And yet one is half ashamed to praise his gifts, so superbly does he himself cast those gifts behind him. He is not trying to be eloquent: he is trying to get a grand piece of justice done in the world. No engineer building a bridge, no ship-master in a storm at sea, was ever more simply intent on substantive results. It is not any "Oration for the Crown" that he stands here pronouncing: it is service, not distinction, at which he aims, and he will be crowned only in the gladness of a redeemed race. The story of his life is a tale of romance; he makes real the legends of chivalry. He might have sat at meat with Arthur and the knights of the Round Table, and looked with equal unabashed eyes into theirs; and a thousand years hence, some skeptic, reading the history of these days, will smile a light disdain, and say, "Very well for fiction; but _real_ men are selfish beings, and serve themselves always to the sweetest and biggest loaf they can find." We praise his gifts and his nobility, not always his opinions. He was once the apostle of a doctrine of disunion; he fervently believes in enforcing "total abstinence" by statute; he is the strenuous advocate of woman-suffrage. We have stood by the Union always; we have some faith in pure wine, notwithstanding the Maine Law; and believing that women have a right to vote, we believe also that they have a higher right to be excused from voting. We are unwilling to consume their delicate fitnesses in this rude labor. It is not economical. We do not believe in using silk for ships' top-sails, or China porcelain for wash-tubs. There are tasks for American women--tasks, we mean, of a social and public, not alone of a domestic nature--which only women _can_ rightly perform, while their accomplishment was never more needed than here. Mr. Phillips is no "faultless painter." He is given to snap-judgments. The minor element of _considerateness_ should be more liberally present. He forgets that fast driving is not suitable to crowded streets; and through the densest thoroughfares the hoofs of his flying charger go ringing over the pavements, to the alarm of many and the damage of some. Softly, Bucephalus! A little gentle ambling through these social complications might sometimes be well. Again, while he has the utmost of moral stability and constancy, and also great firmness of intellectual adhesion to main principles, there is in him a certain minor changefulness. He pours out a powerful light, but it flickers. Momentary partialities sway him,--to be balanced, indeed, by subsequent partialities, for his broad nature will not be permanently one-sided; but meantime his authority suffers. Mood, occasion, the latest event, govern overmuch the color of his statement; so that an unsympathetic auditor--and every partiality, by the law of the world, must push _some one_ out of the ring of sympathy--may honestly deem him unfair, even wilfully unfair.