of the gods, undiminished and unimpaired? Welcome then, welcome, my last hour! After enjoying for so great a number of years, in my public and private life, what I believe has never been the lot of any other, I now extend my hand to the urn, and take without reluctance or hesitation that which is the lot of all.

WENDELL PHILLIPS.

THE ELOQUENCE OF O'CONNELL.

I Do not think that I should exaggerate if I said that God, since He made Demosthenes, never made a man so fit for the great work as he did O'Connell. You may think I am partial to my hero, very naturally. But John Randolph, of Roanoke, who hated an Irishman almost as much as he did a Yankee, when he got to London and heard O'Connell, the old slave-holder held up his hands and said: "This is the man; these are the lips, the most eloquent that speak English in my day." And I think he was right.

Webster could address a bench of judges; Everett could charm a college; Choate could delude a jury; Clay could magnetize a Senate; Tom Corwin could hold the mob in his right hand; but no one of them could do more than that one thing. The wonder of O'Connell was that he could out-talk Corwin; he could charm a college better than Everett; delude a jury better than Choate, and leave Clay him

self far behind in magnetizing a Senate. I have heard all the grand and majestic orators of America, who are singularly famed on the world's circumference. I know what was the majesty of Webster; I know what it was to melt under the magnetism of Henry Clay; I have seen eloquence in the iron logic of Calhoun; but all three together never surpassed, and no one of them ever equalled, the great Irishman. In the first place, he had—what is half the power with a popular orator-a majestic presence. God put that royal soul into a body as royal.

He had in early youth the brow of Jove or Jupiter, and the stature of Apollo; a little O'Connell would have been no O'Connell at all. Sidney Smith said of Lord John Russell's five feet, when he went down to Yorkshire after the Reform Bill had been carried, that the stalwart hunters of Yorkshire said: "That little shrimp! What! he carry the Reform Bill?" "No, no," said Sidney; "no; he was a large man; but the labors of the bill shrunk him." Do you remember the story of Webster, that Russell Lowell tells, when we, in Massachusetts, were about to break up the

Whig party? Webster came home to Faneuil Hall to protest; and four thousand Whigs went to meet him. He lifted up his majestic presence before the sea of human faces, his brow charged with thunder, and he said: "I am a Whig-a Massachusetts Whig, a Revolutionary Whig, a constitutional Whig, a Faneuil Hall Whig; and if you break up the Whig party where am I to go?" And Russell Lowell says: "We held our breaths, thinking where he could go. But if he had been five feet," said Lowell, "we would have said: 'Well, hang it, who cares where you go?""

Well, O'Connell had all that. Then he had, besides, what Webster never had, and what Clay had, the magnetism and grace that melt a million souls into his. When I saw him he was sixty-six-lithe as a boy; his very attitude was beauty; every gesture was grace. Macready or Booth never equalled him. Why, it would have been delightful even to look at him, if he had not spoken at all; and all you thought of was a greyhound. Then he hadwhat so few Americans have a voice that sounded the gamut. I heard him once, in Exeter Hall, say: 'Americans, I send my

voice careering, like a thunder storm, across the Atlantic, to tell South Carolina that God's thunderbolts are hot, and to remind the negroes that the dawn of their redemption is breaking." And I seemed to hear the answer come re-echoing back to London from the Rocky Mountains. And then, with the slightest possible flavor of an Irish brogue, he would tell a story that would make all Exeter Hall laugh. And the next moment tears were in his voice, like an old song, and five thousand men would be in tears.