His oratory was massive, and sometimes even ponderous.  It may be questioned whether an American orator of to-day, with intellectual abilities equal to Webster’s—­if such a one there were—­would permit himself the use of sonorous and elaborate pictures like the famous period which follows:  “On this question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they raised their flag against a power to which, for purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome, in the height of her glory, is not to be compared—­a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts, whose morning drum-beat, following the sun and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England.”  The secret of this kind of oratory has been lost.  The present generation distrusts rhetorical ornament and likes something swifter, simpler, and more familiar in its speakers.  But every thing, in declamation of this sort, depends on the way in which it is done.  Webster did it supremely well; a smaller man would merely have made buncombe of it.

Among the legal orators of the time the foremost was Rufus Choate, an eloquent pleader, and, like Webster, a United States senator from Massachusetts.  Some of his speeches, though excessively rhetorical, have literary quality, and are nearly as effective in print as Webster’s own.  Another Massachusetts orator, Edward Everett, who in his time was successively professor in Harvard College, Unitarian minister in Boston, editor of the North American Review, member of both houses of Congress, minister to England, governor of his State, and President of Harvard, was a speaker of great finish and elegance.  His addresses were mainly of the memorial and anniversary kind, and were rather lectures and Phi.  B. K. prolusions than speeches.  Everett was an instance of careful culture bestowed on a soil of no very great natural richness.  It is doubtful whether his classical orations on Washington, the Republic, Bunker Hill Monument, and kindred themes, have enough of the breath of life in them to preserve them much longer in recollection.

New England, during these years, did not take that leading part in the purely literary development of the country which it afterward assumed.  It had no names to match against those of Irving and Cooper.  Drake and Halleck—­slender as was their performance in point of quantity—­were better poets than the Boston bards, Charles Sprague, whose Shakespeare Ode, delivered at the Boston theater in 1833, was locally famous; and Richard Henry Dana, whose longish narrative poem, the Buccaneer, 1827, once had admirers.  But Boston has at no time been without a serious intellectual life of its own, nor without a circle of highly educated men of literary pursuits, even in default of great geniuses.  The North American Review, established in 1815, though it has been wittily described as “ponderously