Page:The World's Famous Orations Volume 9.djvu/163

RUFUS CHOATE husband, the brother, the father, the friend, and neighbor; that he was plain, simple, natural, generous, hospitable — the heart larger than the brain; that he loved little children and rever- enced God, the Scriptures, the Sabbath-day, the Constitution, and the law — and their hearts clave unto him. More truly of him than even of the great naval darling of England might it be said that *'his presence would set the church- bells ringing, and give schoolboys a holiday, — would bring children from school and old men from the chimney-comer, to gaze on him ere he died." The great and unavailing lamen- tations first revealed the deep place he had in the hearts of his countrymen. You are now to add to this his extraordinary power of influencing the convictions of others by speech, and you have completed the survey of the means of his greatness. And here, again, I begin, by admiring an aggregate made up of excellences and triumphs, ordinarily deemed in- compatible. He spoke with consummate ability to the bench, and yet exactly as, according to every sound canon of taste and ethics, the bench ought to be addressed. He spoke with consum- mate ability to the jury, and yet exactly as, according to every sound canon, that totally different tribunal ought to be addressed. In the halls of Congress, before the people assembled for political discussion in masses, before audiences smaller and more select, assembled for some sol- emn commemoration of the past or of the dead, 153