round him those who are to further their execution, he quietly, though
firmly, advances in his humble path, laboring steadily, but calmly, till he
has opened to the light all the recesses of ignorance, and torn up by the
roots the weeds of vice. His is a progress not to be compared with anything
like a march; but it leads to a far more brilliant triumph, and to laurels
more imperishable than the destroyer of his species, the scourge of the
world, ever won.

Such men--men deserving the glorious title of Teachers of Mankind--I have
found, laboring conscientiously, though, perhaps obscurely, in their
blessed vocation, wherever I have gone. I have found them, and shared their
fellowship, among the daring, the ambitious, the ardent, the indomitably
active French; I have found them among the persevering, resolute,
industrious Swiss; I have found them among the laborious, the warmhearted,
the enthusiastic Germans; I have found them among the high-minded, but
enslaved Italians; and in our own country, God be thanked, their numbers
everywhere abound, and are every day increasing.

Their calling is high and holy; their fame is the property of nations;
their renown will fill the earth in after-ages, in proportion as it sounds
not far off in their own times. Each one of those great teachers of the
world, possessing his soul in peace, performs his appointed course; awaits
in patience the fulfillment of the premises; and, resting from his labors,
bequeathed his memory to the generation whom his works have blessed, and
sleeps under the humble but not inglorious epitaph, commemorating it one in
whom mankind lost a friend, and no man got rid of an enemy."
Lord Brougham.


LXXI.