JOHN A. ANDREW.*

I AM not so presumptuous, Mr. Mayor and Gentlemen of the City Council, as to rise here with the intention to pronounce a eulogy on him whose sudden death sent such a shock of grieved surprise through the nation, for the universal sense of bereavement is the only fitting eulogy of the virtues and abilities whose departure it mourns. My more modest purpose is to attempt, as well as I can, to account for the influence he exerted during his life, and for the peculiar preciousness of the memory he has left behind him. It is generally felt that since the death of Lincoln the country has not been called upon to lament so great a public loss; and a simple statement of the qualities of mind and character which made him so honored and so endeared is, therefore, better than all panegyric.

JOHN ALBION ANDREW was, in the best sense of the word, well born.

He came of that good New

* Address delivered before the City Council of Boston, November 26, 1867.

England stock in which conscience seems to be as hereditary as intelligence, and in which the fine cumulative results of the moral struggles and triumphs of many generations of honest lives appear to be transmitted as a spiritual inheritance. Born in Windham, Maine, on May 31st, 1818, at the time Maine was a part of Massachusetts, his genial nature was developed in the atmosphere of a singularly genial home. The power of attaching others to him began in his cradle, and did not end when all that was mortal of him was tenderly consigned to the grave. Free from envy, jealousy, covetousness, and the other vices of disposition which isolate the person in himself, his sympathies were not obstructed in their natural outlet, and he early laid the foundation of his comprehensiveness of mind in his comprehensiveness of heart. He was not a bright boy in the sense of having that superficial perception and ready memory by which lessons are rapidly learned; but if his mental growth was slow it was sturdy, and what he acquired went to build up faculty and to pass as a force into character. Bowdoin College, from which he was graduated in the class of 1837, he was indifferent to academic honors, and was surpassed in scholarship by many whom he obviously surpassed in all the qualities of intellectual manhood. His ambition at the age of nineteen had

At

maturity in it, showing none of that passion for prominence which the young are apt to mistake for the deeper impulse which gradually lifts men to eminence. He took life in a large and leisurely way, unvexed by the fret and sting of unsatisfied vanities, and less anxious to shine in the estimation of others than to stand well in his own. Choosing the law for his profession, he came to this city to study it in the office of Henry H. Fuller, and in 1840 was admitted to the bar.

As a lawyer he rose but slowly into practice, and developed only by degrees those powers which eventually placed him in the front rank of his profession. There are some prodigies of legal learning and skill who have not only mastered the law, but been mastered by it. Their human nature seems lost in their legal nature. But it was the law of Andrew's mind, that his character should keep on a level with his acquirements, and that the man should never be merged in the professional man. The freshness, elasticity, and independence, the joyousness and the sturdiness, of his individuality, increased with the increase of his knowledge and experience. He showed, from the first, that he could, in Sir Edward Coke's phrase, "toil terribly." We have the testimony of his personal and professional friend, Mr. Chandler, that no man at the bar ever studied harder; that he looked up

his cases with great care and zeal; that he was quick to seize points, and tenacious to hold them; that he was recognized at the bar as a dangerous opponent before he had acquired much outside reputation as a lawyer; that he tried a case with " courage, perseverance, spirit, and a dash of old-fashioned but manly temper"; and that he probably never lost a client who had once employed him. It is impossible to overrate the influence of this austere legal training in making him the great power in the State he finally became, for it was the union of the lawyer with the philanthropist that eventually produced the statesman.

And in passing from the lawyer to the philanthropist we find no break in the integrity of the man. His philanthropy was born of the two deepest elements of his being, beneficence and conscience, his love of his kind, and his sense of duty to his kind; and both had received Christian baptism. The virtues which Christianity enjoins he cultivated with a simple faith in their absolute excellence and authority, which was astonishing in a busy layman; and the difficulty of classing him exclusively with any denomination of Christians, is due to the fact that though he held decided doctrines, he so subordinated theological doctrines to Christian virtues, that wherever the spirit of Christianity was, there was his church. The dis

tinction between Unitarian and Trinitarian, between Protestant and Catholic, vanished the moment he recognized in another that love of God which comes out in service to man. During all the years he was toiling as a lawyer, he found time to give his thought, his eloquence, and his learning, he found time, I should more properly say, to give himself, — to all societies which contemplated the relief of the poor, the reform of the criminal, and the succor of the oppressed. Few men were connected with so many unfashionable and unpopular causes. Indeed it was only sufficient to know that alliance with any party or philanthropic cause was considered to involve some loss of social caste or business patronage, to be pretty sure that John A. Andrew was allied with it. And opposition and obloquy could not embitter his spirit. He was amused rather than exasperated at the idea that, in a Christian community, it could be considered, even by fops, a mark of vulgarity to apply Christian principles to politics and affairs. The champion of many causes, he escaped the narrowing influences which might have resulted from his exclusive devotion to any particular one, whilst his robustness of moral health saved him from all sentimentality, sanctimoniousness, and cant. Moral sentimentality is to moral sentiment what indolent revery is to executive