purpose and object; a sad and mournful duty to be performed on my part.

Gen. LEE was my immediate successor in the House of Representatives, and
served with ability and efficiency in both the Fiftieth and Fifty-first
Congresses. He was reëlected to the present Congress, but his career was
arrested by that higher and supreme Power to which we must all yield,
and on the 15th of October, 1891, he departed this life at his home in
the county of Fairfax, and in the midst of his family and friends.

I do not consider it necessary in this presence or on this occasion to
go into much detail touching the life and character of the deceased.

The full and eloquent tributes paid to his memory in the House of
Representatives show the high appreciation in which he was held by his
associates in that body, and express in far more fitting terms than I
could employ their estimate of his character, services, and virtues.

Gen. LEE came from a distinguished lineage. Two of the family signed our
Magna Charta, the Declaration of Independence, and another was
Attorney-General under Gen. Washington.

On the paternal side he could refer to his distinguished grandfather,
Gen. Henry Lee, of the Revolutionary army, who was known as Light-Horse
Harry, the commandant of Lee's Legion, so conspicuous in the annals of
that period. His maternal grandfather was the late G.W. Parke Custis, of
Arlington, the stepson of Gen. Washington, and familiarly called in his
day the child of Mount Vernon.

His father, Gen. R.E. Lee, the chief military figure on his side in the
late civil war, was too well known for comment at my hands. It is the