Edward Everett (1794–1865), born at Dorchester, Mass., graduated at Harvard in 1811 and in 1815 was elected professor of Greek there. In 1820 he became editor of the North American Review, and in 1824 a member of the U. S. congress. In 1835–38 he was four times governor of Massachusetts, and in 1841–45 minister at the court of St. James. While in England he was made D.C.L. by Oxford, and LL.D. by Cambridge and Dublin. He was president of Harvard 1846–49, and 1852 succeeded Daniel Webster as secretary of state, and in 1853 was returned to the U. S. senate. His chief works are “A Defence of Christianity” (1814); several poems; his “Orations and Speeches” (1836–59); and the memoir prefixed to Daniel Webster’s works (1852).

Personal

  I have been attending Professor Everett’s lectures, which he has begun to deliver in this city, upon Antiquities. I am as much enamored as ever with the incomparable manner of my old idol, though much of his matter is easily acquired from common books. We think strong sense to be his distinguishing feature; he never commits himself, never makes a mistake.

  What I desire, is, that, in addition to the many beautiful, ay, exquisitely beautiful specimens of your genius, which we have had upon occasional topics, you would now meditate some great work for posterity, which shall make you known and felt through all time, as we, your contemporaries, now know and esteem you. This should be the crowning future purpose of your life. Sat verbum sapienti. If I should live to see it, I should hail it with the highest pleasure. If I am dead, pray remember that it was one of the thoughts which clung most closely to me to the very last.

  Edward Everett is one of the most remarkable men living. He is a native of Massachusetts, and was born about 1796. At nineteen he had already acquired the reputation of an accomplished scholar, and was drawing large audiences as a Unitarian preacher. At twenty-one (the age at which Roger Ascham achieved a similar distinction) he was appointed Professor of Greek in Harvard University, and soon afterwards he made a tour of Europe, including Greece. M. Cousin, who was with him in Germany, informed a friend of ours that he was one of the best Grecians he ever knew, and the translator of Plato must have known a good many of the best. On his return from his travels he lectured on Greek literature with the enthusiasm and success of another Abelard—we hope, without the Heloise…. It is admitted, however, that he failed in Congress; and his addresses literary and commemorative, are rather eloquent pieces of writing than orations in the popular acception of the term.

  Mr. Everett’s manuscript is a noble one. It has about it an air of deliberate precision emblematic of the statesman, and a mingled grace and solidity betokening the scholar. Nothing can be more legible, and nothing need be more uniform. The man who writes thus will never grossly err in judgment or otherwise; but we may also venture to say that he will never attain the loftiest pinnacle of renown.

  Everett, the American Minister, has been here at the same time with my eldest brother. We all liked him, and were confirmed in our good opinion of him. A sensible, unassuming man, always wise and reasonable.

  If Webster is the Michael Angelo of American oratory, Everett is the Raphael. In the former’s definition of eloquence, he recognises its latent existence in the occasion as well as in the man and in the subject. His own oratory is remarkable for grasping the bold and essential; for developing, as it were, the anatomical basis—the very sinews and nerves of his subject—while Everett instinctively catches and unfolds the grace of occasion, whatever it be; in his mind the sense of beauty is vivid, and nothing is more surprising in his oratory than the ease and facility with which he seizes upon the redeeming associations of every topic, however far removed it may be from the legitimate domain of taste or scholarship.

  Edward Everett, the man of letters par excellence, burning incense to the south, and insulting abolitionists while they are few and weak, endeavouring to propitiate them as they grew strong, and finally breaking down in irretrievable disgrace under a pressure to which he had exposed himself by ambition, but which he had neither courage nor conscience to abide. I early saw in him the completest illustration I met with of the influences of republican life upon a man of powers without principle, and of knowledge without wisdom. He was still worshipped through vanity, when I knew him, though his true desserts were well enough understood in private: he had plenty of opportunity to retrieve his political character afterwards: he obtained in England, when ambassador, abundance of the admiration which he sacrificed so much to win; and then at last, when the hour arrived which must test his quality, he sank, and must abide for the rest of his life in a slough of contempt from which there was no rescue. This is precisely what was anticipated twenty years ago by (not his enemies, for I believe he then had none, but) friends who mourned over his quitting a life of scholarship, for which he was eminently qualified, for one of political aspiration. They knew that he had not self-reliance or courage enough for effective ambition, nor virtue enough for a career of independence. It is all over now; and the vainest of men, who lives by the breath of praise, is placed for the sad remnant of his days between the scorn of the many and the pity of the few. Vindicators he has none; and I believe no followers.

  There was refinement in the very substance of his being; by a necessity of his constitution he disposed everything he perceived into some orderly relations to ideas of dignity and grace; he instinctively shunned what was coarse, discordant, uncomely, unbecoming; and that internal world of thoughts, sentiments, and dispositions, which each man forms or re-forms for himself, and in which he really lives, in his case obeyed the law of comeliness, and came out as naturally in his manners as in his writings, in the beautiful urbanity of his behavior, as in the cadenced periods of his eloquence.

