"Methinks I see it now, that one solitary, adventurous vessel, the Mayflower of a forlorn hope, freighted with the prospects of a future state, and bound across the unknown sea. I behold it pursuing, with a thousand misgivings, the uncertain, the tedious voyage. Suns rise and set, and weeks and months pass, and winter surprises them on the deep, but brings them not the sight of the wished-for shore. I see them now, scantily provided with provisions, crowded almost to suffocation in their ill-stored prison, delayed by calms, pursuing a circuitous route, and now, driven in fury before the raging tempest, in their scarcely seaworthy vessel. The awful voice of the storm howls through the rigging. The labouring masts seem straining from their base; the dismal sound of the pumps is heard; the ship leaps, as it were, madly from billow to billow; the ocean breaks, and settles with ingulfing floods over the floating deck, and beats with deadening weight against the staggered vessel. I see them, escaped from these perils, pursuing their all but desperate undertaking, and landed at last, after a five months' passage, on the ice-clad rocks of Plymouth, weak and exhausted from the voyage, poorly armed, scantily provisioned, depending on the charity of their ship-master for a draught of beer on board, drinking nothing but water on shore, without shelter, without means, surrounded by hostile tribes. Shut now the volume of history, and tell me on any human probability, what shall be the fate of this handful of adventurers. Tell me, man of military science, in how many months were they all swept off by the thirty savage tribes enumerated within the boundaries of New England? Tell me, politician, how long did this shadow of a colony, on which your conventions and treaties had not smiled, languish on this distant coast? Students of history, compare for me the baffled projects, the deserted settlements, the abandoned adventures of other times, and find the parallel of this. Was it the winter's storm, beating upon the houseless heads of women and children? was it hard labour and spare meals? was it disease? was it the tomahawk? was it the deep malady of a blighted hope, a ruined enterprise, and a broken heart, aching in its last moments at the recollection of the loved and left, beyond the sea? was it some or all of these united that hurried this forsaken company to their melancholy fate? And is it possible that neither of these causes, that not all combined, were able to blast this bud of hope? Is it possible that from a beginning so feeble, so frail, so worthy, not so much of admiration as of pity, there have gone forth a progress so steady, a growth so wonderful, a reality so important, a promise yet to be fulfilled so glorious?"

The close of his address at the inauguration of the Union Club in Boston, delivered on the 9th of April, 1863, in the midst of the Civil War, typifies his eloquence at the end:

"The cause in which we are engaged is the cause of the Constitution and the Law, of civilisation and freedom, of man and of God. Let us engage in it with a steadiness and a fortitude, a courage and a zeal, a patience and a resolution, a hope and a cheer, worthy of the fathers from whom we are descended, of the country we defend, and of the privileges we inherit. There is a call and a duty, a work and a place, for all; for man and for woman, for rich and for poor, for old and for young, for the stout-hearted and strong-handed, for all who enjoy and all who deserve to enjoy the priceless blessings at stake. Let the venerable forms of the Pilgrim Fathers, the majestic images of our Revolutionary sires, and of the sages that gave us this glorious Union; let the anxious expectations of the Friends of Liberty abroad, awakened at last to the true cause and the great issues of this contest; let the hardships and perils of our brethren in the field and the freshmade graves of the dear ones who have fallen; let every memory of the past and every hope of the future, every thought and every feeling, that can nerve the arm, or fire the heart, or elevate and purify the soul of a patriot, rouse and guide and cheer and inspire us to do, and, if need be, to die, for our Country!"

Between these two extracts there is certainly a contrast; but it is rather such a contrast as exists between the history of the very different times in which they were delivered than a temperamental one. The earlier, of course, is more conventional, more elaborate and more florid; the latter, spoken at a moment of gravest national danger, at a moment too when the speaker had attained his full maturity, is more compact, more fervid, more stirring. But both alike reveal the consummate skill of a deliberate master of the art of oratory.

