ntured to mention self-respect as one of
them, and commented upon the invitation of a Virginia Senator, the
author of the Fugitive Slave Bill, to a Seventeenth-of-June
Celebration, while the Senators of Massachusetts were neglected. In
speaking of this, he used, we believe, the word "flunkeyism." It is
not an elegant word; it is not even an English one;--but had the
speaker sought for a Saxon correlative, he could hardly have found one
that would have seemed more satisfactory, especially to those who
deserved it; for Saxon is straightforward, and a reluctance to be
classified (fatal to science) is characteristic of the human animal.

An orator who suggests a new view of any topic is a disturber of the
digestive organs,--this was very properly a matter of offence to the
Aldermen who were to dine after the oration,--but an orator who
tampers with the language we have inherited from Shakspeare and
Milton, and which we share with Tupper, was an object for deeper
reprobation. The Young Men's Democratic Association of Boston are
purists; they are jealous for their mother-tongue,--and it is the more
disinterested in them as a large proportion of them are Irishmen; they
are exclusive,--a generous confusion of ideas as to the meaning of
democracy, even more characteristically Hibernian; they are
sentimental, too,--melancholy as gibcats,--and feared (from last
year's example) that the city might not furnish them with a
sufficiently lachrymose Antony to hold up before them the bloody
garment of America, and show what rents the envious Blairs and Wilsons
and Douglasses had made in it. Accordingly they resolved to have a
public celebration all to themselves,--a pocket-edition of the
cumbrous civic work,--and as the city provided fireworks in the
evening, in order to be beforehand with it in their pyrotechnics, they
gave Mr. Choate in the forenoon.

We did not hear Mr. Choate's oration; we only read it in the
newspapers. Cold fireworks, the morning after, are not enlivening.
You have the form without the fire, and the stick without the soar.
But we soon found that we were to expect no such disappointment from
Mr. Choate. He seems to announce at the outset that he has closed his
laboratory. The Prospero of periods had broken his wand and sunk his
book deeper than ever office-hunter sounded. The boys in the street
might wander fancy-free, and fire their Chinese crackers as they
listed; but for him this was a solemn occasion, and he i