now the time to discuss Mr. Choate’s political preferences and opinions.  No one who knew him well can hesitate to pronounce his motives pure and patriotic.  We could not come to his conclusions on the policy and duty of our people at the last Presidential election.  Our duties to the Union forced us to regard as paramount what he regarded as subsidiary.  Our fear for the Union sprang from other sources than his.  But we believe he acted from the highest convictions of duty, and he certainly exposed himself with unflinching courage to obloquy and misinterpretation when silence would have been easy and safe.

In what we have said of him as a lawyer we are sure that in every essential respect we have not overstated or misstated his powers and characteristics as they were known and conceded by lawyers and judges in Massachusetts.  We have confined ourselves mainly to his jury-trials, because into them he threw the whole force and vitality of his nature, and because we could thus more completely indicate the variety of his accomplishments and the essential characteristics of his genius and individuality.  A knowledge of them is indispensable to a just estimate of the man, and it must die with him and his hearers, excepting only as it may be preserved by contemporaneous written criticism and judgment, and by indeterminate and shadowy tradition.

The labors of so great a lawyer are as much more useful as they are less conspicuous than those of any prominent politician or legislator, unless he be one of the very few who have high constructive or creative ability.  There is little risk of overestimating the value of a life devoted to mastering that complex system of jurisprudence, the old, ever-expanding, and ever-improving common law which is interwoven with our whole fabric of government, property, and personal rights, and to applying it profoundly through trial by jury and before courts of law, not merely that justice may be obtained for clients, but that decisions shall be made determining the rights and duties of men for generations to come.  And when such a life is not only full of immense work and achievement, but is penetrated and informed with genius, sensibility, and loving-kindness, it passes sweetly and untraceably, but influentially and immortally, into the life of the nation.

THE REGICIDE COLONELS IN NEW ENGLAND.

Before the restoration of Charles the Second, in 1660, to the throne of his ancestors, he had issued a “Declaration,” promising to all persons but such as should be excepted by Parliament a pardon of offences committed during the late disorderly times.  In the Parliamentary Act of Indemnity which followed, such as had been directly concerned in the death of the late King were excepted from mercy.  Colonel Whalley and Colonel Goffe were members of the High Court of Justice which convicted and sentenced him.  It was known that they had fled from England; and one Captain Breedon, lately returned from Boston, reported that he had seen them there.  The Ministry sent an order to Endicott, the Governor of Massachusetts, for their apprehension and transportation to England.