The eloquence and the rhetorical skill of Webster and of Everett were the more admired in their own day for the reason that they were exercised in behalf of those political principles which then commanded the support of all conservative people in Massachusetts. So too was the eloquence of many other men, each of whom may fairly be held a master of the art of which Everett and Webster were the most eminent exponents. Even so cursory a study as ours may not neglect the name of Rufus Choate, like Webster a graduate of Dartmouth, like Everett a lifelong reader of the classics, and for years not

only eminent in public life, but acknowledged to be the most powerful advocate at the New England bar. A little later than the prime of these men there arose in Boston another generation of orators, differing from their predecessors both in principle and to some degree in method, who used their great powers for purposes which impressed conservative people as dangerously demagogic. Of these the most eminent were Wendell Phillips, Theodore Parker, and Charles Sumner. On all three we shall touch later. But we may hardly again have occasion to mention an eminent citizen of the elder type who survived until 1894, and preserved to the end the traditions of that great school of formal oratory of which he was the last survivor, Mr. Robert Charles Winthrop.

With Mr. Winthrop, one may say, the oratory of New England expired. And now, as one considers its century and more of history, one discerns more and more clearly why the period in which it reached its height may best be understood when we call it a period of Renaissance. Almost from the time of the Revolution, isolated New England, like the rest of America, was awakening to a new sense of national consciousness; so the society of New England, traditionally one which venerated its leaders, looked to the men whom circumstances brought prominently forward for indubitable assertion of dignity in our national character. The professional circumstances which brought men forward were generally those of the pulpit or the bar; clergymen and lawyers accordingly found that they could no longer maintain their eminence by merely treading in the footsteps of their predecessors. Trained in our old Yankee colleges at a time when such education meant a little mathematics and a tolerable reading knowledge of the classics, these men, who felt themselves called upon admirably to express our new nationality, turned instinctively to that mode of expression which in crude form had long been characteristic of their country. In their impulsive desire to give this a new vitality, they instinctively began to emulate

first the formal oratory of England, which had reached its acme in the preceding century; and then, perhaps more consciously, they strove to saturate themselves with the spirit of those immemorial masterpieces of oratory which help to immortalise the literatures of Rome and of Greece.

On general principles, the world might have expected America to produce public utterances of a crudely passionate kind, marked rather by difference from what had gone before than by respect for traditional models. Instead, without a touch of affectation, our orators, obeying the genuine impulse of their nature, exerted their most strenuous energy in surprisingly successful efforts to emulate the achievements of an extremely elaborate art which had attained final excellence in the days of Cicero and Demosthenes. The oratorical models of Greece and of Rome they imitated in just such spirit as that in which the masterpieces of antique plastic art were imitated by fifteenth-century Italy. Apart from its political significance, as embodying principles which controlled the American history of their time, their work is significant in our study as proving how spontaneously the awakening national consciousness of New England strove to prove our country civilised by conscientious obedience to eldest civilised tradition.

III

THE NEW ENGLAND SCHOLARS AND HISTORIANS

SUCH high development of mental activity as was indicated by the renascent oratory of New England is never solitary. As Emerson's memories of Everett implied, something similar appeared at the same period in the professional scholarship of the region. From the beginning, the centre of learning there had been Harvard College, founded to perpetuate a learned ministry. This it did throughout its seventeenth-century career; and in the eighteenth century it also had the distinction of educating many lawyers and statesmen who became eminent at the time of the Revolution. Thomas Hutchinson was a Harvard man, and so were almost all the leading Boston Tories, of whom he is the best remembered. So, too, were James Otis, and Joseph Warren, and the Adamses, and almost every Bostonian who attained distinction on the revolutionary side. Up to the beginning of the nineteenth century, however, Harvard College remained little more than a boys' school. It received pupils very young; it gave them a fair training in Latin and Greek, a little mathematics, and a touch of theology if they so inclined; and then it sent them forth to the careers of mature life. It contented itself, in brief, with somewhat languidly preserving the tradition of academic training planted in the days of Charles I.; and this it held, in rather mediæval spirit, to be chiefly valuable as the handmaiden of theology, and later of law too. One principal function of a true university that of acquiring and publishing fresh knowledge it had not attempted.

At the close of the eighteenth century, indeed, learning at Harvard was probably inferior to that which had existed there a