I annually enjoyed among them during that period, and another of equal length passed in a special pleader’s anxieties and toils; how they greeted with praise, sweeter than the applause of multitudes to him who wins it, the slender literary effusions by which I supplied the deficiency of professional income; and how, when I dared the hazard of the bar, they provided for me opportunities such as riper scholars and other advocates wait long for, by confiding important matters to my untried hands; how they encircled my first tremulous efforts by an atmosphere of affectionate interest, roused my faint heart to exertion, absorbed the fever that hung upon its beatings, and strengthened my first perceptions of capacity to make my thoughts and impressions intelligible, on the instant, to the minds of courts and juries.  The impulse thus given to my professional success at Reading, and in the sessions of Berkshire during twelve years, gradually extended its influence through my circuit, until it raised me to a position among its members beyond my deserts and equal to my wishes.  Another opening of fortune soon dawned on me; in the maturity of life I aspired to a seat in parliament—­rather let me say, to that seat which only I coveted—­and then, almost without solicitation, from many surviving patrons of my childhood, and from the sons of others who inherited the kindness of their fathers, I received an honor more precious to me as the token of concentrated regards than as the means of advancement; yet greatly heightened in practical importance by the testimony it implied from the best of all witnesses.  That honor, three times renewed, was attended by passages of excitement which look dizzy even in the distance—­with much on my part requiring allowance, and much allowance rendered by those to whom my utmost services were due; with the painful consciousness of wide difference of opinion between some of my oldest friends and myself, and with painful contests which those differences rendered inevitable, yet cheered by attachments which the vivid lights struck out in the conflict of contending passions exhibited in scatheless strength, until I received that appointment which dissolved the parliamentary connection, and with it annihilated all the opposition of feeling which had sometimes saddened it, and invested the close of my life with the old regard, as unclouded by controversy as when it illumined its opening.  And now the expressions of your sympathy await me, when, by the gracious providence of God, I have been permitted to enter on a course of less fervid action, of serener thought, of plainer duty.  For me political animosities are forever hushed and absorbed in one desire, which I share with you all, for the happiness and honor of our country, and the peaceful advancement of our species; and all the feverish excitements and perils of advocacy, its ardent partisanship with various interests, anxieties, and passions, are displaced by the office of seeking to discover truth and to