Since Richard Coeur de Leon forgave Bertram de Gordon, who caused his death, there has never been a more magnanimous man than Charles Sumner. Once when L. Maria Child was anathematizing Preston S. Brooks in his presence, he said: "You should not blame him. It was slavery and not Brooks that struck me. If Brooks had been born and brought up in New England, he would no more have done the thing he did than Caleb Cushing would have done it,"--Cushing always being his type of a pro-slavery Yankee. In 1871 Charles W. Slack, the editor of the Boston _Commonwealth_, for whom Sumner had obtained a lucrative office, turned against his benefactor in order to save his position. When I spoke of this to Sumner, he said: "Well, it is human nature. Slack is growing old, and if he keeps his office for the next six years, he will have a competency. I have no doubt he feels grateful to me, and regrets the course he is taking." At the same time, he spoke sadly. Sumner resembled Lord Chatham more closely than any statesman of the nineteenth century. He carried his measures through by pure force of argument and clearness of foresight. From 1854 to 1874 it was his policy that prevailed in the councils of the nation. He succeeded where others failed. He defeated Franklin Pierce, Seward, Trumbull, Andrew Johnson, Hamilton Fish, and even Lincoln, on the extradition of Mason and Slidell. He tied Johnson down, so that he could only move his tongue. In considering Sumner's oratory, we should bear in mind what Coleridge said to Allston, the painter,--"never judge a work of art by its defects." His sentences have not the classic purity of Webster's, and his delivery lacked the ease and elegance of Phillips and Everett. His style was often too florid and his Latin quotations, though excellent in themselves, were not suited to the taste of his audiences. But Sumner was always strong and effective, and that is, after all, the main point. Like Webster he possessed a logical mind, and the profound earnestness of his nature gave an equally profound conviction to his words. Besides this, Sumner possessed the heroic element, as Patrick Henry and James Otis possessed it. After Webster's death there was no American speaker who could hold an audience like him. Matthew Arnold, in his better days, said that Burke's oratory was too rich and overloaded. This is true, but it is equally true that Burke is the only orator of the eighteenth century that still continues to be read. He had a faulty delivery and an ungainly figure, but if he emptied the benches in the House of Commons he secured a larger audience in coming generations. The material of his speeches is of such a vital quality that it possesses a value wholly apart from the time and occasion of its delivery.