The family of SEARS (anciently Sayer, or Sayres) appears to have been one of respectability at Colchester, in the English county of Essex, at least as early as the beginning of the sixteenth century. John Sayer, Alderman of Colchester, died there in 1509, and was buried in St. Peter's Church, where the memorial brasses of himself and wife may still be seen, together with a marble tablet to his grandson George, in the quaint rhythmical inscription upon which the name is first spelled "Seares." Richard, elder brother of this George, and distinguished from other Richards on the family pedigree as “Richard the Exile," is stated to have married Anne Bourchier, daughter of Edmund Knyvet, of Ashwellthorpe in Norfolk, Serjeant-Porter to King Henry VIII., but, becoming involved in the political dissensions of the period, to have been obliged, in 1537, to fly to Holland. By tradition an ardent papist, he is supposed so to have offended his father and father-inlaw, who were both adherents to the Reformed Faith, that the former proceeded to disinherit and the latter to disown him. He died, three years later, in Amsterdam, leaving an only son, John Bourchier Sayer, who is said to have married a daughter of Sir John Hawkins the navigator, and to have resided some time at Plymouth in Devonshire, but chiefly in Holland, where his eldest son, John Bourchier Sayer the younger, is stated to have married a Dutch lady of fortune, of the family of Egmond.

Richard Sayer, or Sears, distinguished on the family pedigree as "Richard the Pilgrim," was eldest son of the last-mentioned marriage; and while nothing is known of his early life save that he is believed to have been born in Holland in 1590, his supposed portrait, long preserved by his mother's kindred in that country, would indicate a man of much amiability and refinement. His father is thought to have been at Leyden in 1614, and it is not unlikely that the son may have fallen under the influence of John Robinson and William Brewster, who were then residing there; but, be this as it may, it is clear that at some time or other the descendants of the exile had exchanged the dogmas of the Church of Rome for the doctrines of the Separatists, since, about 1630, Richard Sears turned up in Plymouth Colony in New England, where he took to himself a wife, became a magistrate, and acquired an estate at Yarmouth on Cape Cod. His eldest son, Knyvet, is stated to have visited England on a fruitless errand to recover the alleged inheritance of his greatgreat-grandfather, Richard the Exile, after which the family

quietly settled down upon the Cape, where they became an astonishingly prolific race, gradually spreading not merely over New England, but into many other parts of the country. There were, it is true, several distinct persons of the same name among the early colonists; but they do not seem to have multiplied in like proportion, and it may not unfairly be assumed that more than half the families of the name of Sears now scattered throughout the United States are descended from Richard the Pilgrim and some one of his three sons, Knyvet, Paul, and Silas.

In the middle of the last century the eldest branch of these descendants was represented by Squire Daniel Sears, a greatgrandson of the Pilgrim, and a substantial farmer and selectman of Chatham on the Cape. He died in 1761, leaving by his wife, Fear Freeman, two sons, of whom the elder, Richard, afterwards a member of the Massachusetts State Senate, maintained throughout a long life the family connection with the town of Chatham; while the younger, David, developed when still a youth an exceptional capacity for business, and came to Boston, in or before 1770, to seek his fortune. His application was so unremitting, and his investments of his small capital so judicious, that within little more than ten years he had become known as a successful and sagacious merchant, and by the close of the century he was reputed to have accumulated one of the largest properties in New England. His unostentatious tastes and quiet habits did not incline him to become a candidate for public station; but his patriotic spirit was evinced by a subscription of three thousand dollars to a fund raised, in 1798, by the merchants of Boston to present a frigate to the General Government at the outbreak of hostilities with France.

His interests were largely in the East India and China trade; but he found time for other speculations, and in 1806 became one of the principal proprietors of a tract of land, thirty miles square, in the northeastern part of what was then known as the District of Maine, embracing all the islands at the mouth of the Penobscot River, as well as the now flourishing towns of Searsport and Searsmont, which were named in his honor.

