his wit, the play of his fancy, and the gorgeous pictures of his imagination are the constant themes of reminiscence wherever American lawyers assemble for social converse. His arguments, so far as they have been preserved, are textbooks in the profession. His splendid and blazing intellect, fed and enriched by constant study of the best thoughts of the great minds of the race, his all-persuasive eloquence, his teeming and radiant imagination, his brilliant and sportive fancy, his prodigious and never-failing memory, and his playful wit always bursting forth with irresistible impulse, have been the subjects of scores of essays and criticisms, all struggling with the vain effort to describe and crystallize the magical charm of his speech and his influence."

Not only was his diction unique, but his method of delivery was sui generis. In figure he was tall, erect, and lithe — an impressive personality. His face was broad and deeply furrowed; his eyes were large, dark, and lustrous, startling at times in their glare. His hair was black and luxuriant, and his complexion oriental in hue. Though he delighted to speak as well as audiences delighted to hear, yet he was as restless and nervous before a speech as a race horse about to be set off in a race. His voice was wide of range and very musical, now gentle and low, now intense in a whisper, now like the blast of a trumpet. He usually began speaking in a conversational manner, but as he warmed to his theme his whole manner changed. His voice took a higher range and a greater volume; he gesticulated with his whole body; his long arms and bony fingers were in constant and vehement action to enforce his points. Mathews says, Probably no orator ever lived who threw himself with more energy and utter abandon into the advocacy of a cause." He watched his jury as a hawk its prey. His eye and the tones of his voice fascinated them. He could read their thoughts and

know when he had won them, and would not close his argument and appeal until he was morally certain of every juryman. Once he labored three hours with the stubborn foreman of a jury, though the rest had been won long before. Often when he was through with his plea he was so exhausted that he had to be assisted to his carriage.

His arguments before the court were calmer than those before the jury. He well knew that the arts practiced on the average juryman were not suited to the calm judgment of the court. A contemporary says of him, "His was a new school of rhetoric, oratory, and logic, and of all manner of diverse forces, working steadily, irresistibly in one direction to accomplish the speaker's purpose and object." Regarding the effect of his oratory not only in court but in Congress, the story is related of a Kentucky representative who rose to leave the House as Choate began to speak, but lingered for a while to note the tone of his voice and the manner of his speech." But he says: "that moment was fatal to my resolution. I became charmed by the music of his voice and was captivated by the power of his eloquence, and found myself wholly unable to move until the last word of his beautiful speech had been uttered."

If success at the bar is the criterion by which one is to be judged as a forensic orator, Choate must be placed in the highest rank. His record as a winner of verdicts is unsurpassed. His success in clearing criminals made him the subject of taunt by such men as Wendell Phillips, who once said of him, "Thieves inquired into the state of his health before they began to steal." But it cannot be denied that his skill in setting forth the facts in a case and in expounding the law, his unique, original, and powerful method of expression, his abundant illustrations and marvelous fancy, place him quite alone in the field of forensic orators. His

rise was rapid, and had not his love of his profession kept him close to his work, he might have held a distinguished place in statesmanship. Devoted to his business, he shunned politics, and though active in public affairs, and repeatedly urged to enter public service, yet he only consented to succeed Webster, his personal friend, in the Senate while the latter was serving his country as Secretary of State, later to resign that Webster might return to the Senate.

Speaking of the public services of Choate, one of his biographers writes: "He had won for himself an enviable reputation as a deliberative orator in the golden age of American eloquence. But he had little taste and less fondness for political life, and no aptitude at all for the drudgery by which party eminence is gained and party favor kept. He cared little for this sort of success. He counted it as a hindrance to the cultivation of professional and literary tastes, and could therefore hold fast to those conservative opinions which tend to keep a person in retirement."

THE AGE OF THE PILGRIMS

This speech was delivered before the New England Association of the City of New York, in December, 1843.

