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as most unjustly compared him to a monkey in convulsions. His bowings down and straightening himself again were spoken of by another critic, not unfriendly, as opening and shutting like a jack-knife. His curly black hairs seemed each to have a separate life of its own. His eyes shone like coals of fire. There is a passage of Everett's which well describes Choate, and is also one of the very best examples of Everett, who, with all his fertility of original genius, borrowed so much, and so enriched and improved everything that he borrowed. Cicero said of Antonius:

"Omnia veniebant Antonio in mentem; eaque suo quæque loco, ubi plurimum proficere et valere possent, ut ab imperatore equites pedites levis armatura, sic ab illo in maxume oportunis orationis partibus conlocabantur."

Now see what Everett does with this thought in his eulogy, spoken in Fanueil Hall, the week after Choate's death:

"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 majestic thought; then it is that we hear afar off the awful roar of his rifled ordnance; and when he has stormed the heights, and broken the centre, 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."

One of the most remarkable advocates of my day was Sidney Bartlett. He seldom addressed juries, and almost never public assemblies. He was a partner of Chief Justice Shaw before 1830. He argued cases before the Supreme Court of the United States and before the Supreme Court of Massachusetts after he was ninety. He cared for no other audience. He had a marvellous compactness of speech, and a marvellous sagacity in seeing the turning-point of a great question.

He found the place where the roads diverged, got the court's face set in the right direction, and then stopped. He would argue in ten or fifteen minutes a point where some powerful antagonist like Curtis or Choate would take hours to reply. I once told him that his method of argument was to that of ordinary lawyers like logarithms to ordinary mathematics. He seemed pleased with the compliment, and said, "Yes, I know I argue over their heads. The Chief Justice told me he wished I would talk a little longer." I do not know that Bartlett ought to be reckoned among orators. But he had a great power of convincing, and giving intellectual delight to minds capable of appreciating his profound and inexorable logic.

Edward Everett seems to me, on the whole, our best example of the orator, pure and simple. Webster was a great statesman, a great lawyer, a great advocate, a great public teacher. To all these his matchless oratory was but an instrument and incident.

Choate was a great winner of cases, and as relaxation he gave, in the brief vacations of an overworked professional life (he once defined a lawyer's vacation as the time after he has put a question to a witness while he is waiting for an answer), a few wonderful literary and historical addresses. He gave a brief period of brilliant but most unwilling service in each House of Congress. He made some powerful political speeches to popular audiences. But his heart was always in the court-house. No gambler ever hankered for the feverish delight of the gaming table as Choate did for that absorbing game, half chance, half skill, where twelve human dice must all turn up together one way, or there is no victory.

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men the foremost American orator in is introduced. He comes forward quietly

one class.

There is one function of the orator peculiar to our country, and almost wholly unknown elsewhere. That is the giving utterance to the emotion of the people, whether of joy or sorrow, on the occasions when its soul is deeply stirred-when some great man dies, or there is a great victory or defeat, or some notable anniversary is celebrated. This office was filled by other men, on some few occasions by Daniel Webster himself, but by no man better than by Everett. A town, or city, or state is very human. In sorrow it must utter its cry of pain; in victory, its note of triumph. As events pass, it must pronounce its judgment. Its constant purpose must be fixed and made more steadfast by expression. It must give voice to its love and its approbation and its condemnation. It must register the high and low water mark of its tide, its rising and its sinking in heat and cold. This office Edward Everett, for nearly fifty years, performed for Massachusetts and for the whole country. In his orations are preserved and recorded everything of the emotion of the great hours of our people's history. The camera of his delicate photography has preserved for future generations what passed in the soul of his own in the times that tried the souls of men.

I do not know where he got his exquisite elocution. He went abroad in his youth, and there were good trainers abroad, then. He must have studied thoroughly the speeches of Cicero and the Greek orators. Many casual phrases in his works, besides many quotations, show his familiarity with Cicero's writings on oratory.

If you would get some faint, far-off conception of him, first look at the best bust or picture of Everett you can find. Imagine the figure with its every movement gentle and graceful. The head and face are suggestive of Greek sculpture. This person sits on the platform with every expression discharged from the face, looking like a plaster image when the artist has just begun his model, before any character or intelligence has been put into it. You think him the only person in the audience who takes no interest whatever in what is going on, and certainly that he expects to have nothing to do with it himself. He

and gracefully. There is a slight smile of recognition of the welcoming applause. The opening sentences are spoken in a soft-I had almost said, a caressing voice, though 'still a little cold. I suppose it would be called a tenor voice. There was nothing in the least unmanly about Edward Everett. Yet if some woman had spoken in the same tones, you would have not thought them unwomanly.

Illa tanquam cycnea fuit divini hominis vox et oratio.

