Page:Cambridge Modern History Volume 7.djvu/776

 744 Boston orators : Webster; Choate; Everett. [isso- The simplest feature of his complex character was a patriotic devotion to the Constitution of the United States, so fervent as to resemble the religious enthusiasm of Puritan days ; and his chief utterance of this was perhaps his famous Reply to Hayne, published in 1830, only two years before Emerson's withdrawal from the pulpit of the Second Church of Boston. With all Webster's patriotic fervour, his utterances now seem rather innocently artificial ; they are clearly modelled on the masterpieces of Parliamentary oratory in the eighteenth century, which in turn were modelled on the oratorical masterpieces of Cicero and Demosthenes. They have, at the same time, a passionate yet controlled sincerity which marks them as his own. Similarly individual are the more coolly elaborate orations which laid a firm rhetorical basis for the widely useful public career of Webster's most eminent Boston con- temporary, Edward Everett. The school of oratory which these two masters exemplify was numerous, and persisted long. Its later formal master was Rufus Choate, whose achievements at the bar are still fresh in the public memory, though he has been dead for more than forty years. The somewhat demagogic speakers who stirred anti-slavery sentiment, with what seemed to conservative minds a reckless disregard of truth, sprang from the same rhetorical stock. The species of oratory which reached its height in the patriotic eloquence of Webster was the same which declined in the virulent diatribes of Theodore Parker, Charles Sumner, and Wendell Phillips. Meanwhile, almost from the time of the Revolution, another kind of activity had also declared itself in Massachusetts. Harvard College, the oldest of American universities, had been founded there as early as 1636; but for rather more than two centuries it did little more than preserve, with admirable fidelity, the tradition of classical and mathematical scholarship. When the awakening of national conscious- ness began to stir Harvard men, it excited them towards fresher kinds of learning. They began to found learned societies, libraries, and perio- dicals, some of which still exist. For more than a century the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the Massachusetts Historical Society have maintained, each in its own way, a standard of learning which will bear comparison with the best. The Boston Athenaeum, founded about 1815, is now a library of positive and growing importance, from which has indirectly sprung the still richer and more widely-known Public Library of Boston, the model on which have been formed the numerous public libraries now so general in the United States. The North American Review, until it passed into commercial hands and was transferred to New York, maintained for many years in Boston a standard analogous to that of the Edinburgh and the Quarterly Reviews in England. From the influences thus concentrated sprang, by the middle of the nineteenth century, a school of historical writing which has won more than local recognition. Its first eminent master was William Hickling