THE OBSEQUIES OF MR. CHOATE.

Our city has lately witnessed a most beautiful instance of this re-animating power of death. A few weeks since, we followed toward the tomb the lifeless remains of our lamented Choate. Well may we consecrate a moment even of this hour to him who, in that admirable discourse to which I have already alluded, did such noble justice to himself and the great subject of his eulogy. A short time before the decease of our much honored friend, I had seen him shattered by disease, his all-persuasive voice faint and languid, his beaming eye quenched; and as he left us in search of health in a foreign clime, a painful image and a sad foreboding too soon fulfilled dwelt upon my mind. But on the morning of the day when we were to pay the last sad offices to our friend, the 23d of July, with a sad, let me not say a repining, thought, that so much talent, so much learning, so much eloquence, so much wit, so much wisdom, so much force of intellect, so much kindness of heart were taken from us, an engraved likeness of him was brought to me, in which he seemed to live again. The shadows of disease and suffering had passed from the brow, the well-remembered countenance was clothed with its wonted serenity, a cheerful smile lighted up the features, genius kindled in the eye, persuasion hovered over the lips, and I felt as if I was going, not to his funeral, but his triumph. "Weep not for me," it seemed to say, "but weep for yourselves." And never while he dwelt among us in the feeble tabernacle of the flesh; never while the overtasked spirit seemed to exhaust the delicate frame; never as I had listened to the melody of his living voice, did he speak to my imagination and heart with such a touching though silent eloquence, as when we followed his hearse along these streets, that bright mid-summer's noon, up the via sacra in front of this Capitol, slowly moving to the solemn beat of grand dead marches, as they swelled from wailing clarion and muffled drum, while the minute guns from yonder lawn responded to the passing bell from yonder steeple. I then understood the sublime significance of the words, which Cicero puts in the mouth of Cato, that the mind, elevated to the foresight of posterity, when departing from this life, begins at length to live; yea, the sublimer words of a greater than Cicero, "Oh, death! where is thy sting? oh, grave! where is thy victory?" And then, as we passed the abodes of those whom he knew, and honored, and loved, and who had gone before; of Lawrence here on the left; of Prescott yonder on the right; this home where Hancock lived and Washington was received; this where Lafayette sojourned; this Capitol where his own political course began, and on which so many patriotic memories are concentrated, I felt, not as if we were conducting another frail and weary body to the tomb, but as if we were escorting a noble brother to the congenial company of the departed great and good; and I was ready myself to exclaim, "O præclarum diem, cum ad

illud divinum animorum concilium cætumque profisciscar, cumque ex hac turba et colluvione discedam."

THE PERIOD IN WHICH MR. WEBSTER LIVED.

It will not, I think, be expected of me to undertake the superfluous task of narrating in great detail the well-known events of Mr. Webster's life, or of attempting an elaborate delineation of that character to which such ample justice has already been done by master hands. I deem it sufficient to say in general, that, referred to all the standards by which public character can be estimated, he exhibited in a rare degree the qualities of a truly great man.

The period at which Mr. Webster came forward in life, and during which he played so distinguished a part, was not one in which small men, dependent upon their own exertions, are likely to rise to a high place in public estimation. The present generation of young men are hardly aware of the vehemence of the storms that shook the world at the time when Mr. Webster became old enough to form the first childish conceptions of the nature of the events in progress at home and abroad. His recollections, he tells us in an autobiographical sketch, went back to the year 1790-a year when the political system of continental Europe was about to plunge into a state of frightful disintegration, while, under the new constitution, the United States were commencing an unexampled career of prosperity; Washington just entering upon the first Presidency of the new-born Republic; the reins of the oldest monarchy in Europe slipping, besmeared with blood, from the hands of the descendant of thirty generations of kings. The fearful struggle between France and the allied powers succeeded, which strained the resources of the European governments to their utmost tension. Armies and navies were arrayed against each other such as the civilized world had never seen before, and wars waged beyond all former experience. The storm passed over the Continent as a tornado passes through a forest, when it comes rolling and roaring from the clouds, and prostrates the growth of centuries in its path. England, in virtue of her insular position, her naval power, and her free institutions, had more than any other foreign country weathered the storm; but Russia saw the arctic sky lighted with the flames of her old Muscovite capital; the shadowy Kaisers of the House of Hapsburg were compelled to abdicate the crown of the Holy Roman Empire, and accept as a substitute that of Austria; Prussia, staggering from Jena, trembled on the verge of political annihilation; the other German states, Italy, Switzerland, Holland, and the Spanish Peninsula were convulsed; Egypt overrun; Constantinople and the East threatened; and in many of these states, institutions, laws, ideas, and manners were changed as effectually as dynasties. With the downfall of Napoleon a partial reconstruction of the old forms took place; but the political genius of the continent of Europe was revolutionized.

