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You may say that I am partial to my hero; 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 slaveholder threw up his hands and exclaimed, "This is the man, those 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, and Tom Corwin could hold the mob in his right hand; but no one of these men could do more than this one thing. The wonder about O'Connell was that he could out-talk Corwin, he could charm a college better than Everett, and leave Henry Clay himself far behind in magnetizing a senate.

It has been my privilege to hear all the great orators of America who have become singularly famed about 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 of these men never surpassed and no one of them ever equaled the great Irishman. I have hitherto been speaking of his ability and success, I will now consider his character.

To show you that he never took a leaf from our American gospel of compromise, that he never filed his tongue to silence on one truth fancying so to help another, let me compare him to Kossuth, whose only merits were his eloquence and his patriotism. When Kossuth was in Faneuil Hall, he exclaimed, "Here is a flag without a stain, a nation without a crime!" We abolitionists appealed to him, "O, eloquent son of the Magyar, come to break chains, have you no word, no pulse-beat for four millions of negroes bending under a yoke ten times heavier than that of Hungary?" He exclaimed, "I would forget anybody, I would praise anything, to help Hungary!" O'Connell never said anything like that.

When I was in Naples I asked Sir Thomas Fowell Buxtor "Is Daniel O'Connell an honest man?" "As honest a man as ever breathed," said he, and then he told me the following story: "When, in 1830, O'Connell first entered Parliament, the antislavery cause was so weak that it had only Lushington and myself to speak for it, and we agreed that when he spoke I should cheer him up, and when I spoke he should cheer me, and these were

the only cheers we ever got. O'Connell came with one Irish member to support him. A large party of members (I think Buxton said twenty-seven) whom we called the West India interest, the Bristol party, the slave party, went to him, saying, 'O'Connell, at last you are in the House with one helper - if you will never go down to Freemason's Hall with Buxton and Brougham, here are twenty-seven votes for you on every Irish question. If you work with those abolitionists, count us always against you.'

"It was a terrible temptation. How many a so-called statesman would have yielded! O'Connell said, 'Gentlemen, God knows I speak for the saddest people the sun sees; but may my right hand forget its cunning and my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth, if to help Ireland negro one single hour.'

even Ireland

I forget the

"From that day," said Buxton, "Lushington and I never went into the lobby that O'Connell did not follow us."medi

And then besides his irreproachable character, he had what is half the power of a popular orator, he had a majestic presence. In youth he had the brow of a Jupiter, and the stature of Apollo. A little O'Connell would have been no O'Connell at all. Sydney Smith says of Lord John Russell's five feet, when he went down to Yorkshire after the Reform Bill had passed, the stalwart hunters of Yorkshire exclaimed, "What, that little shrimp, he carry the Reform Bill!" "No, no," said Smith, "he was a large man, but the labors of the bill shrunk him." You remember the story that Russell Lowell tells of Webster when we in Massachusetts were about to break up the Whig party. Webster came home to Faneuil Hall to protest, and four thousand Whigs came out to meet him. He lifted up his majestic' presence before that sea of human faces, his brow charged with thunder, and said, Gentlemen, 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," says Lowell, "we all held our breath, thinking where he could go." "But," says Lowell, "if he had been five feet three, we should have said, confound you, who do you suppose cares where you go?" Well, O'Connell had all that, and then he had 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-five, lithe as a boy. His every attitude was beauty, his every gesture grace. Why, Macready or Booth never equaled him.

It would have been a pleasure even to look at him if he had not spoken at all, and all you thought of was a grey-hound. And then he had, what so few American speakers have, a voice that sounded the gamut. I heard him once in Exeter Hall say, "Americans, I send my voice careering like the thunderstorm across the Atlantic, to tell South Carolina that God's thunderbolts are hot, and to remind the negro that the dawn of his redemption is drawing near;" and I seemed to hear his voice reverberating and 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 there were tears in his voice, like an old song, and five thousand men would be in tears. And all the while no effort - he seemed only breathing.

"As effortless as woodland nooks

Send violets up and paint them blue."

- Wendell Phillips.

DESCRIPTION OF WEBSTER'S SPEECH IN REPLY TO HAYNE

It was Tuesday, January the 26th, 1830,- a day to be hereafter forever memorable in Senatorial annals, that the Senate resumed the consideration of Foote's resolution.

