aisle of a period, that the eye, losing none of the crowded particulars, yet sees through all, at the vista's end, the gleaming figure of thought to enshrine which the costly fabric was reared,--all these qualities of the orator demand and receive our sincere applause. In an age when indolence or the study of French models has reduced our sentences to the economic curtness of telegraphic despatches, to the dimension of the epigram without its point, Mr. Choate is one of the few whose paragraphs echo with the long-resounding pace of Dryden's coursers, and who can drive a predicate and six without danger of an overset. Mr. Choate begins by congratulating his hearers that there comes one day in our year when "faults may be forgotten,-- ... when the arrogance of reform, the excesses of reform, the strife of parties, the rivalries of regions, shall give place to a wider, warmer, juster sentiment,--when, turning from the corners and dark places of offensiveness, ... we may go up together to the serene and secret mountain-top," etc. Had he kept to the path which he thus marked out for himself, we should have had nothing to say. But he goes out of his way to indulge a spleen unworthy of himself and the occasion, and brings against political opponents, sometimes directly, sometimes by innuendo, charges which, as displaying personal irritation, are impolitic and in bad taste. One fruit of scholarship, and its fairest, he does not seem to have plucked,--one proof of contented conviction in the truth of his opinions he does not give,--that indifference to contemporary clamor and hostile criticism, that magnanimous self-trust, which, assured of its own loyalty to present duty, can wait patiently for future justice.