are assembled to pay to the memory of such a man; a man not only honored by me, in common with the whole country, but tenderly cherished as a faithful friend, from the morning of his days, and almost from the morning of mine; one with whom through life I was delighted to take sweet counsel; for whom I felt an affection never chilled for a moment, during nearly forty years since it sprung up. I knew our dear friend, sir, from the time that he entered the law school at Cambridge; I was associated with him as one of the Massachusetts delegation, in the House of Representatives of the United States, between whom and myself there was an entire community of feeling and opinion on all questions of men and measures; and with whom, in these late years, as his near neighbor, and especially when illness confined him at home, I have enjoyed opportunities of the most intimate social intercourse. Now that he is gone, sir, I feel that one more is taken away of those most trusted and loved, and with whom I had most hoped to finish the journey; nay, sir, one whom, in the course of nature, I should have preceded to its end, and who would have performed for me the last kindly office, which I, with drooping spirit, would fain perform for him.

But although with a willing heart I undertake the duty you have devolved upon me, I can not but feel how little remains to be said. It is but echoing the voice, which has been heard from every part of the country from the Bar, from the Press, from every association from which it could with propriety be uttered, to say that he stood at the head of his profession in this country. If, in his own or any other part of the Union, there was his superior in any branch of legal knowledge, there was certainly no one who united, to the same extent, profound learning in the law, with a range almost boundless of miscellaneous reading, reasoning powers of the highest order, intuitive quickness of perception, a wariness and circumspection never taken by surprise, and an imagination, which rose on a bold and easy wing to the highest heaven of invention. These powers, trained by diligent cultivation, these attainments, combined and applied with sound judg ment, consummate skill and exquisite taste, necessarily placed him at the head of the profession of his choice; where,

since the death of Mr. Webster, he shone without a rival. With such endowments, formed at the best schools of professional education, exercised with unwearied assiduity, through a long professional life, under the spur of generous ambition, and the heavy responsibility of an ever growing reputation to be sustained-if possible to be raised - he could fill no second

place.

But he did not, like most eminent jurists, content himself with the learning or the fame of his profession. He was more than most men in any profession, in the best sense of the word, a man of letters. He kept up his academical studies in after life. He did not think it the part either of wisdom or good taste to leave behind him at school, or at college, the noble languages of the great peoples of antiquity; but he continued through life to read the Greek and Roman classics. He was also familiar with the whole range of English literature; and he had a respectable acquaintance with the standard French authors. This wide and varied circle of reading not only gave a liberal expansion to his mind, in all directions, but it endowed him with a great wealth of choice but unstudied language, and enabled him to command a richness of illus tration, whatever subject he had in hand, beyond most of our public speakers and writers. This taste for reading was formed in early life. While he was at the law school at Cambridge, I was accustomed to meet him more frequently than any other person of his standing, in the alcoves of the Library of the University. As he advanced in years, and acquired the means of gratifying his taste in this respect, he formed a miscellaneous collection, probably as valuable as any other in Boston; and he was accustomed playfully to say, that every Saturday afternoon, after the labor of the week, he indulged himself in buying and bringing home a new book. Thus reading with a keen relish, as a relaxation from professional toil, and with a memory that nothing worth retaining escaped, he became a living storehouse of polite literature, out of which, with rare facility and grace, he brought forth treasures new and old, not deeming these last the least precious.

Though living mainly for his profession, Mr. Choate engaged to some extent in public life, and that at an early age, as a member of the Legislature of Massachu

setts, and of the National House of Representatives, and in riper years as a Senator of the United States, as the successor of Mr. Webster, whose entire confidence he enjoyed, and whose place he, if any one, was not unworthy to fill. In these different positions he displayed consummate ability. His appearance, his silent demeanor in either house of Congress commanded respect. He was one of the few whose very presence in a public as sembly was a call to order. In the daily routine of legislation he did not take an active part. He rather shunned clerical work, and consequently avoided, as much as duty permitted, the labor of the committee room; but on every great question that came up while he was a member of either house of Congress, he made a great speech; and when he had spoken there was very little left for any one else to say on the same side of the question. I remember, on one occasion, after he had been defending, on broad national grounds, the policy of affording a moderate protection to our native industry, showing that it was not merely a local but a national interest, and seeking to establish this point by a great variety of illustrations, equally novel and ingenious, a Western member, who had hitherto wholly dissented from this view of the subject, exclaimed that he "was the most persuasive speaker he had ever heard."

But though abundantly able to have filled a prominent place among the distinguished active statesmen of the day, he had little fondness for political life, and no aptitude whatever for the out-door's management; for the electioneering legerdemain; for the wearisome correspondence with local great men; and the heartbreaking drudgery of franking cart-loads of speeches and public documents to the four winds, which are necessary at the present day to great success in a political career. Still less adroit was he in turning to some personal advantage whatever topic happens for the moment to attract public attention; fishing with even freshly baited hook in the turbid waters of an ephemeral popularity. In reference to some of the arts by which political advancement is sought and obtained, he once said to me, with that well-known characteristic look, in which sadness and compassionate pleasantry were about equally mingled: "They did not do such things in Washington's day."

