Henry Ward Beecher was a great man—one of the greatest and most remarkable men of his day. His personality was so large, his gifts so varied, his mental and moral composition so multiform, that a volume would be needed to give a complete character sketch of the man. We can only attempt within the limits of this article to bring out the two main elements of his character that seem to have inspired Mr. Ward’s conception of his subject. On the one hand is the positive, almost militant expression that typifies Beecher’s fearless championship of the oppressed; on the other his universal sympathy, his unselfish kindliness, and his especial love for children, betokened by the figures beside the pedestal. His heart was as great as his brain. He was intensely human. Artificiality he hated, and dissembling and deception he could not understand. He was sometimes called a great actor, but sincerity was his very breath of life. “Some men,” he once said, “are like live springs that bubble and flow perpetually, while others are like pumps—one must work the handle for all the water he gets.” And rare indeed are such live springs of imagination and eloquence, of intellect and of affection, as that which welled in Beecher’s own heart. “He was quite as likely,” says one of his biographers, “to burst out into splendid eloquence amid a small group of chatting friends, or even to a single listener, as before a vast audience. One would as soon suspect the Atlantic of holding back a particularly grand roll of surf at Long Branch until people should come down to see it, as to imagine Mr. Beecher keeping a fine thought or a striking figure till he had an audience.” Or again, as Oliver Wendell Holmes says in his essay on Beecher’s English speeches: “He has the simple frankness of a man who feels himself to be perfectly sound in bodily, mental, and moral structure; and his self revelation is a thousand times nobler than the assumed impersonality which is a common trick with cunning speakers who never forget their own interests. Thus it is that wherever Mr. Beecher goes, everybody feels, after he has addressed them once or twice, that they know him well, almost as if they had always known him; and there is not a man in the land who has such a multitude who look upon him as their brother.”