dward Everett in his happiest efforts. He was vehement in gesture, like
Brougham and Mirabeau. He was intensely earnest and impressive, like
Savonarola. He had exceeding tact, and was master of the passions of his
audience. There was an irresistible music in his tones of voice, like
that of St. Bernard when he fanned crusades. He was withering in his
denunciations, like Wendell Phillips, whom in person he somewhat
resembled. He was a fascination like Pericles, and the people could not
long spare him from the excitement he produced. It was their desire to
hear him speak which had no small share in producing his recall from
banishment. They crowded around him as the people did around Chrysostom
in Antioch. He amused like an actor, and instructed like a sage. His
sentences are not short, terse, epigrammatic, and direct, but elaborate
and artificial. Yet with all his arts of eloquence his soul, fired with
great sentiments, rose in its inspired fervor above even the melody of
voice, the rhythm of language, and the vehemence of action. A listener,
who was not a critic, might fancy it was gesture, voice, and language
combined; but, after all, it was the _man_ communicating his soul to
those who hung upon his lips, and securing conviction by his sincerity
and appeals to conscience. He must have had a natural gift for oratory,
aside from his learning and accomplishments and rhetorical arts,--a
talent very rare and approaching to creative genius. But to his natural
gifts--like Luther, or Henry Clay, born an orator--he added marvellous
attainments. He had a most retentive memory. He was versed in the whole
history of the world. He was always ready with apt illustrations, which
gave interest and finish to his discourses. He was the most industrious
and studious man of his age. His attainments were prodigious. He was
master of all the knowledge then known, like Gladstone of our day. He
was not so learned a man as Varro; but Varro's works have perished, as
the great monuments of German scholars are perhaps destined to perish,
for lack of style. Cicero's style embalmed his thoughts and made them
imperishable. No writer is immortal who is not an artist; Cicero was a
consummate artist, and studied the arrangement of sentences, like the
historian Tacitus and the Grecian Thucydides.

But greater than as an artist was he in the loftiness of his mind. He
appealed to what is noblest in the soul. Transcendent eloquence ever
"raises mortals to