the Massachusetts Legislature; and in 1827 was in the Senate. He took a prominent part in the debates, and the energy and sagacity which he displayed gave him a wide reputation. În 1832 he was elected Member of Congress from the Essex district. He declined a re-election, and in 1834 removed to Boston, to devote himself to his profession. He soon took a position among the most eminent lawyers at the Suffolk Bar; and for seven years his legal services were in continual request. In 1841, on the retirement of Mr. Webster from the Senate, he was elected to fill his place by a large majority of the Massachusetts Legislature an honor which Massachusetts bestows on none but men of signal ability and integrity. Since Mr. Choate resigned his seat in the Senate, he has been more exclusively devoted to his profession than at any previous period of his life. The only public office he now holds is that of Regent of the Smithsonian Institute. To his efforts the country is principally indebted for the promising form which that institution has now assumed.

Mr. Choate's powers as a statesman are to be estimated chiefly by his course while a member of the United States Senate, especially, by his speeches on the Tariff, the Oregon Question, and the Annexation of Texas. These we consider among the ablest which were delivered during the agitation of those inflammable questions. Beneath an occasional wildness of style, there can easily be discerned the movement of a sagacious and penetrating intellect, well trained in dialectical science; capable of handling the most intricate questions arising under the Law of Nations and Constitutional law, keen to perceive the practical workings of systems of national policy; possessed of all the knowledge relating to the topics under discussion; fertile in arguments and illustrations, and directing large stores of information and eloquence to practical objects. In his speech, March 14, 1842, on the power and duty of Congress to continue the policy of protecting American labor, he presents a lucid and admirable argument to prove that Congress has the Constitutional power, "so to provide for the collection of the necessary revenues of Government, as to afford reasonable and adequate protection to the whole labor of the coun

try, agricultural, navigating, mechanical, and manufacturing, and ought to afford that protection;" and in the course of the argument he gives a review of the opinions current on the subject, about the period of the adoption of the Constitution. This displays an extensive acquaintance with the political history of the time, the result of original research. In this speech he declares the origin of the objection to the protective policy, based on the assumption of its unconstitutionality, to have arisen in "a subtle and sectional metaphysics;" and adds, in a short paragraph, well worthy to be pondered by all who are exposed to the fallacies springing up in the hot contests of party, that "it is one of the bad habits of politics, which grow up under written systems and limited systems of government, to denounce what we think impolitic and oppressive legislation as unconstitutional legislation. The language is at first rhetorically and metaphorically used; excited feeling, producing inaccurate thought, contributes to give it currency; classes of states and parties inweave it into their vocabulary, and it grows into an article of faith.”

The best and most characteristic of his speeches on the Tariff, however, is that delivered in the Senate on the 12th and 15th of April, 1844. It shows a most intimate acquaintance with the history of our legislation on the question; the subject is taken up in its principles and details, and exhibited in new lights-it glows with enthusiasm for the honor, glory, and advancement of the nation; and its illustrations, allusions, and arguments, have the raciness of individual peculiarity. The philosophy of the manufacturing system is given with great clearness in respect to principles, and at the same time is presented to the eye and heart in a series of vivid pictures. The problem, he says, which the lawgiver should propose to himself, is this"How can I procure that amount of revenue which an economical administration of government demands, in such manner as most impartially and most completely to develope and foster the universal industrial capacities of the country, of whose vast material interests I am honored with the charge?" should like to quote the whole of that passage, in which he enforces the importance of manufactures, on the ground that they give the laborer the choice between many occupations, and do not abso

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lutely confine him to one or two. country," he says, "of few occupations, employments go down by an arbitrary, hereditary, coercive designation, without regard to peculiarities of individual character. But a diversified, advanced, and refined mechanical and manufacturing industry, co-operating with those other numerous employments of civilization which always surround it, offers the widest choice, detects the slightest shade of individuality; quickens into existence and trains to perfection the largest conceivable amount and utmost possible variety of national mind." He proceeds to illustrate this idea by supposing a family of five sons, who, in some communities, would all be compelled to follow one occupation, as fishermen, or farmers, or servants. He then sketches the history of four of these sons, in a community where the diversified employments of civilization give scope to the ruling passion of each. The allusion to the fifth boy is as honorable to the statesman as the poet." In the flashing eye, beneath the pale and beaming brow of that other one, you detect the solitary first thoughts of genius. There are the sea-shore of storm or calm, the waning moon, the stripes of summer evening cloud, traditions, and all the food of the soul, for him. And so all the boys are provided for. Every fragment of mind is gathered up. The hazel rod, with unfailing potency, points out, separates, and gives to sight every grain of gold in the water and in the sand. Every taste, every faculty, every peculiarity of mental power, finds its task, does it, and is made the better for it."

