CENTENNIAL CELEBRATION.



   Here to-day, at a memorial service, conducted under the
auspices of the Breckinridge Centennial Association, well
may many ask who was this John Breckinridge, after whom
this beautiful county was named I dare not venture to
answer that question myself. Another more eloquent than
I, who, himself, deserved well of his State, asked and an-
swered that question years ago. .His answer was:
  Who was John Breckinridge I have heard of a man of that name
who, being left at a very tender age an orphan boy of slender means and
delicate constitution, contrived, no one could tell how, in one of the
frontier counties of Virginia, to make himself an accurate and elegant
scholar by the time of life at which most youths of the best opportunities
are beginning to master the outposts of learning. I have heard that he
turned this early and unusual school craft to such account, and mixed his
love of learning with a spirit of such unconqueraii; energy, that with his
rifle on his shoulder and his surveying implements in his hands, lie scoured
the frontiers of his native State, exposed every hour to death by savage
warriors, that with the price of his toil and almost of his blood, he might
purchase what he valued above the body's life-the means of life to the
spirit-that enchanting knowledge for which his heart panted.
  Old men have told me, and their eyes have filled with tears as they
dwelt on the name of the beloved lad, that when he had left his mountain
home for the ancient institution of Williamsburg, eagerly bent on knowing
what he might, and while yet a minor, his native county appalled him by
an order to represent her interests and honor in the legislative halls of
the most renowned of our Commonwealths; and I have heard that from
that day forward, for a period of six and twenty years, he lived continually
in the public eye, until 18o6 he was prematurely cut off in the very flower
of his manhood, and when the richest fruits of such a life were only
beginning to ripen.
  As an advocate, the mention of his name, even in remote connection
with that of Patrick Henry, who was still in his meridian splendor when
the young backwoodsman met him at the bar, is enough to prove that
from the start the goal was in his reach. As a lawyer, learned, great, and
full of strength, the man who was the constant rival of George Nicholas,
and out of all other professional comparison, and who, when just turned
of forty, and at a period of our history when distinguished merit was an
indispensable requisite for high office, became Attorney General of the
United Stateshad name enough. As a politician, the leader of the first
Democratic Senate that ever met under the present Government of the
United States, the compeer of Jefferson, Madison, and Monroe, and their
confidential friend, the author of the Kentucky Resolutions of 1798, which
constituted the earliest and the boldest movement of that great era, and
which were drawn with such consummate ability that Mr. Jefferson con.



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