their convictions, and guide their conduct. It is worth our while, then, to glance at two or three passages from his speeches.

There is no more familiar example of his occasional oratory than his Apostrophe to the survivors of the battle of Bunker Hill, which occurs in an oration delivered in 1825, when the cornerstone of the Bunker Hill Monument was laid:

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"Venerable men! you have come down to us from a former generation. Heaven has bounteously lengthened out your lives, that you might behold this joyous day. You are now where you stood fifty years ago, this very hour, with your brothers and your neighbours, shoulder to shoulder, in the strife for your country. Behold, how altered! The same heavens are indeed over your heads; the same ocean rolls at your feet; but all else how changed! You hear now no roar of hostile cannon, you see no mixed volumes of smoke and flame arising from burning Charlestown. The ground strewed with the dead and the dying; the impetuous charge; the steady and successful repulse; the loud call to repeated assault; the summoning of all that is manly to repeated resistance; a thousand bosoms freely and fearlessly bared in an instant to whatever of terror there may be in war or death; — all these you have witnessed, but you witness them no more. All is peace. The heights of yonder metropolis, its towers and roofs, which you then saw filled with wives and children and countrymen in distress and terror, and looking with unutterable emotions for the issue of the combat, have presented you to-day with the sight of its whole happy population, come out to welcome and to greet you with a universal jubilee. Yonder proud ships, by a felicity of position appropriately lying at the foot of this mount, and seeming fondly to cling around it, are not means of annoyance to you, but your country's own means of distinction and defence. All is peace; and God has granted you this sight of your country's happiness, ere you slumber in the grave. He has allowed you to behold and to partake the reward of your patriotic toils; and he has allowed us, your sons and countrymen, to meet you here, and in the name of the present generation, in the name of your country, in the name of liberty, to thank you!"

However impressive you may find such work as this, you can hardly avoid feeling it to be elaborately artificial; and yet its artificiality has a ring of genuineness. It comes very near bombast, but it is not quite bombastic. It does not caricature itself.

Similar traits you may find in Webster's legal arguments, such as his description of the murder of Joseph White of Salem :

"The deed was executed with a degree of self-possession and steadiness equal to the wickedness with which it was planned. The circumstances now clearly in evidence spread out the whole scene before us. Deep sleep had fallen on the destined victim, and on all beneath his roof. A healthful old man, to whom sleep was sweet, the first sound slumbers of the night held him in their soft but strong embrace. The assassin enters, through the window already prepared, into an unoccupied apartment. With noiseless foot he paces the lonely hall, half-lighted by the moon; he winds up the ascent of the stairs, and reaches the door of the chamber. Of this, he moves the lock, by soft and continued pressure, till it turns on its hinges without noise; and he enters, and beholds his victim before him. The room is uncommonly open to the admission of light. The face of the innocent sleeper is turned from the murderer, and the beams of the moon, resting on the gray locks of his aged temple, show him where to strike. The fatal blow is given! and the victim passes without a struggle or a motion, from the repose of sleep to the repose of death! It is the assassin's purpose to make sure work; and he plies the dagger, though it is obvious that life has been destroyed by the blow of the bludgeon. He even raises the aged arm, that he may not fail in his aim at the heart, and replaces it again over the wounds of the poniard! To finish the picture, he explores the wrist for the pulse! He feels for it, and ascertains that it beats no longer! It is accomplished. The deed is done. He retreats, retraces his steps to the window, passes out through it as he came in, and escapes. He has done the murder. No eye has seen him, no ear has heard him. The secret is his own, and he is safe!"

It would be hard to find a more vivid description of appallingly tragic fact; and the speech of which this formed a part carried a Salem jury against the evidence to a morally just verdict. As one looks at it, however, after an interval of seventy years, one feels along with its consummate skill, an artificiality of both conception and phrase, nowadays as foreign to us as a totally foreign language. The words "bludgeon" and "poniard," for instance, just as palpably as the slip into the historical present tense, instantly betray elaborate, though spontaneous, artifice.

Just such artificiality and power combine in the famous climax of Webster's reply to Hayne, delivered in that same 1830:

