PREFATORY NOTE. THIS is the Fourth of a series of volumes which have appeared at long intervals under the same name and bearing the common title of "Addresses and Speeches." It need hardly be said that it will be the last. In a friendly notice of one of the previous volumes, an anonymous writer, many years ago, spoke pleasantly of it as "an unconscious Autobiography." The present volume contains quite as much as either of its predecessors of the sort of material to which such a designation might perhaps not unjustly be applied. It certainly furnishes a somewhat substantial idea of my way of life during the years which it covers. But it has a far higher value as supplying occasional notices of the lives of others, and of important public events in which others have been the actors. The Orations, prepared by the order of Congress, on the Centennial Commemoration of the Surrender at Yorktown, and on the Completion of the National Monument to WASHINGTON; the Addresses at the Unveiling of the Statue of Colonel Prescott on Bunker Hill, at the Centennial Anniversary of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, and at the Celebration of the Hundredth Birthday of Daniel Webster; the Memoir of Henry Clay; the Tributes to Dr. Barnas Sears and to General Grant; and the briefer Notices of Mignet and Count Adolphe de Circourt, to name no others, have a general interest, and I should have been unwilling to spare them from my collected works. Miscellaneous Papers, mainly of an Historical character, make up the residue of the volume, and may at least serve to recall the official relations which I have so long sustained to Institutions and Societies, from many of which age has now constrained me to withdraw. The four volumes together, in which the earliest title bears date 12 March, 1835, and the latest 22 February, 1886,contain an abundant record of my sayings and doings during more than fifty years. Yet I should be sorry to have my two separate volumes of the "Life and Letters of John Winthrop" (1588 to 1649) forgotten. They contain the account of a career and character to which later generations of his family can furnish no parallel, nil simile aut secundum. The Heliotype facing the titlepage of this volume is from the portrait in the Speaker's Gallery of the Capitol at Washington, painted by Huntington, and most kindly presented to Congress by Citizens of Massachusetts, as described on page 354. 90 MARLBOROUGH STREET, Boston, 12 May, 1886. ROBERT C. WINTHROP. |