There never was before, in the city, an occasion of so much excitement. Multitudes of strangers had for two or three days previous been rushing into the city, and the hotels overflowed. As early as nine o'clock of this morning, crowds poured into the Capitol in hot haste; at twelve o'clock, the hour of meeting, the Senate chamber its galleries, floor, and even lobbies — was filled to its utmost capacity. The very stairways were dark with men, who clung to one another like bees in a swarm. The House of Representatives was early deserted, an adjournment could hardly have made it emptier.

Seldom, if ever, has speaker in this or any other country had more powerful incentives to exertion. A subject, the determina

tion of which involved the most important interests; even the duration of the Republic. Competitors unequaled in reputation, ability, or position; a name to make still more glorious or lose forever; and an audience comprising not only persons of this country, most eminent in intellectual greatness, but representatives of other nations where the art of eloquence had flourished for ages. All the soldier seeks in opportunity was here.

Mr. Webster perceived and felt equal to the destinies of the moment. The very greatness of the hazard exhilarated him. His spirits rose with the occasion. He awaited the time of onset with a stern, impatient joy. A confidence in his own resources springing from no vain estimate of his power, but the legitimate offspring of previous severe mental discipline, sustained and excited him. He had gauged his opponent, his subject, and himself. He never rose on an ordinary occasion to address an ordinary audience more self-possessed. There was no tremulousness in his voice nor manner; nothing hurried, nothing simulated. The calmness of superior strength was visible everywhere; in countenance, voice, and bearing.

Mr. Webster rose and addressed the Senate. His exordium is known by heart everywhere: "Mr. President, when the mariner has been tossed, for many days in thick weather and on an unknown sea, he naturally avails himself of the first pause in the storm, the earliest glance of the sun, to take his latitude and ascertain how far the elements have driven him from his true course. Let us imitate this prudence, and, before we float farther on the waves of this debate, refer to the point from which we departed, that we may, at least, be able to conjecture where we now are. I ask for the reading of the resolution before the Senate."

There wanted no more to enchain the attention. There was a spontaneous, though silent, expression of eager approbation, as the orator concluded these opening remarks, and while the clerk read the resolution many attempted the impossibility of getting nearer the speaker. Every head was inclined toward him, every ear turned in the direction of his voice, and that deep sudden, mysterious silence followed, which always attends fullness of emotion. From the sea of upturned faces before him, the orator beheld his thoughts reflected as from a mirror. The varying countenance, the suffused eye, the earnest smile, the ever attentive

look, assured him of his audience's entire sympathy. If among his hearers there were those who affected at first an indifference to his glowing thoughts and fervent words, the difficult mask was soon laid aside, and profound, undisguised, devoted attention followed. Those who had doubted Mr. Webster's ability to cope with and overcome his opponents were fully satisfied of their error before he had proceeded far in his speech. Their fears soon took another direction. When they heard his sentences of powerful thought, towering in accumulative grandeur, one above the other, as if the orator strove, Titan-like, to reach the very Heavens themselves; they were giddy with an apprehension that he would break down in his flight; they dared not believe that genius, learning, and intellectual endowment, however uncommon, that was simply mortal, could sustain itself long in a career seemingly so perilous; they feared an Icarian fall. What New England heart was there but throbbed with vehement, tumultuous, irrepressible emotions as he dwelt upon New England struggles and New England triumphs during the war of the Revolution?

There was scarcely a dry eye in the Senate; all hearts were overcome; grave judges and men grown old in dignified life turned aside their heads to conceal the evidences of their emotion. In one corner of the gallery was clustered a group of Massachusetts men; they had hung from the first moment upon the words of the speaker, with feelings variously but always warmly excited, deepening in intensity as he proceeded. At first, while the orator was going through his exordium, they held their breath and hid their faces, mindful of the savage attack upon him and New England, and the fearful odds against him, her champion:- as he went deeper in to his speech they felt easier; when he turned Hayne's flank on Banquo's ghost they breathed freer and deeper. But now as he alluded to Massachusetts, their feelings were strained to their highest tension, and when the orator, concluding this encomium of the land of his birth, turned, unintentionally, or otherwise, his burning eye full upon them, they shed tears like girls. The exulting rush of feeling with which he went through the peroration threw a glow over his countenance, like inspiration-eye, brow, each feature, every line of his face seemed touched as with a celestial fire. The swell and roll of his voice struck upon the ears of the spell-bound audience, in deep and melodious cadence, as waves upon the shore of the far-resounding