If ever there was a truly disinterested patriot Rufus Choate was that man. In his political career there was no shade of selfishness. Had he been willing to purchase advancement at the price often paid for it, there never was a moment, from the time he first made himself felt and known, that he could not have commanded any thing which any party could bestow. But he desired none of the rewards or honors of success. On the contrary he, not only for his individual self, regarded office as a burden-an obstacle in the way of cultivation of his professional and literary tastes-but he held that of necessity, and in consequence of the strong tendency of our parties to assume a sectional character, conservative opinions, seeking to moderate between the extremes which agitate the country, must of necessity be in the minority; that it was the "mission" of men who hold such opinions, not to fill honorable and lucrative posts, which are unavoidably monopolized by active leaders, but to speak prudent words on great occasions, which would command the respect, if they do not enlist the sympathies, of both the conflicting parties, and insensibly influence the public mind. He comprehended and accepted the position; he knew that it was one liable to be misunderstood, and sure to be misrepre sented at the time; but not less sure to be justified when the interests and passions of the day are buried beneath the clods of the valley.

But this ostracism to which his conservative opinions condemned him, produced not a shade of bitterness in his feelings. His patriotism was as cheerful as it was intense. He regarded our confederated Republic, with its wonderful adjustment of State and Federal organizationthe States bearing the burden and descending to the details of local administration, the General Government molding the whole into one general nationality, and representing it in the family of nations

as the most wonderful phenomenon in the political history of the world. Too much of a statesman to join the unreflecting disparagement, with which other great forms of national polity are often spoken of in this country; he yet considered the oldest, the wisest, and most successful of them, the British Constitution, as a far less wonderful political system than our confederated republic. The territorial extent of the country; the beautiful

play into each other of its great commercial, agricultural, and manufacturing interests; the material prosperity, the advancement in arts and letters and manners already made; the capacity for further indefinite progress in this vast theater of action, in which Providence has placed the Anglo-American race; stretching from the Atlantic to the Pacific, from the Arctic circle to the tropics, were themes on which he dwelt, as none but he could dwell; and he believed that with patience, with mutual forbearance, with a willingness to think that our brethren, however widely we may differ from them, may be as honest and patriotic as ourselves, our common country would eventually reach a hight of prosperity of which the world as yet has seen no example.

With such gifts, such attainments, and such a spirit, he placed himself, as a matter of course, not merely at the head of the jurists and advocates, but of the public speakers of the country. After listening to him at the bar, in the Senate, or upon the academic or popular platform, you felt that you had heard the best that could be said in either place. That mastery which he displayed at the forum and in the deliberative assembly was not less conspicuous in every other form of public address. As happens in most cases of eminent jurists and statesmen, possessing a brilliant imagination and able to adorn a severe course of reasoning with the charms of a glowing fancy or a sparkling style, it was sometimes said of him, as it was said before him of Burke and Erskine, of Ames and Pinkney-that he was more of a rhetorician than a logician, that he dealt in words and figures of speech more than in facts or arguments. These are the invidious comments by which dull or prejudiced men seek to disparage those gifts which are furthest from their own reach.

It is, perhaps, by his discourses on academical and popular occasions that he is most extensively known in the community, as it is these which were listened to with delighted admiration by the largest audiences. He loved to treat a purely literary theme; and he knew how to throw a magic freshness. like the cool morning dew on a cluster of purple grapes -over the most familiar topics at a patriotic celebration. Some of these occasional performances will ever be held among the brightest gems of our literature. The

eulogy on Daniel Webster at Dartmouth College, in which he mingled at once all the light of his genius and all the warmth of his heart, has, within my knowledge, never been equaled among the performances of its class in this country for sympathetic appreciation of a great man, discriminating analysis of character, fertility of illustration, weight of sentiment, and a style at once chaste, nervous, and brilliant. The long sentences which have been criticised in this as in his other performances, are like those which Dr. Channing admired and commended in Milton's prose well compacted, full of meaning, fit vehicles for great thought.

But he does not deal exclusively in those ponderous sentences. There is nothing of the artificial Johnsonian balance in his style. It is as often marked by a pregnant brevity as by a sonorous amplitude. He is sometimes satisfied, in concise epigrammatic clauses, to skirmish with his light troops and drive in the enemy's outposts. It is only on fitting occasions, when great principles are to be vindicated and solemn truths told; when some moral or political Waterloo or Solferino is to be fought, that he puts on the entire panoply of his gorgeous rhetoric. It is then that his majestic sentences swell to the dimensions of his thought; that you hear afar off the awful roar of his rifled ordnance ; and when he has stormed the hights, and broken the center, and trampled the squares, and turned the staggering wings of the adversary, that he sounds his imperial clarion along the whole line of battle, and moves forward with all his hosts, in one overwhelming charge.

Our friend was, in all the personal relations of life, the most unselfish and disinterested of men. Commanding from an early period a valuable clientelage, and rising rapidly to the summit of his profes sion, and to the best practice in the Courts of Massachusetts and in the Supreme Court of the United States, with no expensive tastes or habits, and a manner of life highly unostentatious and simple, advancing years overtook him with but slender provision for their decline. He reaped little but fame, where he ought to have reaped both fame and fortune. A career which in England would have been crowned with affluence, and probably with distinguished rank and office, found him at sixty chained to the treadmill of laborious practice.