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troops made their appearance, and when the General Court met in May, the building was surrounded by armed men. The members offered a parliamentary resistance by refusing to act: they met from day to day, and adjourned, when the Governor removed the court out of the armed precinct to Cambridge. The representatives met in the chapel of Harvard College, where the students came to listen to the debates, when Otis eloquently appealed to them, invoking the classic examples of ancient patriotism, to become the saviours of their country. The House, having the proof in their hands of the misrepresentations of Bernard to the Home Government, requested his recall; which, indeed, had been already determined upon by the ministry. Other letters of Bernard and his advisers also came to light through the hands of the colonial agent in London. In these the popular leaders were severely commented upon, Otis of course among the rest. The stigma wore upon his sensitive, over-wrought mind, and he determined to resent it publicly. He published an advertisement in the "Boston Gazette," of September 4, 1769, in which he arraigned the Commissioners of the Customs by name, Henry Hutton, Charles Paxton, William Burch, and John Robinson, as scandalous maligners, in representing him "as inimical to the rights of the crown, and disaffected to his majesty, to whom I annually swear, and am determined at all events to bear true and faithful allegiance." He, therefore, having in vain demanded personal satisfaction, “humbly desires the Lord Com

missioner of his Majesty's Treasury, his principal Secretaries of State, particu larly my Lord Hillsborough, the Board of Trade, and all others whom it may concern, or who may condescend to read this, to pay no kind of regard to any of the abusive representations of me or of my country, that may be transmitted by the said Henry, Charles, William, and John, or their confede rates; for they are no more worthy of credit, than those of Sir Francis Bernard, of Nettleham, Bart., or any of his cabal; which cabal may be well known, from the papers in the House of Commons, and at every great office in England." The next evening after this poster had appeared, Otis entered the British Coffee House, where Robinson, one of the commissioners, was sitting, with a number of army and navy officers.

An altercation immediately ensued, when Robinson struck Otis, with a cane. In the confusion, the lights were extinguished, and Otis, without any protector among the friends of Robinson, when the fray, or rather gross assault, came to an end, was taken home wounded and bleeding. He was found to have a deep wound on the head, inflicted by a sharp instrument. As several blud. geons and a scabbard were found on the floor, it was not unnaturally thought that he was the victim of a murderous assault. To bring his assailant to an acknowledgment, Otis instituted a suit against him, in which he was awarded two thousand pounds damages; but he would not receive it, saying, "it is absolutely impossible that I should take a penny from a man in

this

way, his error."

after an acknowledgment of He rallied, and was reëlected, appeared for a while calmer than ever; but it

He appears after this to have been was only the prelude to lasting mental hardly himself. The noble mind which alienation, with fitful gleams of his old had wavered in some of its irregular genius. His mind worked irregularly, flights, was now quite overthrown, or throwing out wild coruscations of restored only in lucid intervals. There mingled sense and insanity, but he was is something exceedingly touching in seldom violent. In one of his moody the occasional entries of John Adams' hours, he collected and burnt all his Diary of this period, as he meets Otis letters and papers. His later days in society, all the more so for the ap- were passed with Mr. Osgood, a farmer parent uncertainty of the censure of his of Andover. We read-it is pleasant aberrations. In January, 1770, there to read-in Mr. Tudor's narrative, that is this entry of a meeting with him at he spent his time, for the most part, a club of the lawyers of the town, very in cheerfulness, in kindness, and goodpiteous: "Otis is in confusion yet; he nature, with the family, "delighting loses himself; he rambles and wanders them with his wit, his stories and like a ship without a helm; attempted knowledge on every subject." His last to tell a story, which took up almost appearance in Boston was at the table all the evening; the story may at any of John Hancock; when the excite time be told in three minutes, with all ment of conviviality, the sight of old the graces it is capable of, but he faces and the associations of the spot took an hour. I fear he is not in his were too powerful for his enfeebled perfect mind. The nervous, concise, brain. He returned to Andover, and and pithy were his character till lately; one day pointed out the tree beneath now the verbose, roundabout, and which he wished to be buried. He rambling, and long-winded." had even, in some accidental way, mentioned the manner of his death, when in an interval of his delirium, he said to his sister: "I hope when God Almighty, in his righteous providence, shall take me out of time into eternity, that it will be by a flash of lightning." It was even so. As he stood within the house of the Osgood farm one day, the twenty-third of May, 1783, in the act of telling a story to the assembled household, waiting in one of the rooms the passing over of a heavy cloud, the bolt came, a flash in a first heavy burst of thunder. He fell instantly, without mark, or change, or convulsion.

It is sad to pursue the story. He appeared indeed in the Legislature, but no longer as the beacon orator; his usefulness was over; the House thanked him by vote for his "great and important services, which, as a representative in the General Assembly, through a course of years, he has rendered to this town and province; particularly for his undaunted exertions in the common cause of the Colonies, from the beginning of the present glorious struggle for the rights of the British Constitution." This was in 1770, on his retirement in ill health.

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RICHARD HENRY LEE.

speculations of the Ohio Company, and prophesied that the country would be independent of Great Britain, with its seat of government on the Potomac !1 The mother of Richard Henry was a daughter of Colonel Ludwell, whose family was also honorably distinguished in the king's councils.

RICHARD HENRY LEE, one of that entered into the surveys and land band of high-minded gentlemen in Virginia, whose intelligence and spirit gave the strength of manhood to the infancy of the Revolution, belonged to a family which had early been transplanted and struck root in the Old Dominion. Indeed, it was to one of his ancestors that the colony was indebted for this proud designation. Richard Henry Lee was born the His great-grandfather, Richard, brought twentieth day of January, 1732, at an abundant fund of loyalty with him Stratford, Westmoreland County, Vir in the reign of Charles I. In connec-ginia. It was the custom, indeed the tion with Sir William Berkeley, he necessity, of the wealthy gentlemen of gave Cromwell some trouble, after the the Colony, in those days, to educate 'king's death, in his claim upon the their children at home. The young colony, and, when Cromwell died, they Lee had this advantage, and the ad anticipated the parent country in ditional benefit of passing a portion of bringing Virginia to its allegiance to his boyhood and youth at a school the Merry Monarch. Charles, in in Yorkshire, England. It is to be memory of the service, quartered the presumed the institutions of learning arms of Virginia with those of his great kingdoms at home, with the motto: En, dat Virginia quintam. Lo! Vir ginia yields a fifth-to England, France, Scotland, and Ireland. This is said to be the origin of the term Old Dominion. The family retained its influence. A son of this loyal Richard Lee was a blishments-the venerable privilege of member of the King's Council. His son, Thomas, the father of Richard Henry, was also a councillor. He had an eye to the growth of the region, sketch.

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in that county had not then attained the character satirized by the pen of Dickens in the ministrations of his inimitable Squeers. Lee, at any rate, prepared himself, before leaving home, for one barbarous usage which still holds its own in these English esta

juvenile pugilism. To stand on equal

Memoir of the Life of Richard Henry Lee, by his grandson, Richard H. Lee, our main authority in this

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