STUDENTS OF WILLIAM AND MARY: I have been requested by the Faculty to address you at the close of the present term, those of you who have not finished your course as well as those who, invested with the honours of the College, are about to depart and engage in active life. I might well decline the task, when I recal the abilities of your instructors and their unceasing efforts to prepare you for the great mission in which you are engaged; and when I remember the talents of my associates of the Board of Visitors, which are known to the whole country, and which have been so successfully exerted in the cause of our College. But, as I know most of you personally, have often conversed with you in my visits to this city, and feel the deepest interest in your welfare, it was thought that anything I might say would be received by you, not in the spirit of cold criticism, but as the suggestions of a personal friend and an elder brother.

Your College course, gentlemen, has been marked by an extraordinary event. The year which ends with this day will be singled out by posterity as one of the most remarkable in the annals of your institution. The term was advancing prosperously under the new arrangement of the studies of the course, when a memorable catastrophe occurred. On

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the early morning of the 8th of February last, you were roused from your beds by the cry of fire, and you rose to behold your ancient College edifice, reared more than a century ago by your fathers, enveloped in flames which no industry, or skill, or daring could control. Some of you barely escaped with your lives : others of you lost your apparel and your books; but, in contemplating that mournful sight, you forgot your personal risks and losses, and looked only to the calamity which had befallen the College. I shall not recal the progress of the flames at that awful hour. You saw them as they consumed the Laboratory, and as, rising with fearful rapidity, they encompassed that precious library, which the pains and the taste of your fathers for more than a century had gathered together. You saw the main building a vast mass of flames that sprung wildly to the skies, and you watched that venerable tower, which was the first object to greet your ancestors as they approached the ancient metropolis, and the last on which the eye of affection lingered on leaving it, as it toppled and fell. One cherished hope yet survived. The chapel was safe. But that hope was vain. That gem of medieval architecturethat repository of your illustrious dead was also destined to perish. You beheld the blazing scene, and some of you

wept as you gazed. Never were tears more worthily shed.

But, even at that crisis of our fate, a grateful and generous assurance sustained and animated you. You felt that your Alma Mater had incurred a great and grievous loss; but you felt at the same time that she had not lost all. You knew that the purest wealth of such an institution was not material but moral. The flames might consume her structures; the numerous tokens of fond remembrance which she had garnered for generations, and which she loved so well, might be lost; and even the portraits of her benefactors, like the originals, might be turned to dust; but you knew the glorious past was hers. All her sacred associations-all the good she has done to the generations that are past-the glory of her noble sons who have won trophies on every field of fame-these, which constitute the true riches of a literary institution, you knew were indestructible and would endure forever. And you felt that, as long as the memoories of the past survived in human bosoms, her destinies were safe. When that wise and valiant statesman, William Prince of Orange, whose name, blended with that of his amiable consort, is still borne by our College, saw his native Holland girdled by the legions of the unscrupulous Louis the Fourteenth, and felt that the hour had come at last when France, more unrelenting than the ocean, from whose empire his ancestors had rescued his beloved domain, was about to overwhelm his country, he at one moment meditated the chivalric design of embarking in his ships all his people. and his portable wealth, and, leaving the delightful homes of the thriftiest people in Europe, the ashes of his fathers, and the temples of his God, of founding a new Holland in the Indian Archipelago. He knew that the moral glory of a State could not be extinguished by accident or by the swarms of an invading host; and that, under a Southern sun, and amid the billows of a distant sea, he

might rebuild on lasting foundations a greater Commonwealth than the one he was about to lose, and yet substantially the same. The crisis passed and Holland was saved; but let us emulate the heroic spirit of our illustrious Founder. Fortunately, though our buildings were destroyed, our old and honourable site is safe. To separate William and Mary College from Williamsburg would be to inflict a double widowhood upon each. It would be to commit a threefold sacrilege a sacrilege against letters, patriotism, and religion. It would be to blast in a single breath the associations of nearly two centuries. And here we cannot recognize too cordially the influence and services of that venerable man, who, at a time when many Alumni seemed to have forgotten their Alma Mater, or were led astray by a false devotion, and were eager to transplant her to some foreign soil, interposed his aid in the public councils, and succeeded in seating her firmly and, we trust, forever on her ancient site; and who, though retired from the service of that country which has crowned him with her highest rewards, is here with us to-day as the Rector of our College, still guiding by his wisdom the destinies of our noble institution. I repeat it, then, gentlemen, let us emulate the heroic spirit of our illustrious Founder displayed in the crisis to which I have alluded, by rebuilding our College in all its strength and with even more than its original beauty, and in endowing it with a liberality worthy of the occasion.

