These public meetings, and a dinner once a week to as many as my table will hold, with the references to and from the different departments of state, and other communications with all parts of the union, is as much if not more than I am able to undergo; for I have already had within less than a year, two severe attacks;--the last worse than the first,--a third, it is more than probable will put me to sleep with my fathers--at what distance this may be, I know not." [Sidenote: His inauguration and speech to congress.] The ceremonies of the inauguration having been adjusted by congress, the President attended in the senate chamber, on the 30th of April, in order to take, in the presence of both houses, the oath prescribed by the constitution.
To gratify the public curiosity, an open gallery adjoining the senate chamber had been selected by congress, as the place in which the oath should be administered.

Having taken it in the view of an immense concourse of people, whose loud and repeated acclamations attested the joy with which his being proclaimed President of the United States inspired them, he returned to the senate chamber, where he delivered the following address: "_Fellow citizens of the Senate and of the House of Representatives:_ "Among the vicissitudes incident to life, no event could have filled me with greater anxieties than that of which the notification was transmitted by your order, and received on the 14th day of the present month.

On the one hand, I was summoned by my country, whose voice I can never hear but with veneration and love, from a retreat which I had chosen with the fondest predilection, and, in my flattering hopes, with an immutable decision, as the asylum of my declining years: a retreat which was rendered every day more necessary as well as more dear to me, by the addition of habit to inclination, and of frequent interruptions in my health to the gradual waste committed on it by time.

On the other hand, the magnitude and difficulty of the trust to which the voice of my country called me, being sufficient to awaken in the wisest and most experienced of her citizens a distrustful scrutiny into his qualifications, could not but overwhelm with despondence, one, who, inheriting inferior endowments from nature, and unpractised in the duties of civil administration, ought to be peculiarly conscious of his own deficiencies.

In this conflict of emotions, all I dare aver is, that it has been my faithful study to collect my duty from a just appreciation of every circumstance by which it might be effected.