mastery and choice of language, the intellectual
comprehensiveness of glance, which can so order the many-columned
aisle of a period, that the eye, losing none of the crowded
particulars, yet sees through all, at the vista's end, the gleaming
figure of thought to enshrine which the costly fabric was reared,--all
these qualities of the orator demand and receive our sincere
applause. In an age when indolence or the study of French models has
reduced our sentences to the economic curtness of telegraphic
despatches, to the dimension of the epigram without its point,
Mr. Choate is one of the few whose paragraphs echo with the
long-resounding pace of Dryden's coursers, and who can drive a
predicate and six without danger of an overset.

Mr. Choate begins by congratulating his hearers that there comes one
day in our year when "faults may be forgotten,-- ... when the
arrogance of reform, the excesses of reform, the strife of parties,
the rivalries of regions, shall give place to a wider, warmer, juster
sentiment,--when, turning from the corners and dark places of
offensiveness, ... we may go up together to the serene and secret
mountain-top," etc. Had he kept to the path which he thus marked out
for himself, we should have had nothing to say. But he goes out of
his way to indulge a spleen unworthy of himself and the occasion, and
brings against political opponents, sometimes directly, sometimes by
innuendo, charges which, as displaying personal irritation, are
impolitic and in bad taste. One fruit of scholarship, and its fairest,
he does not seem to have plucked,--one proof of contented conviction
in the truth of his opinions he does not give,--that indifference to
contemporary clamor and hostile criticism, that magnanimous
self-trust, which, assured of its own loyalty to present duty, can
wait patiently for future justice.

His exordium over, Mr. Choate proceeds to define and to discuss
Nationality. We heartily agree with him in all he says in its praise,
and draw attention, in passing, to a charming idyllic passage in which
he speaks of the early influences which first develope in us its
germinal principle. But when he says, that the sentiment of a national
life, once existing, must still be kept alive by an exercise of the
reason and the will, we dissent. It must be a matter of instinct, or
it is nothing. The examples of nationality which he cites are those of
ancient Greece and modern Germany. Now we affirm, that, with