Nor must we forget the Boston of earlier days, the Boston of Adams, and
Otis, of Warren and Quincy. In such a city, surrounded by the noblest
traditions of patriotism, stimulated by the greatest group of scholars
that the Republic has produced, Charles Sumner passed his early manhood.
Then, remembering that Edward Everett had fitted himself for his work in
Harvard University by four years abroad, Sumner, in his twenty-seventh
year, went to Europe. He spent five months in Germany, where the spirits
of Goethe, Richter and Luther lingered upon the scene. In Paris he
studied French, French art, French literature, French philosophy, and
finally attended the debates in the French Parliament, examining the
problems with all the care of a member. He lingered long in England,
where he was welcomed and lionized by the foremost men of letters,
science, philosophy, as well as by the leading clergymen and statesmen
of London. He was an honoured guest not at some, but "at most of the
country seats of England and Scotland." He travelled the circuits as the
companion of the greatest English judges, Vaughan, Parke and Alderson.
He met on a familiar footing Macaulay and Grote, Carlyle and Jeffrey,
Sidney Smith and Wordsworth. But his great year was in Italy, in the
Eternal City, the city of Cæsar and Cicero, the city of Horace and
Virgil. In all, Sumner spent thirty years in preparation for his labour.
Few men in American politics have had a wider horizon, a better
equipment in history and literature, or have known so intimately all the
great men in the world of his own generation who were worth knowing. He
went away to Europe an American; he returned a universal man, a citizen
of the world.

Not until 1845, when he was thirty-four years of age, did a really great
opportunity come to Sumner. Boston at that far-off day made much of the
Fourth of July, and looked forward to the holiday as the great event of
the year. During the previous autumn the mayor and aldermen of the city