times wrote the history of the Stuarts.  Wilberforce was a purer man, who acted more conscientiously and persistently within his smaller range of life and thought.  It would have been inconsistent with Mr. Choate’s nature for him to have been “wrong-headed” in any direction.  Such largeness of view, such dramatic and interpretative imagination, such volatile play of thought and fancy, and such perception of the pettiness and hollowness of nearly all the aims and ambitions of daily life we cannot expect to find coexisting with the coarser “blood-sympathies,” the direct passion, and the dogged and tenacious hold of temporary and smaller objects and issues, which distinguish the American politician, or with the narrowness of view, the zeal, and the moral persistency which characterize the practical reformer.  There was, therefore, in his nature a certain want of the sturdier, harder, and more robust elements of character, which, though commonly manifesting themselves in connection with self-assertion and partisan zeal, are indispensable to the man who, in any large and political way, would take hold of practical circumstances and work a purpose out of them.  We admire him for what he was.  We do not condemn him for the absence of qualities not allied to such delicacy and breadth of nature.  It is simply just to state the fact.

He had too little political ambition to seek his own advancement.  He never could have been a strictly party man.  His interest in our politics was a patriotic interest in the country.  While he recognized the necessity of two great parties, he despised the arts and intrigues of the politician.  His modesty, sensibility, large views, and want of political ambition and partisan spirit prevented interest, as they would have precluded success in party management.  Had he spent many years instead of a few in the national Senate, he never could have been a leader in its great party struggles.  He had not the hardier personal and constitutional qualities of mind and character which lead and control deliberative bodies in great crises.  He would not have had that statesmanlike prescience which in the case of Lord Chatham and others seems separable from great general scope of thought, and which one is tempted to call a faculty for government.  But he must have been influential; for, besides being the most eloquent man in the Senate, his speeches would have been distinguished for amplitude and judgment in design, and for tact and persuasiveness in enforcement.  They might not have had immediate and commanding effect, but they would have had permanent value.  His speech upon the Ashburton Treaty indicates the powers he would have shown, with a longer training in the Senate.  More than ten years had passed between that speech and his two speeches in the Massachusetts Constitutional Convention, upon Representation and the Judiciary, and in that time a great maturing and solidifying work had been going on in his mind.  Indeed, it was one sure test of his genius, that his