterwards one of the most 

 accomplished historians of Greece, the people received Herodotus with such universal ap- 

 plause, that as an honorof the highest kind, ihe names of the nine Muses were bestowed 

 upon the nine Books or subdivisions of his interesting narrative, which they continue to 

 bear to the present hour in every language into which they have been translated. 



Pythagoras, of Samos, is another striking instance of a similar career. Disgusted 

 with the tyranny of Polycrates, he retired from his native island ; and having previously 

 travelled extensively in ChaldeaandEgypt, and probably in India, he also appeared at the 

 Olympic games of Greece, and travelled through Italy and Magna-Grecia, dehvering, in 

 the several towns that he visited, oral discourses on the history, religion, manners, and 

 philosophy of the Countries of the East; and their general eff'ect was not less happy 

 than that produced by the narrations of Herodotus ; for it is said that 'these animated 

 harangues were attended with rapid success, and a reformation soon took place in the 

 life and morals of the people.' 



I might go on to enlarge the catalogue of precedents, for both ancient and modern 

 history is full of them — Marco Polo, Cobimbuii, Camoens, Raleigh, and Bruce (all, too, 

 treated with the deepest injustice by their countrymen) will occur to every one — but it 

 is unnecessary. May I only venture to hope, that as some similarity exists between my 

 own history and sufferings from tyranny and the ingratitude of contemporaries and that 

 which marked the career of those great men whose names I have cited — Herodotus and 

 Pythagoras — as well as in the countries we each traversed, and the mode of diffusing the 

 information thus acquired by oral discourses among the people of other lands — the 

 siinilarity may be happily continued — if not in the honors to be acquired, at least in the 

 amount of the good to be done; and that in this last respect, the Olympia and Magna 

 Grecia of the East may fairly yield the palm to the more free and more generally intel- 

 ligent Columbia of the West, is my most earnest hope and desire, my most sincere and 

 fervent prayer. 



I will say no more, except to add, that should my humble labors among you be 

 crowned with the success which I venture to anticipate, and should Providence spare 

 me life and health to follow out the plan I have long meditated and designed, it is my 

 intention, after visiting every part of the United States of America, to extend my tour 

 through the British Possessions of Canada, New-Brunswick, Nova Scotia, and the 

 West Indies ; to visit from thence the Isthmus of Darien, for the purpose of investiga- 

 ting this barrier between the Atlantic and Pacific Ocean ; to make an excursion through 

 Mexico, and from thence pass onward by the South Sea Islands to China, visit thePhil- 

 lippines and the Moluccas, go onward to Australia and Van Dieman's Land; continue 



