pendence, the majestic eloquence of Chatham, the profound reasoning of Burke, the burning satire and irony of Barré, had influence on our fortunes in America? They tended to diminish the confidence of the British ministry in their hopes to subject us. There was not a reading man who did not struggle more boldly for his rights when those exhilarating sounds, uttered in the two houses of Parliament, reached him across the seas." To the effects wrought by “the fulminating eloquence" of the first of these great orators, history has borne abundant testimony. The arbiter of the destinies of his own country, he was also the foremost man in all the world. His august mind overawed majesty. . . . Without dividing, he destroyed party; without corrupting, he made a venal age unanimous; France sunk beneath him; with one hand he smote the House of Bourbon, and wielded in the other the democracy of England."

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We are told that when Mirabeau arose in the National Assembly, and delivered one of those fiery speeches which, in their union of reason and passion, so remind us of Demosthenes, he trod the tribune with the supreme authority of a master, and the imperial air of a king. As he proceeded with his harangue, his frame dilated; his face was wrinkled and contorted; he roared, he stamped; his hair whitened with foam; his whole system was seized with an electric irritability, and writhed as under an almost preternatural agitation. The effect of his eloquence, which was of the grandest and most impressive kind, abounding in bold images, striking metaphors, and sudden natural bursts, the creation of the moment, was greatly increased by his "hideously magnificent aspect," the massive frame, the features full of pock-holes and

the calumny. The House which for two hours before seemed about to yield to the great agitator, was now almost ready to tear him to pieces. In the midst of the storm which his eloquence had raised, he (Lord Stanley) sat down, having achieved one of the greatest triumphs of eloquence ever won in a popular assembly by the powers of oratory."

In our own country the triumphs of eloquence have been hardly less marked than those of the Old World... In the night of tyranny the eloquence of the country first. blazed up, like the lighted signal-fires of a distracted border, to startle and enlighten the community. Everywhere, as the news of some fresh invasion of liberty and right was borne on the wings of the wind, men ran together and called upon some earnest citizen to address them. The eloquence of that period was not the mere ebullition of feeling; it was the enthusiasm of reason; it was judgment raised into transport, and breathing the irresistible ardors of sympathy.

"

When in 1761 James Otis, in a Boston popular assembly, denounced the British Writs of Assistance, his hearers were hurried away resistlessly on the torrent of his impetuous speech. When he had concluded, every man, we are told, of the vast audience went away resolved to take up arms against the illegality. When Patrick Henry pleaded the tobacco case "against the parsons in 1758, it is said that the people might have been seen in every part of the house, on the benches, in the aisles, and in the windows, hushed in death-like stillness, and bending eagerly forward to catch the magic tones of the speaker. The jury were so bewildered as to lose sight of the legislative enactments on which the plaintiffs relied; the court lost the

equipoise of its judgment, and refused a new trial; and the people, who could scarcely keep their hands off their champion after he had closed his harangue, no sooner saw that he was victorious, than they seized him at the bar, and, in spite of his own efforts, and the continued cry of "Order!" from the sheriff and the court, bore him out of the court-house, and, raising him on their shoulders, carried him about the yard in a kind of electioneering triumph. When the same great orator concluded his wellknown speech in March, 1775, in behalf of American independence, no murmur of applause followed," says his biographer; "the effect was too deep. After the trance of a moment, several members of the Assembly started from their seats. The cry, To arms! seemed to quiver on every lip and glance from every eye."-Mr. Jefferson, who drew up the Declaration of Independence, declares that John Adams, its ablest advocate on the floor of Congress, poured forth his passionate appeals in language "which moved his hearers from their seats."

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There are few school-boys who are not familiar with the famous passage in the great speech of Fisher Ames on the British Treaty, in which he depicts the horrors of the border war with the Indians, which would result from its rejection. Even when we read these glowing periods to-day in cold blood, without the tremulous and thrilling accents of the dying statesman, that made them so impressive, we feel the "fine frenzy" of the speaker in every line. An old man, a judge in Maine, who heard the burning words of Ames, declared that as he closed with the climax, "The darkness of midnight will glitter with the blaze of your dwellings. You are a father, the blood of your sons shall fatten your corn-field: you are a mother,

the war-whoop shall wake the sleep of the cradle," the prophecy seemed for a moment a reality. "I shuddered. and looked a little behind me; for I fancied a big Indian with an uplifted tomahawk over me."

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William Wirt, himself an orator, tells us that when the Blind Preacher of Virginia" drew a picture of the trial, crucifixion, and death of our Savior, there was such force and pathos in the description that the original scene appeared to be, at that moment, acting before the hearers' eyes. "We saw the very faces of the Jews: the staring, frightful distortions of malice and rage. We saw the buffet; my soul kindled with a flame of indignation; and my hands were involuntarily and convulsively clinched." But when, with faltering voice, he came to touch on the patience, the forgiving meekness of the Savior, his prayer for pardon of his enemies, "the effect was inconceivable. The whole house resounded with the mingled groans, and sobs, and shrieks of the congregation."

The accounts given of the effects wrought by some of Daniel Webster's speeches, seem almost incredible to those who never have listened to his clarion-like voice and weighty words. Yet even now, as we read some of the stirring passages in his early discourses, we can hardly realize that we are not standing by as he strangles the reluctantes dracones of an adversary, or actually looking upon the scenes in American history which he so vividly describes. Prof. Ticknor, speaking in one of his letters of the intense excitement with which he listened to Webster's Plymouth Address, says: "Three or four times I thought my temples would burst with the gush of blood; for, after all, you must know that I am aware it is no connected and compacted whole, but a collection of won

derful fragments of burning eloquence, to which his manner gave tenfold force. When I came out, I was almost afraid to come near to him. It seemed to me that he was like the mount that might not be touched, and that burned with fire."

As it was the eloquence of Hamilton, spoken and written, which, in no small degree, established our political system, so it was the eloquence of Webster that mainly defended and saved it:

"Duo fulmina belli, Scipiadas, cladem Libya."

When the Federal Constitution, the product of so much sacrifice and toil, was menaced by the Nullifiers of South Carolina, it was the great orator of Massachusetts that sprang to its rescue. As the champion of New England closed the memorable peroration of his reply to Hayne, the silence of death rested upon the crowded Senate Chamber. Hands remained clasped, faces fixed and rigid, and eyes tearful, while the sharp rap of the President's hammer could hardly awaken the audience from the trance into which the orator had thrown them. When, again, over thirty years later, Nullification once more raised its front, and stood forth armed for a long and desperate conflict, it was the ignited logic of the same Defender of the Constitution,—the burning and enthusiastic appeals for "Liberty and Union, now and forever, one and inseparable,”—which, still echoing in the memories of the people, roused them as by a bugle-blast to resistance. It was because Webster, when living, had indoctrinated the whole North with his views of the structure of our government, that, when his bones lay mouldering at Marshfield, the whole North was ready to