On this side of the Atlantic, the United States, though studying an impartial neutrality, were drawn at first to some extent into the outer circles of the terrific maelstrom; but soon escaping, they started upon a career of national growth and development, of which the world has witnessed no other example. Meantime, the Spanish and the Portuguese Viceroyalties south of us, from Mexico to Cape Horn, asserted their independence, that Castilian empire on which the sun never set was dismembered, and the golden chain was forever sundered, by which Columbus had linked half his newfound world to the throne of Ferdinand and Isabella.

Such was the crowd and the importance of the events in which, from his childhood up, the life of Mr. Webster, and of the generation to which he belonged was passed, and I can with all sincerity say, that it has never been my fortune, in Europe or America, to hold intercourse with any person who seemed to me to penetrate further than he had done into the spirit of the age, under its successive phases of dissolution, chaos, reconstruction, and progress. Born and bred on the verge of the wilderness (his father a veteran of those old French and Indian wars, in which, in the middle of the 18th century, wild men came out of the woods to wage war with the tomahawk and the scalping-knife, against the fireside and the cradle), with the slenderest opportunities for early education, entering life with scarce the usual facilities for reading the riddle of foreign state-craft, remote from the scene of action, relying upon sources of information equally open to all the world, he seemed to me nevertheless, by the instinct of a great capacity, to have comprehended in all its aspects the march of events in Europe and this country. He surveyed the agitations of the age with calmness, deprecated its excesses, sympathized with its progressive tendencies, rejoiced in its triumphs. His first words in Congress, when he came unannounced from his native hills in 1813, proclaimed his mastery of the perplexed web of European politics, in which the United States were then but too deeply entangled; and from that time till his death I think we all feltthose who differed from him as well as those who agreed with him that he was in no degree below the standard of the time; that if Providence had cast his lot in the field where the great destinies of Europe are decided, this poor New Hampshire youth would have carried his head as high among the Metternichs, the Nesselrodes, the Hardenbergs, the Talleyrands, the Castlereaghs of the day, and surely among their successors, who now occupy the stage, as he did among his cotemporaries at home.

HIS COTEMPORARIES.

Let me not be thought, however, in this remark, to intimate that these cotemporaries at home were second-rate men; far otherwise. It has sometimes seemed to me that, owing to the natural reverence in which we hold the leaders of the Revolutionary period-the

