Excerpt from An Oration Delivered in Person Hall, Chapel Hill: On the 27th June, 1827, the Day Previous to the Commencement, Under the Appointment of the Dialectic Society The Literary Societies of this Institution, have resolved that an Address be delivered before them annually by some one of their members. This resolution, if carried into effect in the spirit in which it has been adopted, will be creditable to the Societies and favourable to the general Literature of the State. It is now more than thirty years since these Societies were established, and all the alumni of this University have been members of one or the other of them. Upon these alumni and upon others who shall go forth from this University, our hopes must chiefly rest for improvement in our literary character; and their zeal for such improvement cannot fail to be excited by being annually called together, and one of them selected to deliver a public discourse upon the progress and state of our literature, or some subject connected therewith. The Societies have conferred on me an unmerited honour by ap pointing me to deliver the first of these discourses. I accepted the appointment with pride, as it was an evidence of their esteem; yet with humility, from a conviction of my inability to meet public expectation an inability of which I am conscious at all times, but particularly so after a painful and tedious illness. About the Publisher Forgotten Books publishes hundreds of thousands of rare and classic books. Find more at www.forgottenbooks.com This book is a reproduction of an important historical work. Forgotten Books uses state-of-the-art technology to digitally reconstruct the work, preserving the original format whilst repairing imperfections present in the aged copy. In rare cases, an imperfection in the original, such as a blemish or missing page, may be replicated in our edition. We do, however, repair the vast majority of imperfections successfully; any imperfections that remain are intentionally left to preserve the state of such historical works.