  Mr. Everett’s speeches were generally written, and with great care in his forms of expression. Words were selected in respect to their measure and sound, as well as their meaning, and their precise effect upon the ear often determined by rehearsal. He sometimes, I think, sacrificed the power of thought to the euphony of words. Mr. Webster, on the other hand, ordinarily speaking without notes, sought to express his thoughts clearly, directly, and nothing more…. Mr. Everett’s manner in speaking was elaborate and studied. It was artistic till the appearance of art was lost in its perfection. There was an exquisite adaptation of voice, tone, position and gesture to sentiment, and yet so great was the charm which he threw around his subject, by his perfect knowledge of it, in all its relations, bearings and history, and by the beauty of his illustrations, that his auditors forgot the auditor in the theme. Here he felt the advantages of his extended studies and critical research, in which he was immeasurably the superior of his distinguished friend.

  He never missed an opportunity to do a kind office to a fellow man, especially to a man of letters. All his life long he was true to this quality in his nature…. He never doled out scant praise. He never withheld from any one the applause that was due. I never could discern in him the slightest vestige of envy. His heart expanded at observing merit in others; and if sometimes he was too forbearing or too complacent toward mediocrity, he gloriously redeemed that foible by the keenest and most willing perception of all kinds of excellence…. His manner of life was marked by liberality and elegance; but he was simple in his habits and was never given to ostentation; and by the fruits of his own exertion he was able to be of service to those who were akin to him and to others. There were those whom he never ceased to care for, even when the burden became very heavy for him to bear. Here is another leading trait in his character; he gave away money not thoughtlessly but freely, always with reflecting judgment, as befitted one who had much to spare and who desired to do the most good; he kept up his habit of generosity always; and in proportion to his own income, there was perhaps no one who gave more, or showed himself more free from everything that is sordid.

  Mr. Edward Everett was at that time [1843] our Minister at the Court of St. James. I was the bearer to him of a letter of introduction from Mr. Benjamin F. Butler, who had been Attorney-General of the United States under President Van Buren. I found Mr. Everett as frigid as an iceberg. His reserve was constitutional. He was as polished as his own writings, but equally cold. To a young man just out of college, this sort of reception operated like a wet blanket. After my first call, I never ventured upon him again. I feared taking cold.

  As early as 1820 he had established a reputation, such as few men in later days have enjoyed, as an orator. He was frequently invited, as other public men are invited in America, to deliver an “oration” on one or another public topic of historical or other interest. With him these “orations,” instead of being the ephemeral entertainments of an hour, became careful studies of some important theme, so that the collected edition of them is now one of the standard books of reference in an American’s library. Eager to avert, if possible, the impending conflict of arms, Everett prepared an “oration” on Washington, which he delivered in every part of America. In a printed note accompanying the published edition of it, he names nearly one hundred and twenty-five occasions, in almost every State in the Union, in every section but the extreme Southwest, where it was repeated. This exception was caused only by illness in his family, after he had received invitations to go to that quarter also. He travelled really as an ambassador of peace among irritated States. The eagerness to hear him was so great that, from the first, his hosts arranged, almost always, that tickets should be sold to all auditors, and as he travelled wholly at his own charges, the audiences thus contributed more than one hundred thousand dollars for the purchase of the old home of Washington at Mount Vernon, and the securing it as a shrine for American patriotism.

  Edward Everett, of Massachusetts, was the ideal of public and private virtue. He was placid, cool, exact, and conscientious, yet always imaginative, and sometimes impassioned…. The illustrious Everett looked the character he was. Gentle, courteous, kind, with a musical voice, a face of singular benevolence, a figure erect and graceful, and an air of high yet modest culture, his conversation was exceedingly fascinating.

  “Then Mr. Everett pronounced an oration which surpassed all I had ever heard. When, toward the conclusion, he alluded to the noble conduct of our guest in procuring a ship for his own transportation, at a time when all America was too poor to offer him a passage to her shores, the scene was overpowering. Every man in the assembly was in tears.” In Journal, August 26, 1824. I believe that this last expression was literally true. I have heard the great orators of my day at their best; but it was never given to any one of them to lift up an audience as Everett did upon this occasion. I can conceive of nothing more magnificent in the way of oratory. Many who have listened to Mr. Everett’s polished periods during the latter part of his life may question the supreme effect he produced. They will say that he was by nature a conservative, seldom in sympathy with the heart of popular feeling, and that there was always a suspicion of a chill upon his matchless rhetoric. I can only say that the words he spoke that day in the venerable church in Cambridge were as full of fire as of music.

  Notwithstanding his ready fluency of speech, I never heard him utter a sentence that needed correction for the press.

  At times he was almost electrical in his utterances; his reasoning was logical and luminous, and his remarks always gave evidence of careful study. As a politician Mr. Everett was not successful. The personification of self discipline and dignity, he was too much like an intellectual icicle to find favor with the masses, and he was deficient in courage when any bold step was to be taken.

