nt speaker in presidential campaigns, beginning with that of 1856.
He never held political office, although he was a candidate for the
Republican senatorial nomination against Senator Thomas C. Platt in
1897. In 1894 he was president of the New York state constitutional
convention. He was appointed, by President McKinley, ambassador to Great
Britain to succeed John Hay in 1899, and remained in this position until
the spring of 1905. In England he won great personal popularity, and
accomplished much in fostering the good relations of the two great
English-speaking powers. He was one of the representatives of the United
States at the second Peace Congress at the Hague in 1907.

Several of his notable public addresses have been published. _The
Choate Story Book_ (New York, 1903) contains a few of his addresses
and after-dinner speeches, and is prefaced by a brief biographical
sketch.

CHOATE, RUFUS (1799-1859), American lawyer and orator, was born at
Ipswich, Massachusetts, on the 1st of October 1799, the descendant of a
family which settled in Massachusetts in 1667. As a child he was
remarkably precocious; at six he is said to have been able to repeat
large parts of the Bible and of _Pilgrim's Progress_ by heart. He
graduated as valedictorian of his class at Dartmouth College in 1819,
was a tutor there in 1819-1820, spent a year in the law school of
Harvard University, and studied for a like period at Washington, in the
office of William Wirt, then attorney-general of the United States. He
was admitted to the Massachusetts bar in 1823 and practised at what was
later South Danvers (now Peabody) for five years, during which time he
served in the Massachusetts House of Representatives (1825-1826) and in
the state senate (1827). In 1828 he removed to Salem, where his
successful conduct of several important law-suits brought him
prominently into public notice. In 1830 he was elected to Congress as a
Whig from the Salem district, defeating the Jacksonian candidate for
re-election, B.W. Crowninshield (1772-1851), a former secretary of the
navy, and in 1832 he was re-elected. His career in Congress was marked
by a notable speech in defence of a protective tariff. In 1834, before
the completion of his second term, he resigned and established himself
in the practice of law in Boston. Already his fame as a speaker had
spread beyond New England, and he was much sought after as an orator for
public occasions. For severa