heroic age of the country-and those of the constitutional age who brought out of chaos this august system of confederate republicanism, we hardly do full justice to the third period in our political history, which may be dated from about the time when Mr. Webster came into political life and continued through the first part of his career. The heroes and sages of the revolutionary and constitutional period were indeed gone, Washington, Franklin, Greene, Hamilton, Morris, Jay slept in their honored graves. John Adams, Jefferson, Carroll, though surviving, were withdrawn from affairs. But Madison, who contributed so much to the formation and adoption of the constitution, was at the helm; Monroe in the cabinet; John Quincy Adams, Gallatin, and Bayard negotiating in Europe; in the Senate were Rufus King, Christopher Gore, Jeremiah Mason, Giles, Otis; in the House of Representatives, Pinckney, Clay, Lowndes, Cheves, Calhoun, Gaston,, Forsyth, Randolph, Oakley, Pitkin, Grosvenor; on the bench of the Supreme Court, Marshall, Livingston, Story; at the bar, Dexter, Emmet, Pinkney, and Wirt; with many distinguished men not at that time in the general government, of whom it is enough to name Dewitt Clinton and Chancellor Kent. It was my privilege to see Mr. Webster, associated and mingling with nearly all those eminent men, and their successors, not only in later years, but in my own youth, and when he first came forward, unknown as yet to the country at large, scarcely known to himself, not arrogant, nor yet unconscious of his mighty powers, tied to a laborious profession in a narrow range of practice, but glowing with a generous ambition, and not afraid to grapple with the strongest and boldest in the land. The opinion pronounced of him, at the commencement of his career, by Mr. Lowndes, that the "South had not in Congress his superior nor the North his equal," savors in the form of expression of sectional partiality. If it had been said, that neither at the South or the North had any public man risen more rapidly to a brilliant reputation, no one I think would have denied the justice of the remark. He stood from the first the acknowledged equal of the most distinguished of his associates. In later years he acted with the successors of those I have named, with Benton, Burgess, Edward Livingston, Hayne, McDuffie, McLean, Sergeant, Clayton, Wilde, Storrs, our own Bates, Davis, Gorham, Choate, and others who still survive; but it will readily be admitted that he never sunk from the position which he assumed at the outset of his career, or stood second to any man in any part of the country.

THE QUESTIONS DISCUSSED IN HIS TIME.

If we now look for a moment at the public questions with which he was called to deal in the course of his career, and with which he did deal, in the most masterly manner, as they successively came up, we shall find new proofs of his great ability. When he first came forward in life, the two great belligerent

powers of Europe, contending with each other for the mastery of the world, despising our youthful weakness and impatient of our gainful neutrality, in violation now admitted of the Law of Nations, emulated each other in the war waged upon our commerce and the insults offered to our flag. To engage in a contest with both would have been madness; the choice of the antagonist was a question of difficulty, and well calculated to furnish topics of reproach and recrimination. Whichever side you adopted, your opponent regarded you as being, in a great national struggle, the apologist of an unfriendly foreign power. In 1798 the United States chose France for their enemy; in 1812 Great Britain. War was declared against the latter country on the 18th of June, 1812; the Orders in Council, which were the immediate cause of the war, were rescinded five days afterward. Such are the narrow chances on which the Fortunes of States depend!

Great questions of domestic and foreign policy followed the close of war. Of the former class were the restoration of a currency which should truly represent the values which it nominally circulated-a result mainly brought about by a resolution moved by Mr. Webster; the fiscal system of the Union and the best mode of connecting the collection, safe-keeping, and disbursement of the public funds, with the commercial wants, and especially with the exchanges of the country; the stability of the manufactures, which had been called into existence during the war; what can constitutionally be done, ought anything as a matter of policy to be done by Congress to protect them from the competition of foreign skill, and the glut of foreign markets; the internal communications of the Union, a question of paramount interest before the introduction of Railroads; can the central power do anything what can it do-by roads and canals, to bind the distant parts of the continent together; the enlargement of the judicial system of the country to meet the wants of the greatly increased number of the States; the revision of the criminal code of the United States, which was almost exclusively his work; the administration of the public lands and the best mode of filling with civilized and Christian homes this immense domain, the amplest heritage which was ever subjected to the control of a free government; connected with the public domain the relations of the civilized and dominant race to the aboriginal children of the soil; and lastly the constitutional questions on the nature of the government itself, which were raised in that gigantic controversy on the interpretation of the fundamental law itself. These were some of the most important domestic questions which occupied the attention of Congress and the country while Mr. Webster was on the stage.

Of questions connected with Foreign affairs were those growing out of the war, which was in progress when he first became a member of Congress; then the various questions of International