He has found somewhere in the vast storehouse of his knowledge a transaction exactly like the present, or exactly in contrast with it, or some sentiment of poet or orator which just fits the present occasion. If it be new to his audience, he adds to it a newer delight still by his matchless skill as a narrator-a skill almost the rarest of all talents among public speakers. If it be commonplace and hackneyed he makes it fresh and pleasant by giving in detail the circumstances when it was first uttered, or describes some occasion when some orator has applied it before; or calls attention to its very triteness as giving it added authority. If he wish to express his agreement with the last speaker and "say ditto to Mr. Burke," he tells you when that was said, what was the occasion, and gives you the name of Mr. Kruger, who stood for the representation of Bristol with Burke.

Mr. Everett's stores were inexhaustible. If any speaker have to get ready in a hurry for a great occasion, let him look through the index of the four volumes of Everett's speeches, and he will find matter enough, not only to stimulate his own thought and set its currents running, but to illustrate and adorn what he will say.

But pretty soon the orator rises into a higher plane. Some lofty sentiment, some stirring incident, some patriotic emotion, some play of fancy or wit comes from the brain or heart of the speaker. The audience is hushed to silence. Perhaps a little mist begins to gather in their eyes. There is now an accent of emotion in the voice, though still soft and gentle. The Greek statue begins to move. There is life in the limbs.

There has been a lamp kindled

somewhere behind the clear and trans

parent blue eyes. The flexible muscles of

the face have come to life now. Still there is no jar or disorder. The touch upon the nerves of the audience is like that of a gentle nurse. The atmosphere is that of a May morning. There is no perfume but that of roses and lilies. But still, gently at first, the warmer feelings are kindled in the hearts of the speaker and The frame of the speaker is transfigured. The trembling hands are lifted high in air. The rich, sweet voice fills the vast audience-chamber with its resonant tones. At last, the bugle, the trumpet, the imperial clarion rings out full and clear, and the vast audience is transported as to another world-I had almost said as to a seventh heaven. Read the welcome to Lafayette or the close of the matchless eulogy on that illustrious object of the people's love. Read the Read the close of the oration on Washington. Read the contrast of Washington and Marlborough. Read the beautiful passage where, just before the ocean cable was laid, the rich fancy of the speaker describes

"The thoughts that we think up here on the earth's surface in the cheerful light of day-clothing themselves with elemental sparks, and shooting with fiery speed in a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, from hemisphere to hemisphere, far down among the uncouth monsters that wallow in the nether seas, along the wreck-paved floor, through the oozy dungeons of the rayless deep; the last intelligence of the crops, whose dancing tassels will in a few months be coquetting with the west wind on those boundless prairies, flashing along the slimy decks of old

sunken galleons, which have been rotting for ages; messages of friendship and love, from warm, living bosoms burn over the cold green bones of men and women, whose hearts, once as fond as ours, burst as the eternal gulfs closed and roared over them, centuries ago." Read the passage in the eulogy on Choate where he describes him arming himself in the entire panoply of his gorgeous rhetoric-and you will get some far-away conception of the power of this magician.

One thing especially distinguishes our modern orator from the writer in the closet, where he writes solely for his readers, or where he has prepared his speeches beforehand—that is, the influence of the audience upon him. There is nothing like it as a stimulant to every faculty, not only imagination, and zeal, and reason, but especially, as every experienced speaker knows, memory also. Everything needed seems to come out from the secret storehouses of the mind, even the things that have lain there forgotten, rusting and unused. Mr. Everett describes this in a masterly passage in his "Life of Webster." Gladstone states it in a few fine sentences:

"The work of the orator, from its very inception," he says, "is inextricably mixed up with practice. It is cast in the mould offered to him by the mind of his hearers. It is an influence principally received from his audience (so to speak) in vapor, which he pours back upon them in a flood. The sympathy and concurrence of his time is, with his own mind, joint parent of his work. He cannot follow nor frame ideals; his choice is to be what his age would have him, what it requires in order to be moved by him, or else not to be at all. "

TAHITI

By John La Farge

ILLUSTRATIONS FROM SKETCHES BY THE AUTHOR

February 12, 1891. HEN we rose in the early morning our ship had already passed the reef, and we were in the harbor of Papeete. There was the usual enchantment of the land, a light blue sky and a light blue sea; an air that felt cooler than that of Samoa, whatever the thermometer might say; and when we had landed, a funny little town, stretched along the beach, under many trees. From under their shade the outside blue was still more wonderful, and at the edge, where the blue of sky and sea came together opposite us, the island of Moorea, all mountain, peaked and engrailed like some far distance of Titian's landscapes, seemed swimming in the blue.

Near the quay, neatly edged with stone steps, ships lay only a few rods off in the deep water, or their yards touching the branches of the great trees. Farther out, on a French man-of-war, the bugle marked the passing duty of the hour. But everything else was lazy, except the little horses driven by the Kanakas. Natives moved easily about, no longer with the stride of the Samoans, which throws out the knees and feet, as if it were for the stage. People were lighter built, more effacé; but there were pretty faces, many evidently those of half-breeds.

White men were there with the same contrasting look of fierceness and inquisitiveness marked in their faces, which now that we see less of them, looks beaky and eager in contrast with the brown types that fill the larger part of our sight and acquaintance.

