Mr. President, the friends of Gen. LEE do not claim for him brilliant talents and the gifts of genius.  It is doubtless a beneficent ordination of Providence that the best interests of society are not solely dependent on what in common parlance is called genius.  Fortunately for the good of mankind, great gifts and powers of mind are not indispensable to our happiness or to a safe and salutary development of social conditions.

Patient industry and impregnable virtue are the essential cardinal qualities that make the man, in the vast majority of cases, worthy of love and honor, and which conserve the best interests of the world.

That man who in his career and relations to society has gone on from day to day and from trust to trust, never disappointing but always realizing every just expectation, it seems to me is the character who deserves of his fellow-men the highest meed of praise, and gives in his person and example the surest guaranty that the world will be all the better for his agency in shaping its affairs.

The friends of Gen. LEE enjoy the perfect assurance that in every walk of life, on every occasion when duty called him, his responses were ever marked by a dignified and intelligent performance of the tasks assigned him.

What higher honor can we ask for him than this:  that weighty as were the responsibilities that devolved upon him by inheritance and high as the expectations which were the natural implications of this inheritance, he fully and nobly met them.  Much as was expected of him, he more than realized the claims and obligations of a noble lineage.  His fellow-citizens and his contemporaries regard his career as an honor and his companionship as a delight and a resource that adds poignancy to their grief in the loss of so loved and valued a friend.

I might refer to the incidents of his military career to illustrate his courage and fidelity, but it may not be considered appropriate to the time and the occasion.  It is cheering, however, to believe that in this exalted body there is not to be found that spirit of truculent uncharitableness which refuses any credit to an honorable adversary.

Time, which touches all things with mellowing hand, has softened the recollections of past contests, and they who looked upon him as a foe now only remember the glory of the fight, and would join hands with us to weave the garland of his fame.

Securely may the friends and admirers of this noble character rest in the belief that his name for generations to come will be enrolled in the glorious list of worthies that has for all time made the name of Virginia illustrious and among the foremost of all the commonwealths of the ages past.

ADDRESS OF MR. BUTLER, OF SOUTH CAROLINA.