In this honourable enterprise, students of William and Mary, you were among the first to bear a part. While the embers were smouldering, you assembled in the new abodes which the Faculty had judiciously selected for you, and attended your recitations as punctually as if the fire had been all a dream, as if your library, the gift of kings, of archbishops, of royal Governors, of royal Assemblies, and of our own pure patriots, had been open for your reference, and as if the

chapel with its hallowed memories had been ready to receive you. Other students, distracted by the glare of a great calamity, or seduced by an insidious love of change, might have gone abroad; but, realizing that you were the representatives of those whose fame is the boast of our country and whose names some of you bear, you were faithful to your trust. You rallied round the broken fortunes of the College; and in sustaining it you unconsciously afforded the best assurance of your own character, and the most flattering omen of the success that awaits your Alma Mater.

You have watched the rebuilding of the College day by day, and you can assure your friends that every exertion will be made by the Faculty and the Board of Visitors to finish the structure and furnish it in time for the opening of the next session. The new structure will be a great improvement on the original. The ancient walls will be retained, but the interior has been so remodeled as to afford all the conveniences of an entirely new building. The entire edifice will be fire proof from without, and as nearly so from within as was practicable with our means. You might search the land in vain for finer rooms than those of the Laboratory already finished: and the elegant specimens of the apparatus which already adorn them assure you that, in that department of science, the College will be on a level with the most eminent in this country, and espepecially in the South. I think I may safely affirm that in using the old walls we will save a year in time and ten thousand dollars in money; and may we not indulge the pleasing hope that, henceforth, when the student, instinct with the genius of the place, shall enter the venerated structure, and reflect upon those whom it has sheltered in the generations that are gone, he will rejoice that these same walls are ready to perform a similar office for the generations that are to come?

Nor should I omit to say that some of our Alumni and of our citizens at large, have made liberal contributions to our funds, and to our library. Among the books presented to the library, I may be permitted to single out a fine copy of the Encyclopædie Methodique in thirty six folio volumes; an imperfect copy of which, presented by Louis the Sixteenth, was destroyed by the fire; and a copy of the magnificent picturesque Atlas of the Cordilleras by Bonpland and Humboldt in large folio, and printed and published by the government of France.* These two great works are but a part of our valuable receipts; and from present appearances it is probable that our library at the opening of the next session will contain not less than three thousand volumes. Let us hope that every Alumnus of the College will make some contribution, however slight, to our funds or to our library, and thus record his name in the volume which will descend to future times as a memorial of the help extended to William and Mary in the hour of her trial.

But, gentlemen, it is expected that I shall do something more than recount facts for the most part within your own' knowledge, and to allude more directly to your present position. You are engaged in preparing yourselves for the business of life. Some of you are about to leave your Alma Mater and engage at once in affairs. Depend upon it that in the proportion that you shall avail yourselves of the advantages to be derived from your College course will be the ease and the success of your future career. You cannot keep it too steadily before you that here you must lay the foundation of thorough scholarship and of lasting excellence; and that any superstructure you please may in after life be reared upon it. What that superstructure shall be depends upon yourselves. Whether, after leaving College, you sink into the ordinary mass of men, or become useful and eminent by your

knowledge, learning, taste or skill, depends upon yourselves. Without looking too closely into the litigated topic of the equality of minds, I will venture to affirm, from a critical observation of the habits of some of the prominent men of the last generation and of the present, that the difference ordinarily seen between one man and another may be accounted for rather by training and circumstance than by reference to any native superiority of intellect.

What then you are to become hereafter, is wholly a matter for your own decision. Whether you are to engage in agriculture, engrafting upon your calling the vigorous shoots of science or literature, in the study of medicine, law or divinity, mingling in your pursuit of each the elegant with the useful, or in the practical business of the world, you are the arbiters of your own fate. You can adjust the measure of your own attainments. As long as you remain here, others will shape your destinies for you; afterwards, you are to shape them for yourselves.

In performing this important office of your future lives, every student must in the main rely upon the bent of his peculiar genius and his growing experience. He must make his standard of excellence high. He must argue that, as his opportunities are as good as those of others, and as he stands upon the same platform with his fellows, he is bound in honour to keep pace with the foremost in every department in which he puts forth his powers. Having thus fixed on an elevated standard, he must look within to the means of attaining it. He who has passed through a College course with ordinary diligence will not fail to perceive the turn of his mind toward certain studies, and he is to select the means of attaining his purposes. Is he fond of mathematics? He will study them with renewed vigour in their applications to the mechanic arts, to engineering, and to the sublime problems of astronomy. He will avail himself of all the societies established with a view of promoting science, and peruse the publications

which are from time to time sent forth under their auspices. He will collect his books with an eye to his peculiar tastes; and he will seek the intimacy of those who have preceded him in his course, and borrow a new impulse from their words.

