sixty-six years more, I do not believe it is to be found, except on the last page of the Lexington address where he used it on this occasion, and in other places where I have quoted it. Having had this share in the preparation of the address, I begged eagerly at school and at home that I might be permitted to go to Lexington and hear it. But no! The rules of the school did not permit the absence for a few hours of a boy who was "preparing for college," and so I lost my chance.1 At the same moment, probably, I contracted a disgust for the mechanism of the public schools which I have ventured to express on all proper occasions between that time and this.

I had, however, had a chance, on the 6th of September, 1834, to crowd into Faneuil Hall with the boys who had no tickets, in time to hear the close of his eulogy on Lafayette. Mr. Everett was an enthusiast about Lafayette; and let me say here that all the men who knew La

1 But only three years before, as a friend reminds me, when Mr. Webster came on to "address his fellow citizens in Faneuil Hall in regard to Jackson's Nullification Proclamation and to persuade them to support him in the course he took, the Latin School boys were dismissed and sent down to the Hall to hear him." It is just possible that the Master wanted to go himself on this occasion.

fayette best were enthusiastic about him. It is only people who did not know him, like Carlyle, who speak of him with contempt.

When I am asked, as Mr. Conkling was, what are the passages of oratory which I remember as most impressive, I am apt to recur to the close of that eulogy. Near the close of his address Mr. Everett freed himself entirely from every conventionality of the platform, as he turned his back upon his hearers to Stuart's Washington and to the bust of Lafayette which were behind him, and cried, "Break the long silence of that votive canvas! Speak! speak! marble lips, and teach us the love of liberty protected by law!"

Nothing is more absurd than the habit current in our day of referring to Everett's eloquence as if it were academic or as the address of a superior to inferiors. In truth, he brought his audience into sympathy with himself almost as soon as he began, and carried them with him as if they were all in the same boat.

I heard an undergraduate say once, of a preacher of whom he was fond, "By Jove, he reads the Bible, not only as if he thought it the most important book of books, but as if he thought we thought so." In this rough epigram

I am disposed to think is contained the definition of what constitutes real eloquence, - the sympathy, at least for the time, of the speaker and the hearer. As so many men have said, the audience teaches the speaker, not what he is to say, perhaps, but how he is to say it.

But on all that matter the diligent reader had better refer to Mr. Everett's own preface to Webster's orations.

Writing in 1856, eleven years after his return from London, Mr. Everett says of the American community of the first quarter of the century, that the great events and the anniversaries of the last half century "were well adapted to excite the minds of youthful writers and speakers and to give a complexion to their thoughts and style. They produced, if I mistake not, in the community at large, a feeling of comprehensive patriotism, which I fear has, in a considerable degree, passed away. While it lasted, it prompted a strain of sentiment which does not now, as it seems to me, find a cordial response from the people in any part of the country. Awakened from the pleasing visions of former years by the fierce recriminations and dark forebodings of the present day, I experience the feel

ing of the ancient dreamer when cured of his harmless delusions:

666 ―me occidistis, amici,

Non servastis, ait, cui sic extorta voluptas,
Et demtus per vim mentis gratissimus error.'" 1

This seems to me, writing in 1902, to be a very pathetic sign of the time. He wrote it in the midst of the recriminations which preceded the war. You can hardly make a Massachusetts man believe to-day that our Massachusetts Legislature refused to display the United States flag on the State House of Massachusetts. And I fancy that to-day any Mississippi man would be scandalized if I reprinted Logan's fine remark, when speaking of that State in 1863, "They do not know the American flag when they see it, they do not know anything good, they do not know anything at all." Certainly, in 1902, nobody says such things, and I do not think there are many people who believe them.

1❝ah, friends,' he cried,

You meant to save me. Better far have died!'
For when they snatched away his joy, they took
The gracious error which had blessed his life."

DANIEL WEBSTER

go

The poet Lowell had left college for a few months when he went into Boston, on the 9th of November, 1838, "to look out for a place in business." I think I never pass the rather grotesque Parthenon front of our old Court House in Boston without thinking of that walk of Lowell's, as he came through Cambridge Street into Court Street. Observe that at ten o'clock on that 9th of November he meant to into mercantile life. "I was induced, en passant, to step into the United States District Court, where there was a case pending in which Webster was one of the counsel retained. I had not been there an hour before I determined to continue in my profession (of the law) and study as well as I could!" This was what happened to Lowell when he was nineteen years old. I may as well say here that he studied law seriously and to such purpose that when it came to be his turn to be a diplomatist in Spain and in England he knew perfectly well what he was about, and had no superior in his business.

I tell that story because it shows the sort of impression which Mr. Webster made on all intelligent people. I have quoted above what