In 1816, when, at the age of sixty-four and in apparently vigorous health, he was reasonably looking forward to some

years of continued activity, this prosperous career came to a hurried close. A too copious indulgence in that favorite repast of the olden time, a "Saturday salt-fish dinner," brought on serious indigestion followed by a congestion which proved fatal. Dr. John Sylvester John Gardiner, then Rector of Trinity Church, Boston, preached and subsequently printed a funeral sermon upon him, as one of the leading members of his congregation, and the founder of the Widows' Fund of that parish. This production, which may still be met with in collections of early pamphlets, consists not merely of an impressive discourse upon Sudden Death, but is an illustration of the taste of an old-fashioned Churchman for Biblical puns, Dr. Gardiner having taken for his text that well-known passage in the first book of Samuel, "There is but a step between me and death," in allusion to the fact that Mr. Sears had fallen on the step of his carriage in a fit of apoplexy.

He had married, in 1785, Miss Anne Winthrop,- one of the daughters of John Still Winthrop by his first wife, Jane Borland, a lady who had the misfortune in early life to lose both her parents, and who was fated to follow them to the grave two years after her marriage, having given birth to an only child, the subject of this memoir.

A few aged Bostonians can still recall a large house and terraced garden on the upper corner of Beacon and Somerset Streets, then one of the most attractive quarters of the town. Here David Sears the younger was born, Oct. 8, 1787, and here he chiefly resided more than thirty years, until he built, opposite the Common, the stately stone mansion which younger generations so long associated with his name. Beyond the fact that he was naturally all-in-all to his surviving parent, the existing records of his youth are little better than a blank. I have, however, stumbled upon a reminiscence of the late Lucius Manlius Sargent, who recalls a fancy-ball given by Mrs. Perez Morton, at her house in State Street, on the site of which is now the Union Bank, and on which occasion a pas de deux, arranged by Duport, a fashionable French dancingmaster of the close of the last century, was danced by young Sargent and his friend David Sears in the characters of Cupid and Zephyr. Mr. Sargent does not particularize which was which; but to those of us who subsequently became familiar with the lives and lineaments of these two prominent citizens,

either one of the winged mythological characters would seem better suited to the graceful figure and benignant countenance of Mr. Sears than to the stalwart form and rugged aspect of his partner.

In default of brothers and sisters, his constant playmates were a son of one of his father's sisters, who had married in Boston, and the elder children of his maternal uncle, Thomas Lindall Winthrop, afterwards Lieutenant-Governor of Massachusetts and President of this Society. In after years he was fond of recalling how, as a lad, he was occasionally permitted to assist at the famous Sunday evening suppers of his Aunt Winthrop's mother, Elizabeth Bowdoin, Dowager Lady Temple, who had returned in her old age to be a conspicuous figure in that Boston society of which in her youth she had been one of the greatest ornaments.

No one at all intimately acquainted with Mr. Sears in later life would find it easy to believe that he ever failed to be exemplary as a school-boy or decorous as an undergraduate ; but I am only able to state with certainty that after a course of preparatory study at the Boston Latin School, he entered Harvard in 1803, and took his bachelor's degree in 1807, in a class of forty-one members, no less than six of whom subsequently became members of this Society; the others being the Hon. Henry A. Bullard, Mr. Nathaniel Appleton Haven, the Hon. John Glen King, the Rev. Ezra Shaw Goodwin, and the Hon. James C. Merrill. A respectable degree of proficiency in his studies is evidenced by his having taken part, at the August Exhibition of 1806, in an English Conference on "A Seafaring, Itinerary, City, and Country Life, as Objects of Choice," and by his having figured, at his own Commencement a year later, in a Latin dialogue on "The Patriotism of the Romans."

The particular crony of his college days was his cousin and classmate, Thomas L. Winthrop, Jr.;1 and after leaving the University, the two young men entered upon the study of law together, becoming marked favorites in society. But their fraternal intimacy was suddenly embarrassed by the discovery that they had both fallen deeply in love with a reigning belle, Miss Miriam Mason, a daughter of the Hon. Jonathan Mason,

1 Afterwards Secretary to his kinsman George William Erving, U. S. Minister to Denmark and Spain, but whose early death cut short a career of promise now completely forgotten.