They represented respectively the Commonwealth, the City, the Supreme Bench, the University, the American Academy, the Historical Society, the Public Library, the Union Club, and the United States Army and Navy. The officers of the Army and Navy highest in rank on this station represented these services; the other organizations were represented, in each case, by their highest officers.
The Governor received at the same time the following despatch:—
"It is impracticable for the President and the Cabinet to leave the capital to attend the funeral.
"The President of the United States and the heads of departments tender to the Commonwealth of Massachusetts their condolence on the lamented death of Edward Everett, who was worthy to be enrolled among the noblest of the nation's benefactors."
Why do you call that man a private citizen, to whom every officer in the Nation, in the Commonwealth, and in the City, unites in paying homage? Why do you select the leading man in every class of service to be present to represent you at his open grave?
The true answer to these questions, and the true explanation of the universal feeling expressed in public and in private when he died, are not found without reference to some traits of moral constitution, to which it is well, I believe, to call attention now. To those traits of character,—as shown through life,—rather than to specific gifts of intellectual power, is Mr. Everett's singularly varied success to be ascribed. You may say, if you please, that it requires a very rare mental genius and even very rare physical endowment to carry out the behests of such resolution as I am to describe. This, of course, is true. But unless you have the moral determination which compels your vivid mind to plan, and your well-built machine to work for you, you get no such life. The secret—if it is to be called such—of this wonderful life, is the determination to do the special thing which at the moment is to be done. Mr. Everett was no admirer of Carlyle. But long before Carlyle began to tell men "to do the thing that came next them," Mr. Everett had been doing it, with a steady confidence that he could do it. Now the things that come next men in America are very various. That is the reason why he has been doing very various things. That is the reason why President and Cabinet, Navy and Army, University, Bench, and Academy, City and Commonwealth, meet, by their first representatives, at his grave, in recognition of specific service of the most eminent character which he has rendered to each of them, and which it would be a shame for them to fail to own.
In a little sketch of his college life, which he once sent me, there is an estimate—made at the age of sixty-one—of his own standing when he was a Sophomore, in comparison with some of his classmates. Some of those he names have passed on before him; two of them remain with us, to be honored always for the fruits of that scholarship which he observed so young. I think there can be nothing wrong in publishing a recollection, which, by accident, gives a hint as to the method of his own after-life to which I have alluded.
"I was considered, I believe, as taking rank among the few best scholars of the [Sophomore] class, although there was no branch in which I was not equalled—and in several I was excelled—by some of my classmates, except perhaps Metaphysics. Thus, I was surpassed by Cooper in Latin, but he was wholly deficient in Mathematics, and regarded with pity, not altogether unmixed with contempt, all who had a taste for that study. Story, a brother of Mr. Justice Story, excelled me in Greek, but he neglected everything else, and seemed to get at the Greek rather by intuition than study. Fuller, Gray, and Hunt were my superiors in Mathematics; but in other studies I was the rival of Fuller, and Hunt made no pretensions to general scholarship;—for the branch in which he excelled he had a decided genius. Gilman was a more practised writer than I; so was Damon; and Frothingham greatly excelled me in speaking, and was in everything a highly accomplished scholar. If I had any strong point, it was that of neglecting no branch and doing about equally well in all."
He had occasion enough to show in all life that it is a very strong point, this "of neglecting no branch, and doing equally well in all." And in his estimates of other men, I think,—though he was more charitable in his judgments than any man I have ever known,—he always had latent the feeling that men could do almost anything they really resolved to do. You could never persuade him that a public speaker could not learn to speak well. He did not pretend that all men could speak equally well, but he really thought that it was the duty of a man, who meant to speak in public, to train himself, in voice, in intonation, in emphasis, so as to speak simply, and without attracting attention to any failure. He thought any man could do this as truly as any man could acquire a good handwriting. And any one who knew him knows that he considered this art as easily attained as the arts by which we clean our faces or our hands.[C]
Starting upon life with this principle, that he would do what had to be done,—if nobody else appeared to do it,—and that he could do it, too,—he soon found himself with work enough on his hands. English's flippant attack on the New Testament Scriptures appeared while Mr. Everett was minister of Brattle-Street Church. Because it appeared, he considered it his place to defend the New Testament against that specific attack; and he did it. The "Defence of Christianity," which he then published, is of value, chiefly as a piece of controversy belonging to the history of opinion in this neighborhood at that moment. Controversy has long since taken other grounds. For that purpose, at that moment, the book did its work completely. It exhausted the points which Mr. English raised, and exhausted them in a way which required very patient study. Mr. Everett once said that to compile the chapter on the quotations of the Old Testament by the New Testament writers, he went through the whole of the Mischna in the edition of Surenhusius, in six volumes folio. This chapter, I may say in passing, is the chapter of most permanent value in the "Defence." Now this "Defence," the work of a boy of twenty years of age, was written in the midst of the demands made upon the popular preacher in one of the largest parishes in Boston, in a few months' time,—sent to the printer chapter by chapter. And Mr. Everett said of it, in after-life, that, if it did not seem like affectation, he would say that it was relaxation from the work he was doing in the pulpit. I have no doubt it was. I have no thought that he was specially fitted for that work. It illustrates rather his moral force of determination. He thought that particular charge of Mr. English's ought to be answered. Nobody else answered it. And therefore he did it himself. He knew he could do it, if it must be done. If he had not prepared for it, he must prepare for it then.