The great cloud that fell upon his life seemed also to darken the country. The grief and consternation showed how strong a hold he had upon the national mind and heart, which indeed was never so firm as at the very moment that his good name seemed to be obscured. It was the most tremendous ordeal to which any public man of his peculiar character and quality of eminence has ever been exposed in this country. The most remarkable fact in it all was the way in which he endured it. The blacker the cloud appeared to be, the more sturdy was his stern defiance, and for weeks of seemingly accumulating and insurmountable obstruction he faced unflinchingly a possible doom the mere prospect of which might well have withered a brave heart conscious of innocence. That the cloud ever wholly disappeared cannot be said, in view of the tone of the press even as he lay dead in his house. But that he could never have maintained his position as he did if he had not been generally acquitted in the public mind seems to be indisputable. If the relation of his later life to the country was somewhat changed, the result was due to the decline of confidence in what had been believed to be his strongest quality, supreme good sense and sound judgment, rather than to doubt of his moral integrity. No man lived more in the public eye and for the public than Mr. Beecher. In his speeches and sermons and writings he took the public into his confidence with a freedom that was characteristic and natural in him, but which would have been extraordinary in any other man. He could not pass through the street without universal recognition, and no man in the two cities was so well known to everybody as he. At public meetings and at dinners where he was to speak, he came late amid smiling and expectant applause, and with the air of saying, "Where MacGregor sits, there is the head of the table." He had the right to that air, for wherever he was to speak he was the chief orator. But he was no niggard of generous praise and sympathy, and no man spoke with more fervent eulogy and eloquent approval of other men. Doubtless, like an actor or singer, the long habit of receiving applause had made it pleasant to him, and as is the fact with all extempore speaking, the greater the applause the higher the eloquence of his strain. It is a reciprocal action. Of Mr. Beecher's later platform speeches, the most remarkable was his political address at the Brooklyn Rink in 1884, which was delivered amid a storm of enthusiasm, while in the delivery he was himself wrought to the highest feeling.