"I have not allowed myself, sir, to look beyond the Union, to see what might be hidden in the dark recess behind. I have not coolly weighed the chances of preserving liberty when the bonds that unite us together shall be broken asunder. I have not accustomed myself to hang over the precipice of disunion, to see whether, with my short sight, I can fathom the depth of the abyss below; nor could I regard him as a safe counsellor in the affairs of this government, whose thoughts should be mainly bent on considering, not how the Union may be best preserved, but how tolerable might be the condition of the people when it should be broken up and destroyed. While the Union lasts, we have high, exciting, gratifying prospects spread out before us, for us and our children. Beyond that I seek not to penetrate the veil. God grant that in my day, at least, the curtain may not rise! God grant that on my vision never may be opened what lies behind! When my eyes shall be turned to behold for the last time the sun in heaven, may I not see him shining on the broken and dishonoured fragments of a once glorious Union; on States dissevered, discordant, belligerent; on a land rent with civil feuds, or drenched, it may be, in fraternal blood! Let their last feeble and lingering glance rather behold the gorgeous ensign of the republic, now known and honoured throughout the earth, still full high advanced, its arms and trophies streaming in their original lustre, not a stripe erased or polluted, nor a single star obscured, bearing for its motto, no such miserable interrogatory as 'what is all this worth?' nor those other words of delusion and folly, Liberty first and Union afterwards;' but everywhere, spread all over in characters of living light, blazing on all its ample folds, as they float over the sea and over the land, and in every wind under the whole heavens, that other sentiment, dear to every true American heart,— Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable! "

It was such oratory as this, in Congress, in the courts, and at all sorts of public meetings alike, which for more than thirty years sustained Webster's commanding influence. To call it artificial is perhaps a mistake. The man spoke and wrote in a way which to him, as well as to the public of his time, seemed the only fit one for matters of such dignity as those with which he had to deal; and he wrote and spoke with

a fervid power which any one can recognize. All the same, his style is certainly more analogous to Dr. Johnson's published prose than to those idiomatic utterances recorded by Boswell which have made Johnson immortal. If Webster's power is beyond dispute, so is its essentially histrionic character. There used to be a saying that no human being was ever really so great as Daniel Webster always looked; he had, in fact, that temperamental tendency to pose which you generally find in actors, and often in preachers. And this he enforced, in a manner which was thoroughly acceptable to the America of his time, by an extremely elaborate rhetoric based partly on the parliamentary traditions of eighteenth century England, and partly, like those traditions themselves, on the classical oratory of Rome and Greece.

Such highly developed oratory as Webster's is a kind of thing which never grows into existence alone. Like Shakspere before him, he was only the most eminent member of a school which has left many other memories, in their own day of almost equal distinction; and the fact that he retained so many traces of his far from eminent New Hampshire origin makes him somewhat less typical of the Boston orators of his time than were some natives of Massachusetts.

Of these none was more distinguished than Edward Everett. Born in 1794, the son of a minister, but not sprung from a family which had enjoyed high social consideration before the Revolution, he took his degree at Harvard in 1811, and two years later he became for a while minister of the Brattle Street Church in Boston. A year or so later, having been appointed professor of Greek at Harvard, he went abroad, to prepare himself for his academic duties, and was among the earliest of American scholars to study at a German university. The effect which he produced on his return from Europe has been vividly described by Emerson:

"There was an influence on the young people from the genius of Everett which was almost comparable to that of Pericles in Athens.

He had an inspiration which did not go beyond his head, but which made him the master of elegance. If any of my readers were at that period in Boston or Cambridge, they will easily remember his radiant beauty of person, of a classic style, his heavy large eye, marble lids, which gave the impression of mass which the slightness of his form needed; sculptured lips; a voice of such rich tones, such precise and perfect utterance, that, although slightly nasal, it was the most mellow and beautiful and correct of all the instruments of the time. The word that he spoke, in the manner in which he spoke it, became current and classical in New England. He had a great talent for collecting facts, and for bringing those he had to bear with ingenious felicity on the topic of the moment. Let him rise to speak on what occasion soever, a fact had always just transpired which composed, with some other fact well known to the audience, the most pregnant and happy coincidence. . . . In the lecture-room, he abstained from all ornament, and pleased himself with the play of detailing erudition in a style of perfect simplicity. In the pulpit (for he was then a clergyman) he made amends to himself and his auditor for the self-denial of the professor's chair, and, with an infantine simplicity still, of manner, he gave the reins to his florid, quaint, and affluent fancy.

"Then was exhibited all the richness of a rhetoric which we have never seen rivalled in this country. Wonderful how memorable were words made which were only pleasing pictures, and covered no new or valid thoughts. He abounded in sentences, in wit, in satire, in splendid allusion, in quotation impossible to forget, in daring imagery, in parable and even in a sort of defying experiment of his own wit and skill in giving an oracular weight to Hebrew or Rabbinical words: . . . feats which no man could better accomplish, such was his self-command and the security of his manner. All his speech was music, and with such variety and invention that the ear was never tired. This was a triumph of rhetoric. It was not the intellectual or the moral principles which he had to teach. It was not thoughts. But his power lay in the magic of form; it was in the graces of manner; in a new perception of Grecian beauty, to which he had opened our eyes. In every public discourse there was nothing left for the indulgence of his hearer, no marks of late hours and anxious, unfinished study, but the goddess of grace had breathed on the work a last fragrancy and glitter."

If this sketch of Emerson's gives the impression that Everett was a mere rhetorician, as distinguished from a man of power, the facts of his career should suffice instantly to correct it. Among other phases of his later activity, he was