for the act of incorporation of this
Society, and one of its first members. His brother by marriage,
Governor Davis, was your predecessor in the President' chair.

"These reasons would be enough to induce us to value our relation.
But he has filled a highly honorable and conspicuous place
in public life. He is, I believe, the senior person living
who has been a member of the Cabinet. He is the senior among
living persons who have filled important diplomatic stations.
He has represented the United States at Berlin and at St. James.

"His history is, and doubtless will be, the great standard
authority upon the important period which it covers. He
is the only person living whose judgment would change the
place in public estimation held by any of the great statesmen
of the Revolutionary times. He has had the rare good fortune
among men of letters, to have proposed to himself a great
task, requiring a lifetime for its accomplishment, the successful
achievement of which is enough to make any life illustrious,
and to have lived to complete it with powers of body and mind
undiminished. It is his fate to know, while alive, the estimate
in which he will be held by posterity. In his case, that
knowledge can be only a source of pleasure and satisfaction.

"In this Mr. Bancroft resembles Gibbon. We all remember
Gibbon's delightful account of the completion of his great
work.

"In another thing, alone among great historians, Mr. Bancroft
resembles Gibbon. As an artist he has accomplished that most
difficult task of composing a history made up of many separate
threads, which must keep on side by side, yet all be subordinate
to one main and predominant stream. But his narrative never
loses its constant and fascinating interest. No other historian,
I believe, except Gibbon, has attempted this without becoming
insufferably dull.

"Mr. Bancroft tells the story of thirteen States, separate,
yet blending into one National life. It is one of the most
wonderful things in our history, that the separate States
having so much in common, have preserved so completely, even
to the present time, their original and individual characteristics.
Rhode Island, held in the hollow of the hand of Massachusetts;
Connecticut, so placed that one would think it would become
a province of New York; Delaware, whose chief city is but
twenty-five miles from Philadelphia, yet preserve their distinctive
characteristics as if they were states of