I cannot begin this brief paper respecting our honored friend, the late President (who was also the founder) of this Society, without expressing my sense of personal bereavement in connection with his death. His unfailing vivacity, his amiable temper, his generous recognition of contemporary scholars in the same field with himself, and his loyal friendship, may well cause us to lament that his genial presence will no more be with us. He had long been a living, visible link, binding us to Germany, the land of scholars, the country which to many of us is an intellectual fatherland. Circumstances—or, what is the same thing, the leadings of Providence—conspired to fit him for that cosmopolitan place and versatile activity which characterized him. A Swiss by birth, but of German extraction, besides his early training in South Germany he studied at the three universities of Tübingen, Halle, and Berlin. Born and bred in the Reformed branch of the Protestant family, he was thus brought into intercourse in his youth with such men as Neander, Tholuck, and Müller, the great lights of the liberal, evangelical—I will not say party, for they were of no party, but class, among the Lutherans. His theological studies were not less diversified than his personal associations.

The erection of a building requires the preparation of a quantity of material elsewhere. The national structure is no exception. The making of the United States was not begun when the first settlements were established on these shores; the materials were brought from far and wide. Many of the stones built into the foundation of this Republic were hewn out by the Reformation; the formation of the quarries reaches far back. It is not the purpose of this paper to examine the quarries or the work done in them; we will leave this research to others and to another time.

The publication of the Sewall diary and letters was begun by the Massachusetts Historical Society in 1878 and went on for ten years. The result is five goodly octavo volumes.

These make a quarry that has been very largely drawn upon. Dr. Green, the librarian of the Society, told the writer last summer that no other of their publications had had such a sale, and that the demand for them still continues; but the material is so great and its character so rich that the writer would hope that there may still be room for his modest sketch. He has aimed to look at the Judge throughout as typical of the stock from which he sprung and of the province and age in which he lived.