of mind and
character which lead and control deliberative bodies in great crises.
He would not have had that statesmanlike prescience which in the case
of Lord Chatham and others seems separable from great general scope
of thought, and which one is tempted to call a faculty for
government. But he must have been influential; for, besides being the
most eloquent man in the Senate, his speeches would have been
distinguished for amplitude and judgment in design, and for tact and
persuasiveness in enforcement. They might not have had immediate and
commanding effect, but they would have had permanent value. His
speech upon the Ashburton Treaty indicates the powers he would have
shown, with a longer training in the Senate. More than ten years had
passed between that speech and his two speeches in the Massachusetts
Constitutional Convention, upon Representation and the Judiciary, and
in that time a great maturing and solidifying work had been going on
in his mind. Indeed, it was one sure test of his genius, that his
intellect plainly grew to the day of his death. We would point to
those two speeches as giving some adequate expression of his ability
to treat large subjects simply, profoundly, artistically, and
convincingly. Many of his earlier and some of his later speeches and
addresses, though large in conception and stamped with unmistakable
genius, want solid body of thought, and are, so to speak, too fluid
in style. This obviously springs from the qualities of mind and from
the circumstances we have indicated. In court, the necessities of his
case and the determination and shaping of all his argument and
persuasion to convincing twelve men, or a court only, on questions
requiring prompt decision, kept his style free from everything
foreign to his purpose. But, released from these restraints, and
called upon for a treatment more general and comprehensive than acute
and discriminating, his style often became inflamed and decorated
with sensibility and fancy. His mind, moreover, was overtasked in his
profession. His unremitting mental labor in the preparation and trial
of so many cases was immense and exhausting. It shortened his life.
That his genius might have that free and joyous exercise necessary to
its full use and exhibition in literary or political directions, an
abandonment of a great part of his professional duties was
indispensable. This was to him neither possible nor desirable. The
mental heat and pressure, there