LI WRITINGS OF HUGH SWINTON LEGARÉ, LATE ATTORNEY GENERAL AND ACTING SECRETARY OF STATE OF THE UNITED STATES: CONSISTING OF A DIARY OF BRUSSELS, AND JOURNAL OF THE RHINE; EXTRACTS FROM HIS PRIVATE AND DIPLOMATIC CORRESPONDENCE; ORATIONS AND SPEECHES; AND CONTRIBUTIONS TO THE NEW-YORK AND SOUTHERN REVIEWS. PREFACED BY A MEMOIR OF HIS LIFE. EMBELLISHED WITH A PORTRAIT. EDITED BY HIS SISTER. IN TWO VOLUMES. VOL. I. CHARLESTON, S. C.: BURGES & JAMES, 6 BROAD-STREET. PHILADELPHIA: THOMAS, COWPERTHWAIT & CO. 1846. L. O. Dup. 308 1.491 Entered according to the Act of Congress, in the year 1846, In the Clerk's office of the District of South-Carolina. V 21 183 Port, of BIOGRAPHICAL NOTICE. TO HAVE joined, in a degree singular every where, the studies of the closet with practical life in several of its most difficult forms: to have plunged, with an early passion of scholarship, into its vigils, never afterwards intermitted, and yet not to have stiffened into the pedant or the professor: after attaining the command of Arts and Learning, to have known how to rise to a far nobler, rarer thing, and bring them into the vigorous service of active affairs and the great world: not to have studied himself out of the native strength of his parts, but only into their readier and surer exercise: not to have lost himself in words or systems, but turned their mastery into that of things to have filled himself to the lips with languages without spoiling his own, and with literature without losing his originality: in a country of rapidity and shallowness, where to do quickly and popularly is to do successfully, to have dared to be solid and sincere: unabated in his purposes by public inappreciation, the luck of ignorance, the jeers of blockheads, to have held on his courageous way to honor to have scorned all success, but that which is seized and borne off by the mere strong hand and violence of ability and merit: as a lawyer, pausing little at forms, technicalities, the jargon of the science, the mere symbols of its knowledge, to have grasped, from the outset, at all those nearly unattempted resorts, that should make a light and an era in jurisprudence amongst us: as an orator, to have armed himself with an eloquence, not the mere happiness or ill abundance of such speech, glittering and facile, as popular institutions at once make common and forbid to rise to art the most consummate, but such as vied, in regularity, force and polish, with the glories of classic greatness: as a statesman, to have made his way, through a succession of important trusts up to nearly the most eminent, almost without popular favor, in a country where that favor is all in all, to blow, like the wind, where it listeth, and to fall, like the rain, upon |