LIFE OF JAMES MONROE.* AMONG the peculiarities affecting the condition of human existence, in a community formed within the period allotted to the life of man, is the state of being exclusively belonging to the individuals who assisted in the formation of that community. Three thousand years have elapsed since the Monarch of Israel, who, from that time, has borne the reputation of the wisest of men, declared that there was no new thing under the sun. And then, as now, the assertion, confined to the operations of nature, to the instincts of animal life, to the primary purposes, and innate passions of human kind, was, and is, strictly true. Of all the illustrations of the sentiment given by him, the course is now as it was then. One generation passeth away, and another generation cometh. To the superficial observation of the human eye, the Sun still ariseth *Eulogy delivered before the Corporation of Boston, 1831. and goeth down; the wind whirleth about continually; all rivers run into the sea, which yet is not full; and all things are full of labor, which man cannot utter: yet, although the thing that hath been is that which shall be, and that which is done is that which shall be done,—still the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing and this affords. the solution to all the rest. The aspirations of man to a better condition than that which he enjoys, are at once the pledges of his immortality, and the privileges of his existence upon earth; they combine for his enjoyment the still freshening charms of novelty with the immutable laws of creation, and intertwine the ever-varying felicities of his condition with the unchangeable monotony of nature. Thus, a thousand years after Solomon had ceased to exist upon earth, when his kingdom had been extinguished, and his nation carried into captivity, there arose among his own descendants, a Redeemer of the human race from the thraldom of sin; the Mediator of a new covenant between God and man. From that time, though all remained unchanged in the phenomena of creation, all was new in the condition of human life. In the rise and fall of successive empires, other novelties succeed each other from age to age. New planets are discovered in the heavens, and new continents are revealed upon earth. New pursuits are opened to industry; new comforts to enjoyment; new prospects to hope. The secrets of the physical and intellectual world are gradually disclosed; the pow ers of man are from time to time enlarged: but the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. The tendency of the magnet to the pole, and its application to the purposes of navigation; the composition of gunpowder, and its application to the purposes of war; the invention of printing, and its application to all the purposes of man in peace and war,—to the wants of the body, and the expansion of the mind,—the gift as it were, of a new earth to replenish and subdue, by the disclosure of a new hemisphere, to the enterprise and capacities of man; all these things are new in the records of the human species. Each of these things diverted into a new channel the current of human affairs, and furnished for the lord of the creation a new system of occupations in his progress from the cradle to the grave. But of all the changes effected, and all the novelties introduced into the condition of human beings, since the promulgation of the gospel of Christ, none has been more considerable than that, the development of which began with the severance of the British colonies in North America from the parent stock. The immediate collision of rights, interests, and passions, which produced the conflict between the parties, and ended in sundering the two portions of the empire engaged, occupied and absorbed the agency and the powers of the actors on that memorable theatre. An English poet has declared it praise enough to fill the ambition of a common man, that he was the countryman of Wolfe, and spoke the language of |