under his command, and by his readiness at all times to give facility to every measure to which the force of the combined armies was competent." Congress presented to him two of the captured cannon, with suitable inscriptions and devices, — which long adorned the family château in the Vendôme, in testimony of the illustrious part he had played here. His name on the stilldelayed Column-one of only three names in the originally prescribed inscription - will soon be engraved where all the world can read it. Returning

home at the close of our war, he received the highest honors from his sovereign; was Governor successively of Picardy and Alsace; commanded the French Army of the North; and in 1791 was made a Marshal of France. Narrowly escaping the guillotine of Robespierre, he lived to receive the cordon of Grand Officer of the Legion of Honor from Napoleon, and died in 1807, at eighty-two years of age. We welcome the presence of his representative, the Marquis de Rochambeau, at this festival, and of Madame la Marquise, here happily at my side, and offer them the cordial recognition which is due to their name and rank.

Here, in equal rank and honor with Rochambeau, stood the Count de GRASSE, in the fifty-eighth year of his age; who was associated with our War for Independence hardly more than a month, but who during that momentous month did enough to secure our lasting respect and gratitude; whose services, as Lieutenant-General and Admiral of the Naval Army and Fleet of France, in yonder bay, were second in importance to none in the whole siege; to whom Washington did not hesitate to write, the very day after the event: "The surrender of

York, from which so great glory and advantage are derived to the Allies, and the honor of which belongs to your Excellency." The sympathies of all his companions here were deeply stirred, when, losing his famous flagship and a large part of his fleet on his way home, he reached England as a prisoner of Admiral Rodney, to be released only after our Treaty of Peace was signed; and, though he had vindicated his conduct before a court-martial demanded by himself, to die in retirement after a few years, without having regained the favor of a sovereign, who could pardon anything and everything but defeat. Honor this day to the memory of the brave Count de Grasse, whose name, as Washington wrote to Rochambeau on hearing of his death, "will be long deservedly dear to this country"!

Here, second in command of the French Line, was that worthy and excellent General, the Baron de VIOMESNIL, who brought a gallant brother, the Viscount, with him, and who himself returned home "to be killed before the last rampart of Constitutional Royalty," on the 10th of August, 1792.

Here, in hardly inferior rank, was Major-General the Marquis de CHASTELLUX; genial, brilliant, accomplished, the Journal of whose tour in America - indifferently translated and scandalously annotated by an English adventurer is full of the liveliest interest; who returned home to be one of the immortal Forty of the French Academy, welcomed by a discourse of Buffon on Taste; and, better still, to receive one of the very few humorous and playful letters which Washington ever wrote, bantering him "on his catching that

terrible contagion, domestic felicity," which, alas! he only lived to enjoy for six years. Washington had before written to him, soon after his return home: "I can truly say, that never in my life have I parted with a man to whom my soul clave more sincerely than it did to you."

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The Admiral Count de BARRAS was here, senior naval officer of France at the siege, but who generously waived his seniority; who was privileged, however, to sign the Articles of Capitulation for himself and the Count de Grasse; who was fortunate enough to escape any share in the defeat by Rodney; who reached home in season to be promoted, and then to die before the outbreak of a Revolution in which his nephew, of the same name, was famous as a Jacobin and regicide, and afterwards as the head of the Directory.

The magnificent Duke de LAUZUN was here, conspicuous by his tall hussar cap and plume,- afterwards Duke de Biron, -a gay Lothario in the salon, but dauntless in the field, who, at the head of his legion, put Tarleton himself to flight; but who returned home to be, in 1793, one of the victims of the guillotine.

Two of the LAVAL-MONTMORENCYS were here: the Marquis, at the head of the Bourbonnais regiment; and his young son, the Viscount Matthieu, afterwards the Duke de Montmorency,,-an intimate friend of Madame de Staël, long a resident at Coppet, and who was eminently distinguished, in later years, for his accomplishments and his philanthropy.

The young Count AXEL DE FERSEN was here, a Swedish nobleman, an Aid to Rochambeau, "the

Adonis of the camp;" who returned to France to become a suitor of Madame de Staël and a favorite of Marie Antoinette; to whose zeal in aiding the flight of the King and Queen, with "a glass-coach and a new berline," himself on the box, Carlyle devotes an early and humorous chapter of his "French Revolution," and who was killed at last by a mob in Stockholm, in 1810, on an unfounded charge of having been privy to the murder of a popular prince.

The brave young Duke de ROUERIE was here, under the modest title of Colonel Armand, who, after good service in our cause for two years, had sailed for France in February, 1781, but had returned in September in season to be at the siege, and was a volunteer at the capture of one of the redoubts. Before the war was over he was made a Brigadier General on the special recommendation of Washington. He went home at last to be a prisoner in the Bastille, and to die, of fever or of poison, in a forest to which he had fled from Danton and Robespierre.

The Marquis de ST. SIMON, we know, was here, in command of the whole splendid corps, just landed from the fleet, called by Rochambeau "one of the bravest men that lived;" wounded while commanding in the French trenches, but who insisted on being carried to the assault at the head of his troops; who, after our war was ended, entered the service of Spain, and, after various fortunes, died a Captain-General of that Kingdom.

But a second Marquis de ST. SIMON was here also, of still greater historic notoriety, -a young soldier of twenty-one, who had been a pupil of D'Alembert; who lived to be the proposer to the Viceroy of Mexico

of a canal to unite the Atlantic and the Pacific; and to be the author of a scheme for the fundamental reconstruction of society; - the founder of St. Simonianism, with Comte for a time as one of his disciples, and whose published works fill not less than twenty volumes.

And here was the Count MATTHIEU DUMAS, another of Rochambeau's aids, who bore a conspicuous part at one of the redoubts, and was one of the first to enter it, who returned home to be a member of the Assembly and a peer of France; whose last military service was with Napoleon at Waterloo, and who, in 1830, gave active assistance to Lafayette in placing Louis Philippe on the throne, dying at eighty-four years of age.

Count CHARLES DE LAMETH was here, too, as an Adjutant General, and was severely wounded at the storming of the redoubts, who afterwards served in the French army of the North till the memorable 10th of August, 1792; who shared for a time the cruel imprisonment of Lafayette at Olmutz, became a Deputy at the Restoration, and was living as late as 1832.

But how can I attempt to portray the numerous, I had almost said the numberless, French officers of high name and family who were gathered on this field a hundred years ago, and who went home to so many strange fortunes, and not a few of them to such sad fates? It would require no small share of the genius which old Homer displayed in his wonderful catalogue of the ships and forces which came to the siege of Troy, when Pope translates him as demanding of the Muses

"A thousand tongues,

A throat of brass, and adamantine lungs.