States, when he died suddenly of Asiatic cholera, October 1, 1835.
I have carefully read some of his published addresses: a Fourth-of-July oration at Watertown in 1809, and one at Lexington in 1814; also an address before the American Peace Society in 1826. In all these there are the characteristics to be found in a thousand similar speeches of that period, together with some not so common. They are fervent, patriotic, florid; but there is also a certain exceptional flavor arising from the fact that, unlike nine tenths of those who made such addresses in New England, the speaker was a Republican — or, as men were beginning to say, a Democrat — and not a Federalist. He does not appear in these addresses as a bitter partisan; he is as ready to praise Washington and Adams as Jefferson and Madison; but he never mentions Hamilton and Jay, and seems by implication to condemn the policy of the one, and the treaty with which the name of the other is still identified. Nor does he take sides with Napoleon Bonaparte, as the Federalists charged the Democrats with doing, while he condemns, in a really striking and felicitous passage, the selfish motives of the Allied Powers in crushing him: —
“At length the mighty warrior is prostrate; his proud trophies, the spoils of so many vanquished princes, are leveled with the dust. Napoleon is no more! No more, did I say? The blaze of that portentous meteor shall gleam resplendent through all future time!
