deesses of the college halls.  The trouble with most “uneducated” orators is, that they become enamored of these shining gods and goddesses, after they have lost, through repetition, all of their old power to give point or force to any good sentence of modern oratory.  During the times when, to be a speaker at Abolitionist meetings, the speaker ran the risk of being pelted with rotten eggs, I happened to be present, as one of a small antislavery audience, gathered in an equally small hall.  Among the speakers was an honest, strong-minded, warm-hearted young mechanic, who, as long as he was true to his theme, spoke earnestly, manfully, and well; but alas! he thought he could not close without calling in some god or goddess to give emphasis—­after the method of college students—­to his previous statements.  He selected, of course, that unfortunate phantom whom he called the Goddess of Liberty.  “Here, in Boston,” he thundered, “where she was cradled in Faneuil Hall, can it be that Liberty should be trampled under foot, when, after two generations have passed,—­yes, sir, have elapsed,—­she has grown—­yes, sir, I repeat it, has grown—­grown up, sir, into a great man?” The change in sex was, in this case, more violent than usual; but how many instances occur to everybody’s recollection, where that poor Goddess has been almost equally outraged, through a puerile ambition on the part of the orator to endow her with an exceptional distinction by senseless rhodomontade, manufactured by the word-machine which he presumes to call his imagination!  All imitative imagery is the grave of common-sense.

Now let us pass to an imagination which is, perhaps, the grandest in American oratory, but which was as perfectly natural as that of the “cold molasses,” or “God’s flat-iron,” of the New England farmer,—­as natural, indeed, as the “sky-blue, God’s color,” of the New England boy.  Daniel Webster, standing on the heights of Quebec at an early hour of a summer morning, heard the ordinary morning drum-beat which called the garrison to their duty.  Knowing that the British possessions belted the globe, the thought occurred to him that the morning drum would go on beating in some English post to the time when it would sound again in Quebec.  Afterwards, in a speech on President Jackson’s Protest, he dwelt on the fact that our Revolutionary forefathers engaged in a war with Great Britain on a strict question of principle, “while actual suffering was still afar off.”  How could he give most effect to this statement?  It would have been easy for him to have presented statistical tables, showing the wealth, population, and resources of England, followed by an enumeration of her colonies and military stations, all going to prove the enormous strength of the nation against which the United American colonies raised their improvised flag.  But the thought which had heretofore occurred to him at Quebec happily recurred to his mind the moment it was needed; and he flashed