we were colonies of Great Britain!  And now if my brother Hamilton will enact the part of Shem, I will take the place of Japhet, and we will walk backward and will cover with the mantle of charity the shame of our common ancestry,” This sudden burst of wit, argument and eloquence carried the audience by storm, and they were obliged to applaud the “Yankee orator” in spite of themselves.  I count this retort by Dr. Cox one of the finest in the annals of oratory.  Several years afterwards he visited England as a delegate to the first Evangelical Alliance.  It was attended by the foremost divines, scholars and religious leaders of both Britain and the continent; and a brief five-minutes’ speech made by Dr. Cox was unanimously pronounced to have been the most splendid display of eloquence heard during the whole convocation.

He owed a great deal to his commanding figure, fine voice, and graceful elocution.  His memory also was as marvelous as that of Dr. Storrs or Professor Addison Alexander.  One night, for the entertainment of his fellow-passengers in a stagecoach, he repeated two cantos of Scott’s poem of “Marmion”!  I have heard him quote, in a public address before the New York University, a whole page of Cicero without the slip of a single word!  His passion for polysyllables was very amusing, and he loved to astonish his hearers by his “sesquipedalian” phraseology.  A certain visionary crank once intruded into his study and bored him with a long dissertation.  Dr. Cox’s patience was exhausted, and pointing to the door, he said:  “My friend, do you observe that aperture in this apartment?  If you do, I wish that you would describe rectilineals, very speedily.”

I could fill several pages with racy anecdotes of the keen wit and the varied erudition of my venerable friend.  But let none of my readers think of Dr. Cox as a clerical jester, or a pedant.  He was a powerful and intensely spiritual preacher of the living Gospel.  In his New York congregation were many of the best brains and fervent hearts to be found in that city, and some of the leading laymen revered him as their spiritual father.  Sometimes he was betrayed into eccentricities, and his vivid imagination often carried him away into discursive flights; yet he never soared out of sight of Calvary’s cross, and never betrayed the precious Gospel committed to his trust.

The first time that I ever saw Henry Ward Beecher was in 1848.  He was then mustering his new congregation in the building once occupied by Dr. Samuel H. Cox.  It was a weekly lecture service that I attended, by invitation of a lady who invited me to “go and hear our new-come genius from the West.”  The room was full, and at the desk stood a brown-cheeked young man with smooth-shaved face, big lustrous eyes, and luxuriant brown hair—­with a broad shirt collar tied with a black ribbon.  His text was “Grow in Grace,” and he gave us a discourse that Matthew Henry could not have surpassed in practical