antiquity, or to trace a lawless ancestry into the caverns of
ravishers and robbers. It is your peculiar privilege to
commemorate, in this birthday of your nation, an event ascertained
in its minutest details; an event of which the principal actors are
known to you familiarly, as if belonging to your own age; an event
of a magnitude before which imagination shrinks at the imperfection
of her powers. It is your further happiness to behold, in those
eminent characters, who were most conspicuous in accomplishing the
settlement of your country, men upon whose virtue you can dwell with
honest exultation. The founders of your race are not handed down to
you, like the father of the Roman people, as the sucklings of a
wolf. You are not descended from a nauseous compound of fanaticism
and sensuality, whose only argument was the sword, and whose only
paradise was a brothel. No Gothic scourge of God, no Vandal pest of
nations, no fabled fugitive from the flames of Troy, no bastard
Norman tyrant, appears among the list of worthies who first landed
on the rock, which your veneration has preserved as a lasting
monument of their achievement. The great actors of the day we now
solemnize were illustrious by their intrepid valor no less than by
their Christian graces, but the clarion of conquest has not blazoned
forth their names to all the winds of heaven. Their glory has not
been wafted over oceans of blood to the remotest regions of the
earth. They have not erected to themselves colossal statues upon
pedestals of human bones, to provoke and insult the tardy hand of
heavenly retribution. But theirs was "the better fortitude of
patience and heroic martyrdom." Theirs was the gentle temper of
Christian kindness; the rigorous observance of reciprocal justice;
the unconquerable soul of conscious integrity. Worldly fame has
been parsimonious of her favor to the memory of those generous
companions. Their numbers were small; their stations in life