Page:The American Cyclopædia (1879) Volume V.djvu/664

660 DANA semblages, where he sometimes presided, the Boston town meetings from 1763 to 1772 ; and he was often at the head of the committee chosen by Boston to address the country at large on public affairs, under the form of pub- lished instructions to the representatives of the town. He reported the papers of Nov. 20, 1767, and May 8, 1770, noted at that time. He was a member of the sons of liberty, and at their celebrated meeting of Dec. 17, 1769, administered to Secretary Oliver the oath of non-execution of the stamp act, and made and signed a solemn official record of that fact. His death is spoken of in the letters of the leading patriots as a great loss to the cause. He married the sister of Judge Trow bridge, and was the father of Chief Justice Dana. DANA, Richard Henry, an American poet and essayist, son of Chief Justice Dana, born at Cambridge, Mass., Nov. 15, 1787. He was educated at Harvard college, in the class of 1808, but did not complete the course, being involved in the noted college rebellion of 1807, and refusing with many others to accept the terms of accommodation offered by the faculty. His degree, however, was conferred upon him, as of 1808, many years later. He spent two years at Newport, R. I., in completing the usual collegiate course, studied law in Boston, and afterward in the office of Robert Goodloe Harper in Baltimore, was admitted to the Mas- sachusetts bar in 1811, and took up his resi- dence in his native town, where he entered upon his profession, and was for a time also warmly engaged in politics, on the federal side, as a member of the legislature and otherwise. His paramount tastes, however, were literary, and in 1814 he joined the club of gentlemen in Cambridge and Boston by whom the " North American Review" was projected and for a time conducted. His earliest writings were published in that periodical, the " Essay on Old Times," and an article on the poems of "Washington Allston, afterward his brother-in- law. In 181 8-' 19 he was associated with Prof. E. T. Channing in the editorship of that re- view, in which his criticisms excited much attention. In 1821-'2 he published in numbers "The Idle Man," with some aid from his friends Bryant and Allston. It was read and admired by a class of literary men, but this was too small a public for its continuance. His first poems, " The Dying Raven " and " The Husband and Wife's Grave," appeared in the "New York Review " in 1825, then edited by Bryant. In 1827 he published " The Bucca- neer and other Poems," in a small volume which was well received, and highly com- mended by the critics. In 1833 he published an enlarged volume, including new poems and the papers of "The Idle Man;" and again in 1850, " Poems and Prose Writings " (2 vols.), in which to the contents of the former volume are added poems, the essays and reviews from the "North American Review," and others of more recent date; being a complete collec- tion of his writings, with the exception of a series of eight lectures on Shakespeare deliv- ered in Boston, New York, and Philadelphia, in 1839-'40. In the controversy between the Unitarian and Trinitarian Congregational! sts of Massachusetts, in 1825-'35, Mr. Dana took an active part with the latter ; but for many years past he has been connected with the Episcopal church. The success of Mr. Dana as an author is perhaps more noteworthy for its quality than for its extent. His peculiar style is most highly appreciated by lovers of the simple and masculine beauties of the older English writers. In dealing with the greater passions, the handling is bold, and the language instinctively true, but the manner is dramatic, not melodramatic, nor what is called popular. DANA, Richard Henry, jr., an American au- thor and lawyer, son of the preceding, born in Cambridge, Mass., Aug. 1, 1815. He grad- uated at Harvard college in 1837. Having been compelled by an affection of the eyes to suspend his collegiate course in 1834, he made the voyage described in his " Two Years Before the Mast " to California, then an almost unknown region. He was a member of the law school from 1837 to 1840, and during two years of that time was also adjunct to Prof. Channing in the department of rhetoric in the university. He was admitted to the Boston bar in 1840, and was at once much employed in admiralty cases. In 1841 he published a manual of sea usages and laws, under the title of "The Seaman's Friend," republished in England as "The Seaman's Manual." His practice now became general in the law courts. He was engaged in 1845 in the well known in- vestigation of the presumption of murder or homicide in York's case (9 Met., 93), which led to a revision of the decisions and to new en- actments on the general subject in several states. He also defended the legal right to require the use of the Bible in the common schools in Maine (Donahue v. Richard, 38 Maine Rep., 376) ; discussed the canon law of the Episcopal church in the Rev. Mr. Pres- cott's case in 1852 ; the title to public and re- ligious charities in the case of the Presbyterian synod v. the parish of the late Dr. Channing in 1854, and in the case of the Price charity in 1864; and appeared for the defence in the numer- ous trials for the rescue of the slave Shadrack in 1853, and in the more celebrated case of Anthony Burns in 1854. He was a member of the Massachusetts constitutional convention of 1853. Having been one of the founders of the free soil party, a delegate from Boston to the Buffalo convention of 1848, and a popular speaker in the republican movement of 1856, he has remained attached to the republican party, advocating the election of Lincoln in 1860 and in 1864, when he delivered political addresses in several states, and that of Grant in 1868 and 1872. In 1859 and 1860 he made a tour around the world, revisiting California and visiting the Hawaiian Islands, China, Ja-