In this important department of knowledge, we have been singularly deficient in Virginia; but none other holds out a more inviting prospect to the diligent and the enterprising. When we consider the peculiar circumstances of our extensive country, its agriculture conducted on a scale unknown in ancient or in modern times, and requiring all the mechanical aids which ingenuity can contrive to facilitate its results, its numerous manufactures which are subjected to a competition with those of every nation under the sun, and its commercial marine which must encounter the rivalry of the world, it is evident that a more enlarged and a more profitable field for the application of science to the arts was never known before. The success of a poor Valley boy with his Reaper, which enabled him within a few weeks past to endow four full Professorships in a Theological Seminary by a single munificent act, is an earnest of the triumph that awaits useful discoveries in the arts. Under, or even above, the names of McCormick, Morrison, Manny and Mahan, let the student seek to write his own.

Should the student manifest a love of the Greek and Latin classics, he may, if he has done his duty here, prosecute bis researches, even amid the cares of busy life, to any extent that he pleases. To read the finest works of Greek or Roman genius with due profit and with that exquisite gratification which they yield to the scholar, he must not rend them perfunctorily, and with that railway speed which impels our countrymen as well in literature as on the highway. He must study them as they appear radiant with the lights of modern philology. Within the present century philology has become one of the most important as well as most interesting of

the sciences. It has changed the drift of history. It has searched into the hidden meaning of words, and by their aid has reconstructed the polity of extinct empires. It has traced the rise and progress of nations as developed in their tongues, and, dispelling vague traditions which have hitherto made up the record of the past, it has exposed to the eyes of the present age the actual life of States whose names only have come down to us in history! It has penetrated the sepulchres of cities which have been wrapped in the slumber of more than three thousand years. It has brooded over "Tadmor's marble waste," and from the ruins of Eastern structures which for thousands of years have been hidden beneath deserts impenetrable by civilized man, has gathered inscriptions, and graphs which were the letters of their day, and has thrown them into the lap of History. Nor will its progress be stayed until Egypt and Assyria shall reyeal those long hoarded secrets of which Herodotus in all his wanderings had never heard or dreamed, which Plato and Cicero would have hailed with amazement and with joy, but which may ere long be read in his weekly paper by the planter on the banks of the Mississippi, or by the sojourner beside the Oregon.

But it is in their application to our own tongue, that philological studies are directly useful to the American student. If words are things, then it is indispensable for practical purposes that their meaning be ascertained and fixed; and this office is mainly performed by philology. Its study is one of the most delightful recreations of philosophy, calls into play all the faculties of the mind, and makes all knowledge subservient to its use. If with such preparations we take up the Latin and Greek classics, we will derive from them all the instruction and delight which they have imparted to the wisest of our predecessors, and which they are capable of imparting to us. They still contain the purest models of historical composition, of eloquence, and of song in its diversified modulations,

the world has ever seen; and a deliberate contemplation of their worth would do more to counteract the vices of recent literature than all other teachings united. Nor is the labour too severe. Valuable as are the works of Greece and Rome, they are few in number, and may be mastered with ordinary skill in a comparatively brief space of time, and during the bustle of active life. If the student reads daily a single page of Latin and Greek, he will have perused in ten years all the productions of the ancient authors which "Turk and Time and Goth have spared." And it is not only my own opinion drawn from long and attentive observation, but the opinion of some of the ablest living scholars and statesmen, that a thorough study of the Latin and Greek classics will do more to develope, and strengthen, and exalt those faculties of the mind mos employed in the offices of the pulpit, the bar, and the forum, than all the sciences put together. And their popular is as extensive as their critical use. Classical literature, as it has been since the revi val of letters, so it will ever be, at home and abroad, the countersign and the passport of educated men.

But I cannot enlarge on this point; and will only say, that it is my belief that in no institution in this country are the Latin and Greek languages taught with a more abounding wealth of illustration and with more ability than in our own. William and Mary was once distinguished for her classical scholars. All our monumental inscriptions were from their pens, and still maintain their praise. But our scholars ceased with the Revolution. Let us trust that, in the new career in which she is about to advance, they will appear in all their original lustre. And I am gratified to be able to state that the Modern Languages are taught in our College with equal skill as the Ancient; and that, apart from the commercial value of those languages to a student, they eminently subserve his purpose of acquiring a critical knowledge of his mother tongue. That tongue is the youngest spoken by civilized man ; and may be accurately traced in its