We were kindly received by the persons for whom we had introductions, and set about through various more or less shady streets marked French-wise on the corners: Rue des Beaux-Arts, Rue de la Cathédrale, etc.; first to a little restaurant, where I heard, in an adjacent room,“ Buvons,

amis, buvons!" and the noise of fencing; then to hire furniture and buy household needs for the housekeeping we proposed to set up that very day, for there are no hotels. The evening was ended at the "Cercle," where we played dominoes, to remind ourselves that we were in some outlying attachment of provincial France. By the next morning we were settled in a little cottage on the beach that is shaded all along by trees; we had engaged a cook, and Awoki was putting all to rights. As we walk back into the town there are French walls and yellow stuccoed houses for government purposes. A few officers in white and soldiers pass along.

A few scattered French ladies pass under the trees; so far as we can tell (for we have been long away) dressed in some correct French fashion, looking not at all incongruous, because already we feel that this is dreamland—that anybody in any guise is natural here, except a few Europeans, who meet the place half-way, and belong neither to where they came from, nor to the unreality of the place they are in. There is no noise; the street is the beach; the trappings of the artillery horses and the scabbards of the sabres rattle in a profound silence so great that I can distinctly count the pulsations of the water running from the fountain near us into the sea. The shapes and finish of the government buildings, their long spaces of enclosure, the moss upon them, remind us of the sleepiest towns of outof-the-way bits of France.

The natives slip over the dust in bare feet, the waving draperies of the long gown of the women seeming to add to the stealthy or undulating movement which carries them along. Many draw up under the arm some corner of this long, nightgowny dress that it may not trail, or let their arms swing loosely to the rhythm of their passing by.

Most of the native men wear loose

jackets, sometimes shirts, above the great loin-cloth which hangs down from the waist, and which is the same as the lavalava of the Samoans, the sulu of the Fijians, and is here called the pareu.

Many of the women have garlands round their necks and flowers behind their ears. Occasionally we hear sounds of singing that come back to us from some cross-street, and as I have ventured to look, I see, in a little enclosure, some women seated, and one standing before them making the gestures, perhaps of a dance; and, I grieve to say, looking as if all had begun their latest evening very early in the day. But this I have noticed from sheer inquisitiveness. I feel that in another hour or so I shall not care to look for anything, but shall sit quietly and let everything pass like the turn of a revolving panorama. In this state of mind, which represents the idleness of arrival, we meet at our Consul's an agreeable young gentleman belonging to a family well known to us by name—the Branders, a family that represents, though mixed with European-the best blood of the islanders. They speak French and English with the various accents and manners that belong to those divisions of European society; they are well connected over in Scotland. Do you remember the Branders of "Lorna Doone"? At home their ancestry goes back full forty generations. They are young and pleasant, and we forget how old we are in comparison. We call on their mother later, a charming woman, and on an aunt, Mrs. Atwater, who has a similar charm of manner, accent, and expression; and on another aunt, the ex-Queen Marau, but she is away with her younger sister Manihinini.

In the evening, with some remnant of energy, we walk still farther than our house upon the beach, passing over the same roads that Stoddard wearily trod in his "South Sea Idylls." We try to find, by the little river that ends our walk, on this side of the old French fort, the calaboose where Melville was shut up. There is no one to help us in our search; no one remembers anything. Buildings occupy the spaces of woodland that Melville saw about him. Nothing remains but the same charm of light and air which he, like all others, has tried to describe and to bring back home

in words. But the beach is still as beautiful as if composed for Claude Lorrain. Great trees stand up within a few feet of the tideless sea. Where the shallows run in at times, canoes with outriggers are pulled up. People sit near the water's edge, on the grass. Outside of all the shade, we see the island of Moorea, farther out than the far line of the reef, no longer blue, but glowing like a rose in the beginning of the twilight.

At night we hear girls passing before our little garden; we see them swinging together, with arms about the flowers of their necks. They sing-alas! not always soberly, and the wind brings the odor of the gardenias that cover their necks and heads.

In the night the silence becomes still greater around us, though we hear, at a distance, the music of the band that plays in the square, which is the last amusement left to this dreary, deserted village called a town. In the square, which is surrounded by many trees, through which one passes to hidden official buildings, native musicians play European music, apparently accommodated to their own ideas, but all in excellent time, so that one just realizes that somehow or other these airs must have been certain well-known ones. nothing matters very much.

But

A few visitors walk about; native women sit in rows on the ground, apparently to sell flowers, which they have before them. People of distinction make visits to a few carriages, drawn up under the trees. Occasionally, in the shadows, or before the lights, in an uncertain manner, natives begin to dance to the accompaniment of the band. But it is all listless, apparently, at least to the sight, and just as drowsy as the day.

In the very early morning we drive to the end of the bay at Point Venus, to see the stones placed by Wilkes and subsequent French navigators, in order to test the growth of the coral outside. And we make a call on a retired French naval officer, who has been about here more or less, since 1843, the time of Melville. We drive at first through back roads of no special character. We pass through a great avenue of trees, over-arching, the pride of the town; we cross a river-torrent, and the end of our road brings us along the

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