times almost blends with, the exercise of his imagination; but it is still to be distinguished from its nobler companion. By imagination he apparently exaggerates a thing through the intensity which he conceives it; by fancy, he really magnifies it by comparison with larger objects. From the manner in which these two powers of his mind play into each other's processes, and also from his frequent practice of overtopping an imagination with a fanciful decoration, the charge of exaggeration against his eloquence has its foundation. The phrase "clothed upon," which is often applied to the operations of imagination, is more properly applicable to those of fancy; and in Mr. Choate's productions, the shining garment of comparison, which he has placed upon his vital thought, may easily be disconnected from it, and leave the original idea, grasped and modified by imagination, in its own intense and living beauty. Even if the fancy, as is sometimes the case with him, grows out of the imagination, it can be severed from it without striking at the life of its parent,- as we can lop the luxuriant foliage from a tree without injuring its root and trunk. The truth is, that, in respect to ornament, fancy is more effective than imagination, because it is more readily apprehended; and Mr. Choate's real poetic power has generally suffered most from the praises of such as have been captivated by his swollen comparisons and flaring illustrations. Mr. Choate has a peculiar kind of mirth in his composition, and also that readiness which commonly accompanies ludicrous perception; but his wit is rather witty fancy, and his humor, humorous imagination. He has a kind of playful sympathy with the ludicrous side of things, and is often exceedingly felicitous in its expres sion. Such is his grotesque image, in his speech on the Oregon question, of the Legislature putting its head out of the window, and, in a voice audible all over the world, speaking to the negotiators of the impending treaty, bid ding them God-speed, but insinuating that if they did not give up the whole subject in dispute, it would be settled by main strength. But perhaps his best passage in this way is his picture of a New England summer, introduced in his second speech on the tariff, to illuŝtrate the idea that irregularity is not ruin. "Take the New England climate in summer; you would think the world was coming to an end. Certain recent heresies on that subject may have had a natural origin there. Cold today; hot to-morrow; mercury at 80° in the morning, with wind at south-west; and in three hours more a sea-turn, wind at east, a thick fog from the very bottom of the ocean, and a fall of forty degrees of Fahrenheit; now so dry as to kill all the beans in New Hampshire; then floods carrying off the bridges of the Penobscot and Connecticut; snow in Portsmouth, in July; and the next day a man and a yoke of oxen killed by lightning in Rhode Island. You would think the world was twenty times coming to an end! But I don't know how it is: we go along; the early and the latter rain falls, each in its season; seed-time and harvest do not fail; the sixty days of hot corn weather are pretty sure to be measured out to us. The Indian Summer, with its bland south-west, and mitigated sunshine, brings all up; and on the twenty-fifth of November, or thereabouts, being Thursday, three millions of grateful people, in meeting-houses, or around the family board, give thanks for a year of health, plenty, and happiness." The reader of Mr. Choate's speeches will readily call to mind many sentences in which the serious and the ludicrous shake hands as cordially, and with as little detriment to each other, as in the preceding extract. This peculiar sportiveness, which Mr. Choate can command at pleasure, is an element in the general impression conveyed by his genius, and it makes the character complete. Will, understanding, imagination, passion, fancy, humor, subtlety in the perception of distinctions, subtlety in the perception of resemblances, sympathy with the ideal, and sympathy with the familiar; these, both in their separate exercise, and their subtle interpenetration, are resources which he commands and blends at will. In this play and interchange of imagination and humor, in this union of the high with the common, there is established in his mind a kind of fellowship with the things he describes and the persons he addresses. Through this he contrives, in his legal arguments, to lift the familiar into the ideal, by the strength of his conception of both; and when his materials are at all tractable, he can achieve the task without suggesting the ludicrous. When they are not, he does it by pure force and determination. He discerns, instinctively, the unconscious poetry in characters and actions which are prosaic to the common eye; and he does not, perhaps, so often superadd as evolve. His arguments have often the artistical effect of a romantic poem, even when they are most firmly based on law and evidence. His client is the hero of the narrative; and spectators, if not juries, always desire that the hero of Mr. Choate's epic argument may not come to an end "by edge of penny cord and vile reproach." The im mense fertility of his mind, in possibilities and plausibilities, enables him to account for every action on other principles than those which are obvious; and the warm blood never glows and rushes through his sentences with more intensity than when he is giving to the secondary the prominence and life of the primitive. There is a constant appeal, in his arguments, to generous sentiment, an implied assumption that men will always act honestly and without prejudice, that a jury will as heartily pronounce in favor of his client, as the reader of a romance in favor of persecuted virtue. And, for the time, the orator himself is earnest and sincere. By force of sympathy, he has identified himself with his client, and realized everything to his own mind. if his own character or life was at stake. ·sitions, possibilities, drawn into his own imagination, are vitalized into realities, and he sees them as living things, He pleads as He sees them as Dante saw Farinata rise from his glowing tomb, as Shakspeare saw Cordelia bending over Lear. And while thus giving breathing life to characters and events, he does not overlook a single particle of evidence, or neglect to urge a single point of law, which bears upon the case. Indeed, a legal argument, as conceived and delivered by Mr. Choate, has the merit of combining an influence upon the will and understanding, with an artistical effect upon the imagination. makes no parade of logic; the skeleton is not always forcing itself through the flesh, as in the arguments of men of dryer brains and less skill; yet he ranges his case with consummate art around its great leading points, to which he binds, in the strictest sequence, and with a masterly power of concentration, every fact and every argument. His fancy leads him into no illogical discursions, but plays like heat-lightning along the lines of his argument, while his imagination, interpenetrating and working with his logic, at once condenses and creates. It is needless to say that his arguments cannot be reported. In a newspaper, they have the effect of "champagne in decanters, or Herodotus in Beloe's version." It would be impossible to convey an idea of this power of Mr. Choate by single passages, as it is something which animates, unites, and vivifies the whole argument. It is imagination, not a series of imaginations, which produces the result. Sentences cut apart from the main body of one of his productions can only suggest his manner through the process of caricature. Thus, we recollect that an honest master-mason, in one of his arguments, rose to the dignity of "a builder and beautifier of cities." In another, he represented the skipper of a merchant vessel, who had been prosecuted by his crew for not giving them enough to eat, as being busily studying some law-book, while passing the island of St. Helena, to find out his duty in case the vessel was short of provisions. "Such," said Mr. Choate, "were his meditations, as the invisible currents of the ocean bore him by the grave of Napoleon." A witness once testified, in reference to one of his clients, that he had called upon him on Friday evening, found him crying, and, on asking him what was the matter, received in answer, – "I'm afraid I've run against a snag." This was rendered by Mr. Choate somewhat in this way: -: Such were his feelings, and such his actions, down to that fatal Friday night, when at ten o'clock, in that flood of tears, his hope went out like a candle." These instances convey an idea of the process by which Mr. Choate makes "strange combinations out of common things," but a little more accurate than an intentional parody of his manner. The style of Mr. Choate is the style of an orator, not |