sense of the word.[1] It shows that he has read out-of-the-way books, like Bodinus "De Republicâ," and fresh ones, like Gladstone's Homer,—that he can do justice, with Spinoza, to Machiavelli,—and that in letters, at least, he has no narrow prejudices. Its sentences are full of scholarly allusion, and its language glitters continually with pattins of bright gold from Shakspeare. We abhor that profane vulgarity of our politics which denies to an antagonist the merits which are justly his, because he may have been blinded to the truth of our principles by the demerits which are justly ours,—which hates the man because it hates his creed, and, instead of grappling with his argument, seeks in the kitchen-drains of scandal for the material to bespatter his reputation. Let us say, then, honestly, what we honestly think,—the feeling, the mastery and choice of language, the intellectual comprehensiveness of glance, which can so order the many-columned 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.
His exordium over, Mr. Choate proceeds to define and to discuss Nationality. We heartily agree with him in all he says in its praise, and draw attention, in passing, to a charming idyllic passage in which he speaks of the early influences which first develope in us its germinal principle. But when he says, that the sentiment of a national life, once existing, must still be kept alive by an exercise of the reason and the will, we dissent. It must be a matter of instinct, or it is nothing. The examples of nationality which he cites are those of ancient Greece and modern Germany. Now we affirm, that, with accidental exceptions, nationality has always been a matter of race, and was eminently so in the instances he quotes. If we read rightly, the nationality which glows in the "Iliad," and which it was, perhaps, one object of the poem to rouse or to make coherent, is one of blood, not territory. The same is true of Germany, of Russia, (adding the element of a common religious creed,) and of France, where the Celtic sentiment becomes day by day more predominant. The exceptions are England and Switzerland, whose intense nationality is due to insulation, and Holland, which was morally an island, cut off as it
- ↑ We may be allowed to wonder, however, at his speaking of "memories that burn and revel in the pages of Herodotus,"—a phrase which does injustice to the simple and quiet style of the delightful Pepys of Antiquity.
