Charleston, where thirty years before a price had been set upon his head, among a throng of freedmen, "rending the air with their shouts " to see "the flag" re-hoisted on Fort Sumter. In 1879 he departed in peace, and entered into his inheritance. "No shadow of suspicion," writes Whittier, "rests upon the white statue of a life, the fitting garland of which should be the Alpine flower that symbolises noble purity."

As Garrison was the apostle of Abolitionism, so its orator was WENDELL PHILLIPS, a man of the highest birth and culture of New England, who with equal devotion surrendered his brilliant prospects at the bar and Senate to the advocacy of the cause to which from youth upwards he gave his splendid energies and eloquence. Of the latter we can only give a single instance-earliest in date, but characteristic of his manner and attitude throughout. In 1837, at a crowded. meeting, convened by Dr. Channing in Faneuil Hall, to express indignation at the murder of Lovejoy, Mr. Austin, the Attorney-General of the State, moved an amendment, in the course of which he justified the atrocity, and compared the mob of miscreants who had perpetrated it to that which had destroyed the tea in Boston harbour. Whereupon Phillips rose and said—

"Mr. Chairman-When I heard the gentleman lay down principles which placed the rioters, incendiaries, and murderers of Alton side by side with Otis and Hancock, with Quincy and Adams, I thought those pictured lips (pointing to the portraits in the hall) would have broken into voice to rebuke the recreant American, the slanderer of the dead. Sir, the gentleman said that he should sink into insignificance if he dared not gainsay the principles of the resolution before this meeting. Sir, for the sentiments he has uttered on soil consecrated by the prayers of Puritans and the blood of patriots, the earth should have yawned and swallowed him up."

Phillips has always been the leader of the extreme "gauche" of the party, and his fervour frequently led him beyond the limits prescribed by the substantial good sense of Garrison;

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but in distinct genius for speech he was their Coryphæus. Their politician, and nearly one of their martyrs, CHARLES SUMNER, had the same claims of scholarship and descent, with a native power little inferior. His earlier eloquence is best illustrated by some of his denunciations of war (v. especially his description of a sea-fight). Most of his life was spent in battle, its closing years in triumph, when, in high office, most honourably attained, he helped to weld together the Union under new conditions. This extensive learning and retentive memory enabled him to make a mass of facts converge on the conclusion of an argument, at once impassioned and apparently judicial. No better testimony can be given to the trenchant force of his eloquence than the dastardly assault made upon him (1856) in the Senate by Preston Brooks. The approval of this outrage in the South, with the contemporary events of the free fight for Kansas, made it plain that while constitutional disputes may be adjusted by civilised discussion, the only answer to organised rowdyism is at the cannon's mouth. We shall recur to the last phase of the struggle, in connection with the poetry it called forth. Pierce paved the way for the treachery of Buchanan, and that for the open revolt of the Mississippi repudiator. The North, with its twenty1 States and twenty millions, taken at a disadvantage, had to fight against the eleven States of the South, with six million 2 freemen, threeand-a-half million slaves, for three years before the Union was virtually saved at Gettysburg. The crisis passed, the question of the end was merely one of time, and the event gave rise to the few paragraphs of consummate natural

3

1 Kentucky and Maryland being set down as neutral, and Missouri as loyal.

2 These are roughly the numbers, allowing for the average increase on the census of 1860.

3 Gettysburg was the Metaurus of the war; though hope of foreign aid, and Lee's generalship, for two years more prolonged the desperate fight.

eloquence, in which the rail-splitter of Illinois, raised on the surge of a great moral and patriotic tide, recalled the address of Pericles over his Athenian dead, in terms with which we may close our record of the oratory of the West" It is for us, the living, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us; that from these honoured dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion; that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain; that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom; and that government of the people-by the people and for the people-shall not perish from the earth."

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CHAPTER V.

HISTORIANS-ROMANCE AND CRITICISM, 1800-1850.

IF the literary fame of the orator and statesman is transient, he has the compensation of having more or less permanently affected the destinies of the nation in which his personality is merged. He makes history: he is, equally with the soldier or philanthropist, a cause of the struggles, victories, and defeats of which others have to preserve the memory. Mere narrative is often almost contemporaneous with the event, and biographies are apt to follow too swiftly on the lives of great men. But these are mere preliminaries to a true History, which, as the result of the comprehensive reflection of an organising genius, makes as great a claim on the finest faculties and strongest energies of the mind as an epic poem does. It demands a knowledge of details rarely combined with the power to grasp a whole : it involves a perfect idea of the proportion of parts, keen analysis of character, broad synthesis of national movements on or beneath the surface, the impartial verdicts of a judge and the skill of an artist, the zeal of the moralist tempered by the sense of the politician, the sympathies of the antiquary with the past, almost the insight of the prophet into the future. Such histories are necessarily few. Greece, Rome, and England have each contributed but one that meets all the conditionsthe works respectively of Thucydides, Tacitus, and Gibbon.

They never come early in the literature of any country. Our Saxon, semi-Saxon, and Norman chronicles differ from the Fasti Consulares, or even the notched sticks of savage tribes, by the occasional infusion into their pages of a religious, patriotic, and pictorial element. They differ in accuracy or attractiveness: they agree in their lack of system, being for the most part bundles of facts or fictions thrown down for later ages to disentangle. Our sixteenth and seventeenth centuries abound in annals, memoirs, satirical and polemical contributions to history; but the power of massing together a long series of events in a harmonious whole, of enlisting the interest of the reader in their evolution and rendering their representation attractive by literary graces, can hardly be said to have been manifested before the eighteenth. Similarly in America, the Colonial time, and the first three decades of the Republic, abound in letters, journals, chronicles, biographies-some of great merit in themselves, others notable from association with distinguished names. Among those of the later period may be signalised J. Sanderson's Lives of the Signers, the historical Discourses and Addresses of G. C. Verplanck, Wirt's Patrick Henry, Parton's Franklin and Jefferson, the American Register of Brockden Brown, F. Cooper's History of the American Navy, The Life of Josiah Quincy by his son, The Life of John Adams by his grandson, Hamilton's Republic of the United States, Palfrey's New England, and the stupendous series edited and largely written by Jared Sparks. To these we should add Josiah Quincy's History of Harvard University, setting forth, in the following sentences (prefixed by the brothers Duyckinck to their indispensable Cyclopædia) what is one purpose of all, and the special claim of Transatlantic, biography :

'While passing down the series of succeeding years, as through the interior of some ancient temple, which displays on either hand the statues of distinguished friends and benefactors, we should stay for a moment in the presence of each, doing justice to the humble, illustrat