He had too little political ambition to seek his own advancement. He never could have been a strictly party man. His interest in our politics was a patriotic interest in the country. While he recognized the necessity of two great parties, he despised the arts and intrigues of the politician. His modesty, sensibility, large views, and want of political ambition and partisan spirit prevented interest, as they would have precluded success in party management. Had he spent many years instead of a few in the national Senate, he never could have been a leader in its great party struggles. He had not the hardier personal and constitutional qualities of mind and character which lead and control deliberative bodies in great crises. He would not have had that statesmanlike prescience which in the case of Lord Chatham and others seems separable from great general scope of thought, and which one is tempted to call a faculty for government. But he must have been influential; for, besides being the most eloquent man in the Senate, his speeches would have been distinguished for amplitude and judgment in design, and for tact and persuasiveness in enforcement. They might not have had immediate and commanding effect, but they would have had permanent value. His speech upon the Ashburton Treaty indicates the powers he would have shown, with a longer training in the Senate. More than ten years had passed between that speech and his two speeches in the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, upon Representation and the Judiciary, and in that time a great maturing and solidifying work had been going on in his mind. Indeed, it was one sure test of his genius, that his intellect plainly grew to the day of his death. We would point to those two speeches as giving some adequate expression of his ability to treat large subjects simply, profoundly, artistically, and convincingly. Many of his earlier and some of his later speeches and addresses, though large in conception and stamped with unmistakable genius, want solid body of thought, and are, so to speak, too fluid in style. This obviously springs from the qualities of mind and from the circumstances we have indicated. In court, the necessities of his case and the determination and shaping of all his argument and persuasion to convincing twelve men, or a court only, on questions requiring prompt decision, kept his style free from everything foreign to his purpose. But, released from these restraints, and called upon for a treatment more general and comprehensive than acute and discriminating, his style often became inflamed and decorated with sensibility and fancy. His mind, moreover, was overtasked in his profession. His unremitting mental labor in the preparation and trial of so many cases was immense and exhausting. It shortened his life. That his genius might have that free and joyous exercise necessary to its full use and exhibition in literary or political directions, an