ver the surface of the whole
globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drum-beat,
following the sun and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth
with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of
England." The secret of this kind of oratory has been lost. The
present generation distrusts rhetorical ornament and likes something
swifter, simpler, and more familiar in its speakers. But every thing,
in declamation of this sort, depends on the way in which it is done.
Webster did it supremely well; a smaller man would merely have made
buncombe of it.

Among the legal orators of the time the foremost was Rufus Choate, an
eloquent pleader, and, like Webster, a United States senator from
Massachusetts. Some of his speeches, though excessively rhetorical,
have literary quality, and are nearly as effective in print as
Webster's own. Another Massachusetts orator, Edward Everett, who in
his time was successively professor in Harvard College, Unitarian
minister in Boston, editor of the _North American Review_, member of
both houses of Congress, minister to England, governor of his State,
and President of Harvard, was a speaker of great finish and elegance.
His addresses were mainly of the memorial and anniversary kind, and
were rather lectures and Phi. B. K. prolusions than speeches. Everett
was an instance of careful culture bestowed on a soil of no very great
natural richness. It is doubtful whether his classical orations on
Washington, the Republic, Bunker Hill Monument, and kindred themes,
have enough of the breath of life in them to preserve them much longer
in recollection.

New England, during these years, did not take that leading part in the
purely literary development of the country which it afterward assumed.
It had no names to match against those of Irving and Cooper. Drake and
Halleck--slender as was their performance in point of quantity--were
better poets than the Boston bards, Charles Sprague, whose _Shakespeare
Ode_, delivered at the Boston theater in 1833, was locally famous; and
Richard Henry Dana, whose longish narrative poem, the _Buccaneer_,
1827, once had admirers. But Boston has at no time been without a
serious intellectual life of its own, nor without a circle of highly
educated men of literary pursuits, even in default of great geniuses.
The _North American Review_, established in 1815, though it has been
wittily described as "ponderously revolving through