wont to
talk about, should no longer pretend to an equality with them, not
merely in this world, but in the manner of going out of it. At any
rate, he notes the date of Madison's death, the twenty-eighth day of
June, as "the anniversary of the day on which the ratification of the
Convention of Virginia in 1788 had affixed the seal of James Madison as
the father of the Constitution of the United States, when his earthly
part sank without a struggle into the grave, and a spirit, bright as the
seraphim that surround the throne of Omnipotence, ascended to the bosom
of his God." There can be no doubt of the deep sincerity of this
tribute, whatever question there may be of its grammatical construction
and its rhetoric, and although the date is erroneous. The ratification
of the Constitution of the United States by the Virginia Convention was
on June 25, not on June 28. It is the misfortune of our time that we
have no living great men held in such universal veneration that their
dying on common days like common mortals seems quite impossible. Half a
century ago, however, the propriety of such providential arrangements
appears to have been recognized almost as one of the "institutions." It
was the newspaper gossip of that time that a "distinguished physician"
declared that he would have kept a fourth ex-President alive to die on a
Fourth of July, had the illustrious sick man been under his treatment.
The patient himself, had he been consulted, might, in that case,
possibly have declined to have a fatal illness prolonged a week to
gratify the public fondness for patriotic coincidence. But Mr. Adams's
appropriation of another anniversary answered all the purpose, for that
he made a mistake as to the date does not seem to have been discovered.

It was accidental that Port Conway was the birthplace of Madison. His
maternal grandfather, whose name was Conway, had a plantation at that
place, and young Mrs. Madison happened to be there on a visit to her
mother when her first child, James, was born. In the stately--not to say
stilted--biography of him by William C. Rives, the christened name of
this lady is given as Eleanor. Mr. Rives may have thought it not in
accordance with ancestral dignity that the mother of so distinguished a
son should have been burdened with so commonplace and homely a name as
Nelly. But we are afraid it is true that Nelly was her name. No other
biographer than Mr. Rives, that we know of, calls her Eleanor. Even