We thought that very funny and very apt,--but now! I am glad I have
his image vivid, in the pulpit beside my grandfather scratching a
match for a too careless cigar. Between smokes he had done, and was
still to do, some fine things.

* * * * *

In those days, Edward Everett and Robert C. Winthrop were often
under my immature gaze. Men much alike in views, endowments, and
accomplishments, they had played out their parts in public life and
had been consigned to their Boston shelf. In the perspective they are
statuettes rather than statues, of Parian spotlessness, ribboned and
gilt-edged through an elegant culture, well appointed according to
the best taste, companion Sévres pieces, highly ornamental, and
effectually shelved. By the side of the robust protagonists of those
stormy years they stand as figurines, not figures, and yet it was
rather through their fate than through their fault perhaps that they
are what they are in our Pantheon. They were not at all without virile
quality. Everett bore himself well in some rough Senatorial debates,
and Winthrop, as Speaker of the House at Washington, was in stormy
times an able and respected officer. But coarse contacts jarred upon
their refinement; and when, like the public men in general who saw
in postponement of the slavery agitation the wiser course, they were
retired from the front, it is easy to see why the world judged them
as it did. Everett's son, Mr. Sidney Everett, at one time Assistant
Secretary of State, was my classmate, and honoured me once with a
request to edit his father's works. I declined the task, but not from
the feeling that the task was not worth doing. Everett had the idea
that the armed rush of the North and South against each other might