which I now leave them as the last bequest of a dying friend.

Mr. Chairman, in the long and honored career of our lamented friend, there are efforts and triumphs which will hereafter fill one of the brightest pages of our history. But I greatly err if the closing scene the height of the religious sublime-does not, in the judgment of other days, far transcend in interest the brightest exploits of public life. Within that darkened chamber at Marshfield was witnessed a scene of which we shall not readily find the parallel. The serenity with which he stood in the presence of the king of terrors, without trepidation or flutter, for hours and days of expectation; the thoughtfulness for the public business, when the sands were so nearly run out; the hospitable care for the reception of the friends who came to Marshfield; that affectionate and solemn leave separately taken, name by name, of wife, and children, and kindred, and friends, and family, down to the humblest members of the household; the designation of the coming day, then near at hand, when "all that was mortal of Daniel Webster would cease to exist!" the dimly-recollected strains of the funeral poetry of Gray; the last faint flash of the soaring intellect; the feebly murmured words of Holy Writ repeated from the lips of the good physician, who, when all the resources of human art had been exhausted, had a drop of spiritual balm for the parting soul; the clasped hands; the dying prayers. Oh, my fellow-citizens, this is a consummation over which tears of pious sympathy will be shed ages after the glories of the forum and the Senate are forgotten.

"His sufferings ended with the day;

Yet lived he at its close,

And breathed the long, long night away
In statue-like repose.

"But ere the sun, in all his state,

Illumed the eastern skies,

He pass'd through glory's morning gate,
And walk'd in Paradise."

XV.

RUFUS CHOATE'S ADDRESS, DELIVERED BEFORE THE SUF FOLK BAR IN BOSTON, ON THE DEATH OF MR. WEBSTER.

MAY IT PLEASE YOUR HONOR: I have been requested by the members of the bar of this court to present certain resolutions in which they have embodied, as they were able, their sorrow for the death of their beloved and illustrious member and countryman, Mr. Webster; their estimation of his character, life, and genius; their sense of the bereavement-to the country as to his friends-incapable of repair; the pride, the fondness-the filial and patriotic pride and fondness-with which they cherish, and would consign to history to cherish, the memory of a great and good man.

And when I have presented these resolutions, my duty is done. He must have known Mr. Webster less and loved him less than your honor, or than I have known and loved him, who can quite yet-quite yet, before we can comprehend that we have lost him forever-before the first paleness with which the news of his death overspread our cheeks, has passed away; before we have been down to lay him in the Pilgrim soil he loved so well, till the heavens be no more he must have known and loved him less than we have done, who can come here quite yet, to recount the series of his service-to display with psychological exactness the traits of his nature and mind-to ponder and speculate on the secrets, on the marvellous secrets and sources of that vast power, which we shall see no more in action, nor aught in any degree resembling it, among men. These first moments should be given to grief. It may employ-it may promote a calmer mood to construct a more elaborate and less unworthy memorial.

For the purposes of this moment and place, indeed, no more is needed. What is there for this court or for this bar from me to learn, here and now of him? The year and the day of his birth; that birthplace on the frontier yet bleak and waste; the well of which his childhood drank -dug by that father of whom he said, "that through the

fire and blood of seven years' revolutionary war, he shrank from no danger, no toil, no sacrifice, to serve his country, and to raise his children to a condition better than his own' the elm-tree that father planted, fallen now, as father and son have fallen-that training of the giant infancy on Catechism and Bible, and Watts's version of the Psalms, and the traditions of Plymouth and Fort William and Mary, and the Revolution, and the age of Washington and Franklin; on the banks of the Merrimack, flowing sometimes in flood and anger, from his secret springs in the crystal hills; the two district schoolmasters, Chase and Tappan; the village-library; the dawning of the love and ambition of letters; the few months at Exeter and Boscawen; the life of college; the probationary season of schoolteaching; the clerkship in the Fryburg Registry of Deeds; his admission to the Bar, presided over by judges like Smith, illustrated by practitioners such as Mason, where by the studies, in the contentions of nine years he laid the foundation of the professional mind; his irresistible attraction to public life; the oration on commerce; the Rockingham resolutions; his first term of four years' service in Congress, when by one bound he sprang to his place by the side of the foremost of the rising American statesmen; his removal to this State; and then the double and parallel current in which his life, studies, thoughts, and cares, have since flowed, bearing him to the leadership of the Bar, by universal acclaim; bearing him to the leadership of public life-last of that surpassing triumvirate, shall we say the greatest, the most widely known and admired of all? These things, to their minutest details, are known and rehearsed familiarly. Happier than the younger Pliny, happier than Cicero, he has found his historian unsolicited, in his lifetime-and his countrymen have him all by heart.

