and for the purpose of staying the hand of the prosecutors.

Mr. Choate's successful defense of Albert J. Tirrell was followed by severe criticisms, and the loss of public esteem among those whose narrow ethics could not comprehend the true relations of the Government to the individual members of society. Tirrell was a young man of irregular ways of life, and Maria Bickford was a young woman of great beauty and some celebrity. That Tirrell was her slayer there was no doubt. The defense was somnambulism on the part of Tirrell, and the habit was proved upon the testimony of his family and associates. The defense relied also on the absence of motive on the part of Tirrell.

Beyond this the witnesses for the Government, who had knowledge of the facts occurring during the night of the murder, and in the house where the killing took place, were persons of ill repute. The jury found the prisoner not guilty. The public found him guilty, and the public made Mr. Choate responsible for the verdict of the jury. When Mr. Choate declined the defense of Professor Webster, charged with the murder of Dr. Parkman, his course was attributed to his disinclination to again encounter the popular odium. It is more probable, however, that Mr. Choate declined the defense because Professor Webster

was unwilling to rely upon the actual facts, and on which his crime would have been reduced from murder to manslaughter.

Although Mr. Choate was destitute of many of the qualities of statesmanship, his views of public questions were those of a statesman. He was conservative in his opinions, a follower of Hamilton, and an associate and friend of Webster. If the Constitution of the country had been the work of his own hand, his devotion to it could not have been greater; but he was terrified by the thought that it was a band of iron which might be broken but could never be changed. The civil war, which he dreaded, but lived not to see, wrought changes in the Constitution that he would have welcomed.

Mr. Choate's last public service was in the Constitutional Convention of Massachusetts of 1853. In those days, in Massachusetts, we were blessed with an excellent sergeant-at-arms, who, through the agency of a boy blindfolded-a clairvoyant, no doubt was able usually to so draw the numbers from a box as to secure a good seat for the leading men of all parties. Mr. Choate drew an end-seat, and it was my fortune to secure the next end-seat immediately behind him. For about three months we were thus associated. I enjoyed his conversation, observed his ways, and listened to

his speeches, which were, in fact, always orations.

During the months of May, June, and July, Mr. Choate attended to some professional business, prepared and delivered his Dartmouth eulogy upon Mr. Webster, and participated in the debates of the convention. Worthy of especial notice were his speeches upon the judiciary and the representative system. The speech on the judiciary was delivered on a hot day in July. During all his mature years Mr. Choate was subject to severe headaches, and they often followed or attended the excitement of public efforts. That day he provided himself with a bottle of bay-rum, with which he bathed his head frequently and profusely. His gesticulations were so vigorous that drops of bay-rum and perspiration were thrown from his hair and bespattered his neighbors. His speeches were usually written, if the characters he employed could be called writing, inasmuch as they were illegible to every one but himself. In the delivery, however, he dealt only with the sheets which he took up and held, and laid down in succession, without appearing to read what was written. Probably a word suggested an entire sentence or even a paragraph, and thereupon his memory was quickened or his mind repeated the process of thought pursued when the sentence or paragraph was written.

When engaged in the trial of causes he usually ran two sets of notes. Upon one he minuted questions or topics to be used in the cross-examination of witnesses, and upon the other he noted points or illustrations for his argument to the jury.

Neither cloquence nor argument is exclusively of the word spoken. The tones, the gestures, the emphasis, the accent, reveal the finer shades of meaning on the one side and enforce the argument on the other.

Therefore, we can institute no comparison between the orators that we have heard and the orators that we have not heard. In justice we can only compare with one another the orators that we have heard, and with one another the orators that we have not heard.

Mr. Choate was a student in the office of William Wirt, and for a year he was a listener to the arguments of William Pinckney in the Supreme Court of the United States. On those models he fashioned his career as an advocate, and on those models he so improved, I imagine, as, in the end, to defy rivalry and even comparison. But Mr. Choate's laurels were gathered in a field where there were many competitors both at the bar and upon the rostrum. His antagonists and competitors were Webster, Mason, Franklin Dexter, Hillard, Dana, Everett, Phillips, and, whether at the bar or upon the platform, he could have com

manded an audience at the expense of each and all of those gifted men.

To these I may add, out of my own personal experience, the names of Henry Clay, J. McPherson Berrien, Thomas Corwin, Abraham Lincoln, George Thompson, Louis Kossuth, as persons quite unequal to contest with Rufus Choate for supremacy in ability to interest, instruct, and control a popular assembly,

Of Mr. Choate it is to be said that his philosophy and his powers of imagination passed not beyond the relations of men to men, and of men to things. Hence, we shall seek in vain for idealistic passages in his speeches and writings. We shall find nothing that can be compared with Webster's great passage in his eulogy on Jefferson and Adams:

"A superior and commanding human intellect, when Heaven vouchsafes so rare a gift, is not a temporary flame burning brightly for a while and then expiring, giving place to returning darkness; it is rather a spark of fervent heat as well as a radiant light, with power to enkindle the common mass of human mind, so that when it glimmers in its own decay, and finally goes out in death, no night follows, but it leaves the world all light, all on fire, from the potent contact of its own spirit."

Nor any passage which can be compared to Buckle's tribute to men of thought and science :