“It would be a somewhat singular subject of speculation to discover how it is that national character so often remarkably expresses itself in single individuals who are born as representatives of a class.  It is wonderful, for it has been the remark of ages, how the great are born in clusters; sometimes, indeed, one star shining with solitary splendor in the firmament above, but generally gathered in grand constellations, filling the sky with glory.  What is that combination of influences, partly physical, partly intellectual, but somewhat more moral, which should make a particular country productive of men great over all others on earth and to all ages of time?  Ancient Greece, with her indented coast, inviting to maritime adventures, from her earliest period was the mother of heroes in war, of poets in song, of sculptors and artists, and stands up after the lapse of centuries the educator of mankind, living in the grandeur of her works and in the immortal productions of minds which modern civilization with all its cultivation and refinement and science never surpassed and scarcely equalled.  And why in the three hundred years of American history it should be given to the Old Dominion to be the grand mother, not only of States, but of the men by whom States and empires are formed, it might be curious were it possible for us to inquire.  Unquestionably, Mr. President, there is in this problem the element of race; for he is blind to all the truths of history, to all the revelations of the past, who does not recognize a select race as we recognize a select individual of a race, to make all history; but pretermitting all speculation of that sort, when Virginia unfolds the scroll of her immortal sons—­not because illustrious men did not precede him gathering in constellations and clusters, but because the name shines out through those constellations and clusters in all its peerless grandeur—­we read the name of George Washington.  And then, Mr. President, after the interval of three-quarters of a century, when your jealous eye has ranged down the record and traced the names that history will never let die, you come to the name—­the only name in all the annals of history that can be named in the perilous connection—­of Robert E. Lee, the second Washington.  Well may old Virginia be proud of her twin sons! born almost a century apart, but shining like those binary stars which open their glory and shed their splendor on the darkness of the world.

“Sir, it is not an artifice of rhetoric which suggests this parallel between two great names in American history; for the suggestion springs spontaneously to every mind, and men scarcely speak of Lee without thinking of a mysterious connection that binds the two together.  They were alike in the presage of their early history—­the history of their boyhood.  Both earnest, grave, studious; both alike in that peculiar purity which belongs only to a noble boy, and which makes him a brave and noble man, filling