e Edward Everett, for
nearly fifty years, performed for Massachusetts and for the
whole country. In his orations is preserved and recorded
everything of the emotion of the great hours of our people's
history. The camera of his delicate photography has preserved
for future generations what passed in the soul of his own
in the times that tried the souls of men.

I do not know where he got his exquisite elocution. He went
abroad in his youth, and there were good trainers abroad,
then. He must have studied thoroughly the speeches of Cicero
and the Greek orators. Many casual phrases in his works,
besides many quotations, show his familiarity with Cicero's
writing on oratory.

If you would get some faint, far-off conception of him, first
look at the best bust or picture of Everett you can find.
Imagine the figure with its every movement gentle and graceful.
The head and face are suggestive of Greek sculpture. This
person sits on the platform with every expression discharged
from the face, looking like a plaster image when the artist
has just begun his model, before any character or intelligence
has been put into it. You think him the only person in the
audience who takes no interest whatever in what is going on,
and certainly that he expects to have nothing to do with it
himself. He is introduced. He comes forward quietly and
gracefully. There is a slight smile of recognition of the
welcoming applause. The opening sentences are spoken in a
soft--I had almost said, a caressing voice, though still a
little cold. I suppose it would be called a tenor voice.
There was nothing in the least unmanly about Edward Everett.
Yet if some woman had spoken in the same tones, you would
have not thought them unwomanly.

Illa tamquam cycnea fuit divini hominis vox et oratio.

He has found somewhere in the vast storehouse of his knowledge
a transaction exactly like the present, or exactly in contrast
with it, or some sentiment of poet or orator which just fits
the present occasion. If it be new to his audience, he adds
to it a newer delight still by his matchless skill as a narrator--
a skill almost the rarest of all talents among public speakers.
If it be commonplace and hackneyed he makes it fresh and pleasant
by giving in detail the circumstances when it was first uttered,
or describes some occasion when some orator has applied it
before; or calls attention to its very triteness as giving
it added authority. If he wi