We should like to refer, at some length, to Mr. Choate's speech on the bill to provide further remedial justice in the courts of the United States, delivered in the Senate, May, 1842. It is one of the most ingenious, learned and vehement of his speeches; is replete with logical passion-rapid, animated, high-tonedat one moment transfixing an objection with one of those radiant shafts which speed from the mind only in periods of excited reasoning, at another overthrow ing an antagonist proposition by a series of quick, trampling interrogatories, by which argument is gifted almost with muscular power. There is one passage, illustrating the idea that the condition of national existence is to be under the obligations of the law of nations, from which we quote a characteristic sentence

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The closing passage of the speech is even more passionately imaginative: The aspect," he says, "which our United America turns upon foreign nations, the aspect which our Constitution designs she shall turn upon them, the guardian of our honor, the guardian of our peace, is, after all, her grandest and her fairest aspect. We have a right to be proud when we look on that. Happy and free empress mother of States themselves free! unagitated by the passions, unmoved by the dissensions, of any one of them, she watches the rights and fame of all; and reposing, secure and serene, among the mountain summits of her freedom, she holds in one hand the fair olive branch of peace, and in the other the thunderbolt of reluctant and rightful war. There may she sit forever; the stars of union upon her brow, the rock of independence beneath her feet!" This image has the splendor and energy of one of Burke's, with a slight touch, perhaps, of Mr. Jefferson Brick. The shock it may give to the finer filaments of taste, is owing to the ridicule which has been cast on the sentiment of national exaggeration, through the nonsense and bombast of fifth-rate declaimers. In this connection we may as well allude to Mr. Choate's sympathy with those general feelings of patriotism, as they are felt, not by tasteful students, but by great bodies of people. Though one of the first classical scholars in New England, and a diligent student of the great productions of English genius and taste, he is still exceedingly open to impressions from the common mind and heart, and has none of that daintiness, which, in the man of letters, contemptuously tosses aside all sentiment, expression, and imagery which Mr. Prettyman and Miss Betty may choose to consider vulgar and ungenteel. The greatest English statesmen have always addressed these com

mon sentiments of large classes of the people--have often spoken in their speeches as Dibdin wrote in his songs and have been indebted for a great deal of their influence to passages, which wrinkle with scorn the lips of elegant scholars and contributors to the Reviews.

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The speech delivered by Mr. Choate on March 21, 1844, on the Oregon Question, in reply to Mr. Buchanan, is dotted all over with splendid sentences: the general course of the argument is well sustained and happily enforced; and there is a joyous spring in the style, even in its occasional inflation, which seems to indicate that most of it was produced extempore, without any more preparation than the facts and arguments demanded. It is an exceedingly spirited and brilliant speech, but has the inequalities of merit common to purely extemporaneous productions, in which argument is diversified by personal matters of reply and retort. The tone of most of the speech is that of excited conversation, with the customary exaggeration both of passion and wit, common in colloquial disputes. The invective, provoked by a remark that the American people cherish a feeling of deep-rooted hatred to Great Britain, is perhaps the intensest passage in the production. "No, sir," he indignantly ob. serves, we are above all this. Let the Highland clansman, half naked, half civilized, half blinded by the peat-smoke of his cavern, have his hereditary enemy and his hereditary enmity, and keep the keen, deep, and precious hatred, set on fire of hell, alive if he can; let the North American Indian have his, and hand it down from father to son, by Heaven knows what symbols of alligators, and rattle-snakes, and war-clubs smeared with vermillion and entwined with scarlet; let such a country as Poland, cloven to the earth, the armed heel on the radiant forehead, her body dead, her soul incapable to die-let her remember the wrongs of days long past; let the lost and wandering tribes of Israel remember theirs the manliness and the sympathy of the world may allow or pardon this to them but shall America, young, free, and prosperous, just setting out on the highway of heaven, 'decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she just begins to move in, glittering like the morning star, full of life and joy-shall she be supposed to be polluting and corroding her noble and happy heart, by moping over old stories of stamp-act, and tea-tax,

and the firing of the Leopard on the Chesapeake, in time of peace? No, sir; no, sir; a thousand times no! * * * * * We are born to happier feelings. We look on England as we look on France. We look on them from our new world, not unrenowned, yet a new world still; and the blood mounts to our cheeks, our eyes swim, our voices are stifled with the consciousness of so much glory; their trophies will not let us sleep, but there is no hatred at all-no hatred; all for honor, nothing for hate! We have, we can have, no barbarian memory of wrongs, for which brave men have made the last expiation to the brave."

We have not by us the great speech of Mr. Choate, on the annexation of Texas, but we remember being impressed at the time with its strength and felicity; and the position taken in it regarding the consequences of the measure, have been realized almost to the letter.

He was one of the most ardent opponents of annexation, and both in the Senate and in addresses to the people, made his resistance felt. In what we have said regarding his other speeches, we have not, of course, done justice to their merit as arguments, or stated the wide variety of topics and principles they discussed. We have merely, in our quotations, given prominence to a few sentences, which illustrate the essential solidity and correctness of his views of national policy, amid all the exaggeration and ornament of their expression. It is one of his peculiarities, and a very striking one, that he combines a conservative intellect, with a radical sensibility; and those irregular impulses of fancy and passion, which usually push men into the adoption of reckless, desperate and destructive principles of legislation, he employs in the service of the calmest, most comprehensive, and most practical political wisdom, rooted deep in reason and experience. His fire seems to be of that kind which sweeps, in a devouring flame, to blast and desolate what is established and accredited; but it really is that fierce heat, which infuses energy and breathing life into maxims and principles, which are in danger of becoming ineffective, from their usual disconnection with the sensibility and imagination. He is a kind of Mirabeau-Peele.

In what we have now to say in regard to Mr. Choate's mind and character, we shall have to consider him chiefly as a lawyer and advocate, and only incident