During and after the war she lectured in regular courses, and became so popular that only Gough and Beecher rivalled her as a lyceum favorite; but it was on war topics that she was heard at her best. Then, in pleading for the Union, she spoke and looked like one inspired, and never failed to thrill and enthrall her audiences. In vituperation and denunciation she had no rival among living orators. In politics she had a “level head.” The power of her arguments was surpassed only by the force of her anathemas. This great woman had a passion for the stage, and after having established a just claim to be regarded as one of the greatest actors in a true sense in her country’s history, she yearned to win the reputation of a great player on the mimic stage. Of course she failed. The stern and stalwart personality, the imperious individuality that made her a great factor in the history of her day, disqualified her for excellency on the stage, and not even her most devoted friends could conceal or deny the fact that she was a dead failure. “With all her skill as an orator, and with all her ability as a writer, Anna Dickinson broke down utterly when she attempted to win Thespian laurels. [Illustration: MARY A. LIVERMORE] Mrs. Livermore, still a favorite in her seventy-ninth year, is the most successful woman on the platform I have known. Interested actively in her husband’s pastoral and editorial work as a leading Universalist minister, Mrs. Livermore was one of the first American women to fill a pulpit or occupy an editorial position. She had given her public “testimony” against chattel slavery before her marriage, upon her return home from Virginia, where, in the early forties, she had been occupied as a governess. Her career as a lecturer, however, fairly began with the closing years of the Kansas strife and the first election of Abraham Lincoln. Indeed, I first saw Mary A. Livermore among the reporters in the Wigwam in Chicago in 1860, when Abraham Lincoln was first nominated for President. At that time she was the busiest woman in the Northwest, editing her husband’s paper, carrying on a regular correspondence for other journals, writing books and magazine articles, managing hospitals and homes, while advancing an extended temperance agitation. Withal her home was always attended to. The civil war found the largest of place for this great-brained woman. At the request of President Henry W. Bellows of the United States Sanitary Commission, she, with her friend, Miss Jane O. Hoge of Chicago, became associates in the Northwest and co-operated in all the vast labors of both sanitary and Christian commissions. Soon after being placed in charge of the Northwestern branch of the United States Sanitary and Christian Commission, she, with a few other women, went to Washington to talk with President Lincoln. “Can no woman go to the front?” Mrs Livermore asked.