I. EARLY HEROISM

Mr. Choate traces the history of the Pilgrim Fathers and shows how the spirit of liberty led them to flee their oppressors and brave the hardships necessary to establish a colony in New England.

We meet again, the children of the Pilgrims, to remember our fathers. We meet again, to repeat their names one by one, to retrace the lines of their character, to recall the lineaments and forms over which the grave has no power, to appreciate their virtues, to recount the course of their lives full of heroic deeds, varied by sharpest trials, crowned by transcendent consequences, to assert

the directness of our descent from such an ancestry of goodness and greatness, to erect, refresh, and touch our spirits by coming for an hour into their more immediate presence, such as they were in the days of their human "agony of glory." The two centuries which interpose to hide them from our eye-centuries so brilliant with progress, so crowded by incidents, so fertile in accumulations dissolve away for the moment as a curtain of clouds, and we are once more by their side. The grand and pathetic series of their story unrolls itself around us, vivid as if with the life of yesterday. All the stages, all the agents, of the process by which they and the extraordinary class they belonged to, were slowly formed from the general mind and character of England. The successive development and growth of opinions and traits and determinations and fortunes, by which they were advanced from Protestants to Republicans, from Englishmen to Pilgrims, from Pilgrims to the founders of a free Church, and the fathers of a free people in a new world; the retirement to Holland; the resolution to seek the sphere of their duties and the asylum of their rights beyond the sea; the embarkation at Delft Haven- a noble colony of devout Christians, educated and firm men, valiant soldiers, and honorable women; a colony on the commencement of whose heroic enterprise the selectest influences of religion seemed to be descending visibly, and beyond whose perilous path are hung the rainbow and the westward star of empire; the voyage of the Mayflower; the landing; the slow winter's night of disease and famine in which so many the good, the beautiful, the brave sunk down and died, giving place at last to the spring dawn of health and plenty; the meeting with the old red race on the hill beyond the brook; the treaty of peace unbroken for half a century; the organization of a republican government in the Mayflower cabin; the planting of these kindred and coeval and auxiliar institutions, without which such a government can no more live than the uprooted tree can put forth leaf or flower; institutions to diffuse pure religion; good learning; austere morality; the practical arts of administration; labor, patience, obedience; "plain living and high thinking "; the

securities of conservatism; the germs of progress; the laying deep and sure, far down on the rock of ages, of the foundation stones of the imperial structure whose dome now swells toward heaven; all these high, holy, and beautiful things come thronging fresh on all our memories, beneath the influence of the hour. Such as we heard them from our mothers' lips, such as we read them in the histories of kings, of religions, and of liberty, they gather themselves about us; familiar but of an interest that can never die, heightened inexpressibly by their relations to that eventful future into which they have expanded and through whose lights they show.

And yet, with all this procession of events and persons moving before us, and solicited this way and that by the innumerable trains of speculation and of feeling which such a sight inspires, we can think of nothing and of nobody, here and now, but the Pilgrims themselves. I cannot, and do not, wish for a moment to forget that it is their festival we have come to keep. It is their tabernacles we have come to build. It is not the Reformation, it is not colonization, it is not ourselves, our present or our future, it is not political economy, or political philosophy, of which to-day you would have me say a word. We have a specific and single duty to perform. We would speak of certain valiant, good, and peculiar men, our fathers. We would wipe the dust from a few old, plain, noble urns. We would shun husky disquisitions, irrelevant novelties, and small display; would recall rather and merely the forms and lineaments of the heroic dead - forms and features which the grave has not changed, over which the grave has no power.

I regard it as a great thing for a nation to be able, as it passes through one sign after another of its zodiac pathway, in prosperity, in adversity, and at all times, to be able to look to an authentic race of founders, and a historical principle of institution, in which it may rationally admire the realized idea of true heroism. Whether it looks back in the morning or evening of its day; whether it looks back as now we do, in the emulous fervor of its youth, or in the full strength of manhood, it is a great and precious thing to be able to ascend to, and to repose its strenuous or its wearied virtue