o make the
faculties acute, but at the same time narrow. The study of
jurisprudence may, no doubt, enlarge the intellect; but the habit of
mind induced by an indiscriminate advocacy--which may be summoned to
the defence of a Sidney to-day and of a spoon-thief to-morrow--is
rather that of the sophist than of the philosophic reasoner. Not
truth, but the questionable victory of the moment, becomes naturally
and inevitably the aim and end of all the pleader's faculties. For
him the question is not what principle, but what interest of John Doe,
may be at stake. Such has been Mr. Choate's school as a reasoner. As
a politician, his experience has been limited. The member of a party
which rarely succeeded in winning, and never in long retaining, the
suffrages of the country, he for a time occupied a seat in the Senate,
but without justifying the expectations of his friends. So far, his
history shows nothing that can give him the right to assume so high
and mighty a tone in speaking of his political opponents.

But in his scholarship he has a claim to be heard, and to be heard
respectfully. Here lies his real strength, and hence is derived the
inspiration of his better eloquence. The scholar enjoys more than the
privilege, without the curse, of the Wandering Jew. He can tread the
windy plain of Troy, he can listen to Demosthenes, can follow Dante
through Paradise, can await the rising of the curtain for the first
acting of Hamlet. Mr. Choate's oration shows that he has drawn that
full breath which is, perhaps, possible only under a Grecian sky, and
it is, in its better parts, scholarly in the best sense of the
word.[1] It shows that he has read out-of-the-way books, like Bodinus
"De Republica," and fresh ones, like Gladstone's Homer,--that he can
do justice, with Spinoza, to Machiavelli,--and that in letters, at
least, he has no narrow prejudices. Its sentences are full of
scholarly allusion, and its language glitters continually with pattins
of bright gold from Shakspeare. We abhor that profane vulgarity of our
politics which denies to an antagonist the merits which are justly
his, because he may have been blinded to the truth of our principles
by the demerits which are justly ours,--which hates the man because it
hates his creed, and, instead of grappling with his argument, seeks in
the kitchen-drains of scandal for the material to bespatter his
reputation. Let us say, then, honestly, what we honestly think,--the
feeling, the