nvited his
hearers to a Stoic feast of Medford crackers and water, to a
philosophic banquet of metaphors and metaphysics.

We confess that we expected a great deal. Better a crust with Plato
than nightingales' tongues with Apicius; and if Mr. Choate promised
only the crust, we were sure of one melodious tongue, at least, before
the meal was over. He is a man of whom any community might be
proud. Were society an organized thing here, as in Europe, no dinner
and no drawing-room would be perfect without his talk. He would have
been heard gladly at Johnson's club. The Hortensins of our courts,
with a cloud of clients, he yet finds time to be a scholar and a
critic, and to read Plato and Homer as they were read by Plato's and
Homer's countrymen. Unsurpassed in that eloquence which, if it does
not convince, intoxicates a jury, he was counted, so long as Webster
lived, the second advocate of our bar.

All this we concede to Mr. Choate with unreserved admiration; but
when, leaving the field where he had won his spurs as the successful
defender of men criminally accused, he undertakes to demonstrate the
sources whence national life is drawn, and the causes which lead to
its decay,--to expound authoritatively the theory of political ethics
and the principles of sagacious statesmanship, wary in its steps, and
therefore durable in its results,--it becomes natural and fair to ask,
What has been the special training that has fitted him for the task?
More than this: when he comes forward as the public prosecutor of the
Republican Party, it becomes our duty to examine the force of his
arguments and the soundness of his logic. Has his own experience given
him any right to talk superciliously to a great party overwhelmingly
triumphant in the Free States? And does his oration show him to
possess such qualities of mind, such grasp of reason, such continuity
of induction, as to entitle him to underrate the intelligence of so
large a number of his fellow-citizens by accusing them of being
incapable of a generalization and incompetent to apprehend a
principle?

The Bar has given few historically-great statesmen to the
world,--fewer than the Church, which Mr. Choate undervalues in a
sentence which, we cannot help thinking, is below the dignity of the
occasion, and jarringly discordant with the generally elevated tone of
his address. Burke, an authority whom Mr. Choate will not call in
question, has said that the training of the bar tends t