the Christian scholar,—who so strikingly illustrated in his own character the blended influences of a sound religion and a healthful literature, and who for so many years exercised in the midst of us the congenial offices of a pastor of the Christian Church and President of the neighbouring University. My position, as the minister of the church of which he was for more than sixteen years the pastor, seems to require that I should discourse of his life and character. Brethren, you expect me to speak of him. You have come hither today, in unwonted numbers, to hear me pronounce, however inadequately or unworthily, his Eulogy. You, who were his old friends and parishioners, would not forgive me were I not to say something concerning him in this place where for so many years you listened to his words of wisdom and persuasion. I could not forgive myself were I to keep silence, standing as I do on the privileged and hallowed spot where he stood so long, "a burning and a shining light." If I should hold my peace, these walls would utter his Eulogy, and this pulpit would cry shame on his dumb and degenerate successor. Incompetent, therefore, as I feel myself to do justice to the character and services of this eminent scholar and divine, -and who among us is fully competent? I will yet try, with your indulgence, to sketch my own idea of him, and to lay before you the impressions which an acquaintance of a quarter of a century has left upon my mind. It shall not be a cold, dry, formal panegyric, but the warm and heartfelt tribute of my reverence, affection, and gratitude. But what style shall I use to set forth

wonted

this excellent man, who, from my youth up, has given me some helps, more hopes, all encouragements in my best studies; to whom I never came, but I grew stronger in moral virtue; from whom I never went but I parted better instructed? Of him, therefore, my acquaintance, my friend, my instructer, my predecessor in the church, if I speak much, it were not to be marvelled; if I speak frankly, it is not to be blamed ; and though I speak partially, it were to be pardoned.*

JOHN THORNTON KIRKLAND, though not sprung from a family possessed of entailed estates and hereditary honors, could yet point to an ancestry of which, in a republican and Christian land like this, it might be excusable in any man to be proud. On the maternal side he was a descendant of Captain Miles Standish, the renowned military leader of the Pilgrims, and one of that noble company who in 1620 landed from the Mayflower on the rock at Plymouth. On his father's side he was one of a long line of Christian ministers, and the son of one of those intrepid and self-denying men, who, from the first settlement of these shores to the present day, have devoted themselves to the benevolent, but arduous and perilous work of preaching the Gospel to the aboriginal inhabitants of this land, "the tawny savage immortals of the desert," as his father called them. On this point he could adopt the words of the great Dr. Mayhew, when reproached by Secker, the Archbishop of Canterbury, for his poverty

* See Harington's Nugæ Antiquæ, ii. 157.

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and lowly birth. "I am, indeed, even literally, the poor son of a good man, who spent a long life and his patrimony in the humble and laborious, though apostolical employment of preaching the unsearchable riches of Christ to poor Indians."

Daniel Kirkland, the grandfather of the President, was born in Saybrook, Connecticut, in 1701, and was graduated at Yale College in 1720. On the 10th of December, 1723, he was ordained the first pastor of the third church in Norwich, Connecticut, in that part of this large town which was originally called Newent by some members of his parish who came from Newwent, in Gloucestershire, England, and which parish was in 1786 incorporated as the present town of Lisbon. He continued the minister of this church for twenty-eight or twenty-nine years, when he left; and on the 19th of December, 1757, he was settled again in the ministry at Groton, in the same State, which parish he also left in 1758, and returned with his wife to Newent, where he resided till his death in May, 1773, and was buried in the burying-ground of that place. There are two individuals still living in Norwich who remember him, and speak of him as a man of fine talents and wit. During the last four years of his life he was supported in part by his son Samuel, the Indian missionary.

Samuel Kirkland, the father of the President, was the tenth child and fourth son of Daniel, who had eleven children, and he was born in Norwich, November 20th, 1741. He seems to have been early destined for a missionary among the Indians, and accord

ingly was sent by his father to Moor's Indian Charity School, at Lebanon, in Connecticut, which had been established in 1754 by the Rev. Dr. Eleazar Wheelock, for the purpose of educating Indian youth, and qualifying them to go forth as teachers among their own tribes in conjunction with young English preachers educated at the same school. Here he made some proficiency in the Mohawk language, learning it of a young native, who was his fellow-student. He spent some time likewise at the College in Princeton, New Jersey, "for the sake of better advantage for some parts of learning," where he received a degree in 1765.

for

On the 20th of November, 1764, he set off for the country of the Senecas, one of the Six Nations of Indians, in the interior of the State of New York, in order to learn their language and prepare the way a mission among them. No missionary had ever before dared to venture among that remote and savage tribe; and Dr. Wheelock said at the time, "this bold adventure of his, considered in all the circumstances of it, is the most extraordinary of the kind I have ever known." He stopped on his way at Sir William Johnson's whose influence over the Indians is well known, where he was obliged to remain till January 17th, waiting for a convoy, and then set out accompanied by two Seneca Indians, as guides. In a letter to Dr. Wheelock he says, "It is said to be a very great and dangerous undertaking to venture into those parts. Perhaps I may be killed in my first attempt."

The hardships he endured, and the perils he encoun

tered in this expedition, are almost incredible. The weather was excessively cold, and the snow more than four feet deep. He travelled on snow-shoes, with his pack of provisions on his back, upwards of two hundred miles into the wilderness, where there was no path or house, and after a march of seventeen days, arrived on the 3d of February at a Seneca town, called Canasadaga. Soon after his arrival a famine ensued. For two months Mr. Kirkland lived without bread, flesh, or salt, subsisting on small fish, roots, acorns, and pounded corn. Two or three times he was obliged to journey on foot to the Mohawk river, a distance of two hundred miles, to procure a little bread to keep himself from starving; and several times his life was in imminent danger from the savages. After remaining among the Senecas a year and a half, he returned to Lebanon on the 24th of May, 1766, accompanied by the chief warrior of the tribe.

On the 19th of June he was ordained at Lebanon, and on the 7th of July started on a new mission among the Oneidas, with whom he lived and labored forty years, the residue of his life. He established himself at Kanonwarohare, their principal village, the New Oneida Castle, as it was called, six miles distant from Old Oneida, and about fifteen south of the Oneida Lake. Here he built a house, cutting and drawing the timber, and digging the cellar, twelve feet square and six feet deep, with his own hands; and with the aid of his Indians he cut out and made a road, thirteen miles long, towards Fort Stanwix, afterwards called Fort Schuyler, on the Mohawk. Here too he