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BIOGRAPHICAL SKETCH OF JUDGE BAZIL HARRISON BY A. D. P. VAN BUREN
Like one who wraps the drapery of his couch About him, and lies down to pleasant dreams. "
What changes have taken place since his birth—March 15, 1771! Our own republic was not born, American independence was scarcely dreamed of. The Boston massacre had aroused public excitement, it is true, but no general conflict of arms between the colonies and the mother country was deemed probable. It was thirty months before the tea was "put to steep" in Boston Harbor, and more than five years before Jefferson reported the immortal Declaration to the Continental congress in Independence Hall. Washington, not yet forty years of age, was tilling his farm at Mt. Vernon, little imagining the great future before him. 'In 1771, Franklin was yet hale and hearty at 65; John Adams was 36, and John Quincy a boy of four; Jefferson was only 28; Madison was 20; Hamilton 14 and Burr 15; Monroe was 13 and Jackson had been born on the same day of the same month four years before. Every other president was his junior, as was Henry Clay by six years and Webster by eleven. In England, George III, aged 33, was ou the throne in the eleventh year of his 60 years reign, with Lord North as prime minister. The first earl of Chatham was yet alive, and his son, the younger Pitt, a boy of 12, was fitting for Cambridge. Burke at 41 was in the zenith of his greatness, and Warren Hastings was in India, though not as governor general till three years later. Grattan was only 21 and not yet admitted to the bar; Charles Fox, though only 22, was in parliament, and had been for three years; Walpole had been out of parliament only three years, and Wilberforce, only 12 years of age, did not enter the House of Commons until nine years later. Nelson, who was killed thirty four years later at Trafalgar, was only 13 and serving as a midshipman on the Raisonnable; Arthur Wellesley, afterwards Duke of Wellington, an infant of less than two years, was doubtless creeping about Dungan Castle, and for years afterward a very stupid child, history says, giving no promise of future greatness but regarded as the dunce of the family. Robert Burns, a dozen years of age, was using
his leisure time to read Shakespeare and Pope, but had yet to make his own first attempt at verse.
Michigan
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