among you big fellows, I wasn't much. Here they seem to think I am
somebody. Nothing like the right setting." The record shows that even
among the "big fellows" Starr King was a very definite somebody, for
although crowds did not attend his preaching in Boston as in San
Francisco, he was able to congratulate himself upon the fact that he
preached his last sermon in Hollis Street Church to five times as many
people as heard his first. Nor do we need to await the judgment of
California admirers to be convinced of his ability as a preacher or his
popularity as a lecturer. It was said of him that "he was an orator from
the beginning:" that his first public address "was like Charles Lamb's
roast pig, good throughout, no part better or worse than another." "His
delivery," says a candid and scholarly critic, "was rather earnest than
passionate. He had a deep, strange, rich voice, which he knew how to
use. His eyes were extraordinary, living sermons, a peculiar shake and
nod of the head giving the impression of deep-settled conviction.
Closely confined to his notes, yet his delivery produces a marked
impression."

Hostile criticism, which no man wholly escapes, enjoyed suggesting that
King had been educated in the common schools of Portsmouth and
Charlestown, and that he had graduated from the navy yard into the
pulpit. A Boston correspondent passed judgment upon him as follows: "He
was not considered profoundly learned; he was not regarded as a
remarkable orator; he was not a great writer; nor can his unrivalled
popularity be ascribed to his fascinating social or intellectual gifts.
It was the hidden interior man of the heart that gave him his real power
and skill to control the wills and to move the hearts, and to win the
unbounded confidence and affection of his fellow-beings."

William Everett is authority for the statement that in those early years