to work for eight or ten hours a day at home. I hope your fathers and mothers will not permit it. If you insist upon a half an hour or so in the morning, and as much more in the afternoon and evening, by way of amusement, I do not know that I should greatly object; but take care to have a right good time, and come back at the end of the holidays, with rosy cheeks and bright eyes, ready to engage with eagerness in the duties of the new term.

THE OTTOMAN EMPIRE. *

A TOAST having been given by Hon. William Sturgis in honor of the diplomatic corps of the United States, prefaced by some complimentary remarks, Mr. EVERETT was called upon to reply. He said that he understood that he was looked upon for a response to the toast last given, as the only individual present included in it. But for this reference to himself, Mr. E. could have expressed his hearty concurrence with what had been said by Mr. Sturgis in reference to the diplomatic service. It had certainly been performed in general in a manner creditable to the country. As far as his own humble services were concerned, he felt sincerely grateful for a complimentary notice from a company containing so much of the mercantile respectability of Boston. The diplomatic service of the United States, at least at the court where he had had the honor to be their representative, was very closely connected with the commerce of the country. In ordinary times, if he might judge from his own experience, nine tenths of the business of the American minister in London was connected with commercial interests and claims. Our trade was carried on all over the globe. It came in contact with British jurisdiction in the remotest seas, and new cases involving appeals to the central power at London were constantly arising. If, in discharging his duty to those whose interests in this way had been placed in some degree in his hands, he was thought, in a company like this, to have

In reply to a toast in honor of the Diplomacy of the United States, at a dinner to Emin Bey, Turkish Commissioner, at the Revere House in Boston, on the 4th of November, 1850, Thomas B. Curtis, Esq. in the chair.

been not wholly deficient, he felt bound to acknowledge, in this public manner, the master by whom he had been instructed, (Mr. Webster,) and the guidance which he had enjoyed.

But you will allow me, continued Mr. Everett, to pass from this topic to one on which I can express myself with greater freedom and propriety; and to thank you for being permitted to share the festivities of this occasion. It is one of a somewhat peculiar nature, and really, as it seems to me, of no ordinary interest. We are honored with the company of an officer high in the service of the Ottoman Porte, who has been commissioned by his government to visit the United States. He is, I believe, the first of his countrymen who has ever visited us. It is not a diplomatic mission, instituted merely to keep up the official intercourse of the two governments; and we may be quite sure it is not an excursion of mere curiosity. Our respected guest has not come, as was said to an English traveller, by a native chief I believe on the western coast of Africa, "to take a walk and make book;" he has come for a more substantial and practical purpose,— to acquire information in respect to the commercial, industrial, and social character of the country; to form some acquaintance with our institutions; and especially to explore, by personal observation, the elements of an extended and mutually beneficial commerce. Such an errand, I must say, sir, seems to me indicative of an enlightened and liberal government, watchful for the means of benefiting its subjects, and willing to derive information even from remote sources. I need not say, sir, that the choice of the Commissioner, as far as I have been favored with the means of forming an estimate of his character, has been not less judicious, than the errand itself is wisely conceived and auspicious of good.

I have therefore, sir, called this social interview, which enables us to pay our joint respects to this honored visitor, an interesting occasion. We have not often had one more so. It is the first time that a similar act of public hospitality has been tendered in this city, perhaps in this country, to an officer of the Ottoman Porte. I hope it will prove to be the

commencement of a permanent relation of good offices mutually exchanged.

Philosophers, sir, have been at a loss for a definition of man. He has been called a reasoning animal, but there are not a few of the race, I am sorry to say, that will not hear to reason. He has been called a laughing animal; but there are some sour-faced fellows that will not even smile; while some of the lower animals have something like a laugh. He has been called a cooking animal, and the propriety of this definition will hardly be questioned around this well-laden board. Dr. Franklin pronounces him a tool-making animal. But I am not sure, sir, that he would not be best defined as a fighting animal, for no event in the history of our race seems so much a matter of course, as that nations in contiguity with each other, should live in a state of almost eternal war. Such seems at least, till of late years, to have been the case with the Christian and the Mussulman powers; and I rather think that we should not gain much, as far as the Turks are concerned, in inquiring very particularly who began the warfare. The most celebrated and important of these demonstrations of hostility, if not the very first in point of time, were the crusades, in which the united forces of a great part of Europe were poured upon Western Asia, in a torrent which swept away friends and foes on its path. I fear the law of nations would be studied in vain for a justifiable motive for these strange expeditions. But whatever their cause, one effect was certain, that of producing a feeling of no amiable kind between the two great parties. Christians have for ages been complimented by the Turks, as well as by other Mussulman races, with sundry ill-sounding epithets not necessary to be repeated on this occasion; and I must say that we have not left the debt of international courtesy unpaid. From the ideal monsters that spread terror in the nursery under the name of Ogres (the name a little changed by which the Turks first became known to the Western world), down to the warlike princes, whose armies have carried alarm into the heart of Europe, at a comparatively recent period, they have, from their first establishment in Western Asia, been

habitually spoken of as ruthless barbarians, and stigmatized by every name of hatred. I am afraid even that in quite modern times, those of us who took an interest in the Greek revolution, were not always as choice in their language as they might have been.

With what feelings the fathers of New England, the contemporaries of the ancestor of whom our respected friend (Mr. Winthrop) has just spoken, regarded the Turks, in common with all other Mahometans, hardly need be said. If the first settlers of Boston, who laid the foundations of our ancient and beloved city on this very spot where we are now assembled, attracted not by the good cheer which has regaled us, not by the sparkling cup with which Mr. Stevens has so liberally crowned the board, but by the pure and wholesome waters of Mr. Blackstone's spring, if they had been told that in two generations from the first settlement, their children would have been beset by a visitation of witches, and that in a century and a half more, a company of their descendants would sit down to table with a live Turk, and he the official messenger of the Grand Seignior, a full-blooded Mussulman and no mistake, they would have thought their degenerate posterity were doomed to sink from bad to worse. Turks, as you know, are a branch of the great Tartar family, Tatar as they spell it themselves, the r having been interpolated in Europe in the middle ages, by way of a polite inuendo that they came from a place, not to be mentioned in English to ears polite.

The

I esteem it a very pleasing circumstance that feelings like these are so entirely passed away, as to be alluded to as a matter of merriment alone. I look upon it as an omen of great and happy changes in rapid progress, that an officer of distinction in the service of this once odious power, (which has lately endeared itself to the friends of liberty in a manner not soon to be forgotten,) has been sent by his youthful sovereign, a ruler whose large and liberal views for the improvement of his people have been equalled only by his munificence of disposition and kindness of heart, to examine the United States; to learn what we are by the hearing of the