There is, then, nothing to tell you; nothing to bring to mind. And then, if I may borrow the language of one of his historians and friends-one of those through whose beautiful pathos the common sorrow uttered itself yesterday, in Faneuil Hall-"I dare not come here, and dismiss in a few summary paragraphs the character of one who has filled such a space in the history-who holds such a place

in the heart of his country. It would be a disrespectful familiarity to a man of his lofty spirit, his great soul, his rich endowments, his long and honorable life, to endeavor thus to weigh and estimate them." A half-hour of words, a handful of earth, for fifty years of great deeds, on high places!

But although the time does not require any thing elaborated and adequate-forbids it rather-some broken sentences of veneration and love may be indulged to the sorrow which oppresses us.

There presents itself, on the first, to any observation of Mr. Webster's life and character, a twofold eminenceeminence of the very highest rank in a twofold field of intellectual public display-the profession of the law, and the profession of statesmanship-of which it would not be easy to recall any parallel in the biography of illustrious

men.

Without seeking for parallels, and without asserting that they do not exist, consider that he was by universal designation the leader of the general American Bar; and that he was also, by an equally universal designation, foremost of her statesmen living at his death-inferior to not one who has lived and acted since the opening of his own public life. Look at these aspects of his greatness separately,-and from opposite sides of the surpassing elevation, consider that his single career at the Bar may seem to have been enough to employ the largest faculties without repose-for a lifetime and that if then and thus the "infinitus forensium rerum labor" would have conducted him to a mere professional reward-a Bench of Chancery or Lawthe crown of the first of advocates-jurisperitorum elo-quentissimus to the pure and mere fame of a great magistrate that that would be as much as is allotted to the ablest in the distribution of fame. Even that half-if I may say so of his illustrious reputation-how long the labor to win it-how worthy of all that labor! He was bred first in the severest school of the common law-in which its doctrines were expounded by Smith, and its administration shaped and directed by Mason,-and its foundation principles, its historical sources and illustrations, its connection with the parallel series of statutory

enactments, its modes of reading, and the evidence of its truths, he grasped easily and completely: and I have myself heard him say, that for many years, while still at the bar, he tried more causes, and argued more questions of fact to the jury than perhaps any other member of the profession anywhere. I have heard from others, how even then he exemplified the same direct, clear, and forcible exhibition of proofs, and the reasonings appropriate to the proofs as well as the same marvellous power of discerning instantly what we call the decisive points of the cause in law and fact-by which he was later more widely celebrated. This was the first epoch in his professional training.

With the commencement of his public life, or with his later removal to this State, began the second epoch of his professional training-conducting him through the gradation of the national tribunals to the study and practice of the more flexible, elegant, and scientific jurisprudence of commerce and of chancery, and to the grander and less fettered investigation of international jurisprudence and constitutional law-and giving him to breathe the air of a more famous forum, in a more public presence, with more variety of competition; although he never met abler men, as I have heard him say, than some of those who initiated him in the rugged discipline of the courts of New Hampshire; and thus, at length, by these studies, these labors, this contention, continued without repose, he came, now many years ago, to stand, omnium consentu, at the summit of the American Bar.

It is common, and it is easy, in the case of all in such position, to point out other lawyers, here and there, as possessing some special qualification or attainment more remarkably, perhaps, because more exclusively; to say of one that he has more cases in his recollection at any given moment; or that he was earlier grounded in equity; or has gathered more black-letter, or civil law, or knowledge of Spanish or Western titles; and these comparisons were sometimes made with him. But when you sought a counsel of the first-rate for the great cause, who would most surely discern and most powerfully expound the exact law required for the controversy, in season for use; who could