The Anniversary of 1836.

The following is an account of the Anniversary Banquet held in 1836. It is copied from Quincy's History of Harvard.

"Harrison Gray Otis, the elected President of the day, was prevented by a sudden domestic bereavement from attending the Celebration, and in his absence, Edward Everett presided at the dinner of the alumni.

The tables were prepared to accommodate fifteen hundred persons, and they were completely filled by the Alumni and their invited guests, except a division on the left of the President's chair, reserved for, and occupied by the undergraduates.

It was extraordinary to see how soon and how quietly fifteen hundred persons found places, each one seated and duly provided for the feast. On the left of the chair, the undergraduates of the University were seated, and thence to the extreme right extended row above row, and class after class of Alumni, embracing every period of life, from the youth fresh from the studious hall, to the octogenarian, who seemed to live again in the memories of the distant past. When all were seated, a prayer was offered by the Rev. President Humphrey of Amherst College. For a time the dining quietly proceeded; but soon the busy hum of many voices, the laugh, the joke, animated the scene. All were again hushed, as if by magic, when Mr. Edward Everett, the President of the day, rose to address them. To say that he was most happy, is feeble praise. He was eloquent, brilliant, touching: - and as he read, in the sea of intelligent faces around him, the effect of his own unrivalled declamation, his fancy seemed to burst away on freshened pinion, and to pour forth lavishly the riches of his well-fraught mind." President Everett then spoke for nearly an hour, closing with the following toast:

"Our Alma Mater; mature in youth, vigorous in age, illustrious always:

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'In freta dum fluvii current, dum montibus umbrae

Lustrabunt convexa, polus dum sidera pascet,

Semper honos, nomenque tuum, laudesque manebunt!"

The following toasts were then given from the chair.

2. (The whole company rising.)

"The sacred memory of John Harvard, who set the first example on the American continent, of a union between private munificence and public education which has bound successive generations as with links of steel, together, and has given to an unknown stranger a deathless name."

3. "The President of the University; his fame shall not, to use his own language, this day be left to 'a dogged dirge and a Latin epitaph': - we pronounce him while he lives, in our mother tongue, the ornament of the forum, the senate and the academy."

Other toasts were proposed and the following gentlemen among others, responded to them, - Ex-President Kirkland, Harrison Gray Otis, Dr. Palfrey, Dean of the Divinity School; Mr. Justice Story, for the Law School; Dr. J. C. Warren, for the Medical School; Daniel Webster, Samuel T. Armstrong, Mayor of Boston; Leverett Saltonstall, Mayor of Salem; Robert C. Winthrop. Chief Marshal of the day; Josiah Quincy, Jr.

The hour of eight o'clock having now arrived, Josiah Quincy, Jr., moved, "That this assembly of the Alumni be adjourned to meet at this place on the 8th of September. 1936."