On the other hand—does it not admonish us, while we are parsimonious of our praise, to be niggards also, of our censure? Does it not whisper to the moral ear this truth—that humanity is frail? And how artfully does it not insinuate, that if Cæsar had faults, his funeral dirge ought not to be the vehicle of their publicity, but contrived rather as a sacred seal, to preserve them from the eye of malice, or the finger of scorn.
Does it not too inculcate the moral duty of investing the frail, the spotted portion of a great man's memory, with a shroud of charitable forgetfulness; and does it not do all this with the evangelick spirit in which the poet has given us the benevolent caution to "tread lightly o'er the ashes of the dead."
Genius, gentlemen, is too frequently accompanied by morbid sensibility; and the high-wrought powers of the human mind, rarely shine with unsullied lustre. The first annunciation therefore of a great man's death, should be the watch-word to seal the history, or, if possible, the recollection of his frailties—the countersign to facilitate their passage, along with the mortal remains of the human fabrick they inhabited, into perennial oblivion.
I have been seduced into these reflections, by a retrospect of the last ten years. During this span of time, it has been my fate to see four[1] of five professors, who were my teachers when I entered the university, pay the debt of nature. And though two[2] of these were, in the paths whither their peculiar talents directed their labours and their zeal, the brightest figures in the history of our country's science—yet I cannot add, that the spirit of the comments I have given on the words of Mark Antony, has been either conceived or applied in relation to their memories.
I shall now proceed, gentlemen, after requesting your pardon for this trespass on your time, to the performance of the task with which you have honoured me, on the threshold of which I have been arrested by the preceding reflections—a task which, while it affords me an opportunity of speaking, in the plain language of truth, of the merits of a departed son of science—gives me not the pleasure of adding, that the chasm in the science of our country which his exit from this world, to him a world of
