not an eventful life; it was, indeed, the reverse. It was a life
passed in the constant and assiduous practice of the law. We do not
forget his brief term of service in the House of Representatives, and
his longer period in the Senate; but these were but episodes. They were
trusts reluctantly assumed and gladly laid aside; for he was one of
those exceptional Americans who have no love of political distinction
or public office. A lawyer's life leaves little to be recorded; the
triumphs of the bar are proverbially ephemeral, and lawyers themselves
are willing to forget the cases they have tried and the verdicts they
have won. Had Mr. Choate been merely and exclusively a lawyer, the story
of his life could have been told in half a dozen pages; but though
he was a great lawyer and advocate, he was something more: he was an
orator, a scholar, and a patriot. He had no taste for public life, as
we have just said; but he had the deepest interest in public subjects,
loved his country with a fervid love, had read much and thought much
upon questions of politics and government Busy as he always was in
his profession, his mind, discursive, sleepless, always thirsting for
knowledge, was never content to walk along the beaten highway of the
law, but was ever wandering into the flowery fields of poetry and
philosophy on the right hand and the left. These volumes show how
untiring was his industry, how various were his attainments, how
accurate was his knowledge, how healthy and catholic were his
intellectual tastes. The only thing for which he had no taste was
repose; the only thing which he could not do was to rest. When we see
what his manner of life was, how for so many years the nightly vigil
succeeded the daily toil, how the bow was always strung, how much he
studied and wrote outside of his profession, even while bearing the
burden and anxiety of an immense practice, we can only wonder that he
lived so long.

The whole of the second volume and a full half of the first are occupied
with Mr. Choate's own productions, mainly speeches and lectures. Many of
these have been published before, but some of them appear in print for
the first time. Mr. Choate's peculiar characteristics of style and
manner--his exuberance of language, his full flow of thought, his
redundancy of epithet, his long-drawn sentences, stretching on through
clause after clause before the orbit of his thought had begun to turn
and enter upon itself--are well known