Entered according to Act of Congress, in the year 1856, by

SEWALL HARDING,

In the Clerk's Office of the District Court of the District of Massachusetts.

PREFACE.

THE effort to exhume from the past such relics as may serve to portray, with any degree of justice, the character of one whom his contemporaries rather admired than ventured to describe, is unique. It may seem presumptuous as well as arduous yet with a fitting subject, it has some peculiar attractions. The antiquarian vein is struck; interesting historical reminiscences blend with it; incidents of the times will reflect their light upon the subject to be sketched in the foreground of the picture; facts worthy of note in topography interweave themselves with it; the causes of things are laid open in the light of their effects; the study of "endless genealogies" will beguile some passing hours; the writer and reader will stand amid the scenes, and inhale the air of ancestral virtues; the pure, the good, the true, will appear in its fine essence, divorced by time from the passions and prejudices to which it was wedded.

Yet, the expediency of such an undertaking must depend upon the urgency of the occasion for it, and the aims with

which it is prosecuted. How far these considerations may justly be considered as weighing in the case of this work, the work itself must witness. It has been prepared under advantages of position and relation to the subject which it would be ungrateful not to recognize, while yet impeded by great embarrassments, from incessant interruption and frequent suspension, under the continual pressure of numerous other cares.

Much of the work has been of special delicacy, from its connection with the living as well as the dead. To the various members of the family of Judge Phillips's descendants, and to some others, many acknowledgments are due for their courtesy in furnishing the manuscripts which have been used.

It may be thought that some chapters in the Memoir are too full, and others too brief; or that in some other respect a due proportion has not been preserved between the different topics. It was, however, supposed that not only the proportion, but the order and sequence of the various points as they appear, would on the whole best subserve the chief ends of the volume. So great a departure from a strict chronological arrangement as will be here discovered, and such a grouping of widely scattered facts to illustrate in succession separate phases of the character and life, must be considered in itself undesirable; yet no other method seemed fitted to give such vividness as this, with its occasional repetitions, to one's impression of the extraordinary man to be described, in the great prominence and variety of his characteristics: and