Your only error--and I speak from the
heart--is in the hands to which you have confided the task.
The time for performing this duty has arrived; and I rejoice to see
associated with you the Mayor and the Recorder of the City, the
gentlemen of the Common and Select Councils, the officers of the army
and navy, the President, Professors, and Students of William and Mary
College, his venerable _alma mater_, and various public bodies
distinguished by their useful and benevolent purposes. It is meet that
it should be so. At the call of your fathers, gentlemen, he was ever
prompt to render any service in his power; and on two occasions
especially, when important interests affecting Norfolk were in jeopardy,
at great pecuniary sacrifices on his part, he was sent abroad to protect
them. On another occasion, when a foreign fleet was in our waters, he
undertook the errand of your fathers, and performed it with unequalled
success. It was in the service of your fathers that he won his great
reputation as a lawyer; and to them and to you, disregarding the obvious
dictates of personal interest and ambition, he clung for almost
two-thirds of a century, as to his friends and neighbors, and to your
city as the abode of his brilliant manhood, and the home of his
declining years; and he has left his children and grandchildren, those
dear objects of his love on whom his eyes rested in the dying hour, to
live and to die among you.
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