and the ministry he stood forth, as John Adams expressed it, as
"a flame of fire," full of consuming zeal for his country and an
ardent upholder of its rights and prerogatives. In assuming this
attitude, that Otis's zeal and energy were at times unrestrained
and his language occasionally unguarded and overvehement, is
doubtless true; but this was certainly excusable in a man of his
ardent temperament and strength of character; while the situation
of affairs was such as to call not only for patriotic enthusiasm,
but for righteous indignation and heated denunciation, in a cause
that stirred to the depths the heart and brain of an impetuous
and commanding orator. Nor do we well to forget what this
consuming, patriotic passion and heated vindication of his
country's rights cost Otis, in the responsibility he felt and the
solicitation he manifested, especially in the middle and later
stages of his strenuous career, for the cause he had so keenly at
heart. Pathetic is the story of the ailment that clouded his
closing years; and only exculpatory can be the judgment now
passed upon the man and his work when we consider what the strain
was that he had long and anxiously borne and that revealed its
effects in periods of sad mental alienation and incipient
madness. To speak and write strongly on taxation and its
injustice, in the case of the Colonies, might well, however,
disturb the mental equilibrium of even a strong man, and the more
so when actively protesting, as Otis long continued to protest,
against unlawful encroachments upon the liberties of the Colonies
and the other arbitrary acts that then characterized the
administration of the Crown. Whatever it cost Otis personally to
engage in this defence, the result, as we all now know and admit,
was only and wholly beneficent--in the defeat of an unrighteous
autocracy, and the emancipation of a Continent from a fettering