  Edward Everett was then second only to Mr. Webster as an orator. In scholarship and manner of speaking, he was Mr. Webster’s superior. He was perhaps the finest classical scholar of the day, the greatest linguist that ever went to Congress, except Caleb Cushing…. Mr. Everett did not maintain his high reputation in Congress. He was an orator, not a debater, and he was too refined in character, too much of a gentleman to be perfectly at home in the lower House of Congress.

  Of Edward Everett’s eloquence—consummate of its kind—delivery, description, narration and illustration, historical incident and classical allusion, were the most notable and noteworthy features. “It is hardly too much to say of him”—if I may borrow from my own tribute to him at Faneuil Hall a day or two after his death—“it is hardly too much to say of him that he established a new standard of American eloquence; that he was the founder of a new school of occasional oratory, of which he was at once the acknowledged master and the best pupil, and in which we were all proud to sit at his feet as disciples.” Delivering his principal orations avowedly from memory, every sentence and every gesture were studied to produce the most striking effect. And they did produce it. He was as dramatic at times as Kean or Macready, and his audiences hung with rapture on his lips.

  I was scarcely less an admirer of Edward Everett, whose cold, classical, and studied style was in marked contrast to the massive warmth and energy of his great rival in public oratory. The one struck the quarry with the emphasis of a discoverer; the other chiselled the marble with the delicacy of a finished sculptor. To listen to Webster was to be warmed with an unexpected emotion; to hang upon the periods of Everett was to feel the charms of cultured rhetoric.

  Mr. Everett was one of the most graceful and polished speakers of modern times. He was called the “golden-mouthed orator” by his friends and contemporaries, Choate, Webster and Phillips. In preparing his speeches no detail was too minute to escape his care—invention, arrangement of matter, expression, intonation and gesture—all received the greatest attention. Mr. Everett’s eloquence was of the Ciceronian order—copious, graceful, and flowing. He also resembled Cicero in the variety—and extent of his knowledge. His memory was very retentive. His sensibilities were refined. His imagination rich and sparkling. His gestures were graceful, and appropriate, and the tones of his voice clear, sweet and melodious. His manner was elegant and persuasive. It is said that no one could listen to him without being moved, instructed, and delighted.

General

  The great charm of Mr. Everett’s orations consists not so much in any single and strongly-developed intellectual trait as in that symmetry and finish which, on every page, give token of the richly-endowed and thorough scholar. The natural movements of his mind are full of grace; and the most indifferent sentence which falls from his pen has that simple elegance which it is as difficult to define as it is easy to perceive. His level passages are never tame, and his fine ones are never superfine. His style, with matchless flexibility, rises and falls with his subject, and alternately easy, vivid, elated, ornamented, or picturesque; adapting itself to the dominant mood of the mind, as an instrument responds to the touch of a master’s hand. His knowledge is so extensive, and the field of his allusions so wide, that the most familiar views in passing through his hands, gather such a halo of luminous illustrations, that their likeness seems transformed, and we entertain doubts of their identity.

  We should have no hesitation, therefore, in placing in the hands of young American citizens these volumes [“Orations and Speeches”] as containing the best developments of the genius of free institutions; the noblest expositions of the lofty duties by which the citizen of a free State is bound; the most spirit-stirring representations of the greatness of the illustrious founders of our commonwealths, now living immortal in the monuments of genius and patriotic wisdom they have left behind them.

  It is curious to follow the public life of such a man, and that is easy to do in the two volumes before us. Here, as in all of his literary works and political harangues, as well as in all the discourses pronounced by Mr. Everett for the last thirty years, he is found en rapport with his fellow-citizens. The subjects are naturally very various, but the thought is always the same, and returns to one point, intellectual education, the morality and the patriotism of the people. This unity is in the word as well as in the life of the author.

  The “Defence of Christianity,” which he then published, is of value, chiefly as a piece of controversy belonging to the history of opinion in this neighborhood at that moment. Controversy has long since taken other grounds. For that purpose, at that moment, the book did its work completely. It exhausted the points which Mr. English raised, and exhausted them in a way which required very patient study. Mr. Everett once said that to compile the chapter on the quotations of the Old Testament by the New Testament writers, he went through the whole of the Mischna in the edition of Surenhusius, in six volumes folio. This chapter, I may say in passing, is the chapter of most permanent value in the “Defence.” Now this “Defence,” the work of a boy of twenty years of age, was written in the midst of the demands made upon the popular preacher in one of the largest parishes in Boston, in a few months’ time,—sent to the printer chapter by chapter. And Mr. Everett said of it, in after-life, that, if it did not seem like affectation, he would say that it was relaxation from the work he was doing in the pulpit. I have no doubt it was.

  He stood undoubtedly at the head of men of letters of New England, and perhaps I might say at the head of the men of letters of America. True, Longfellow excelled him in poetry, and Hawthorne in romance, and Prescott in history, and the incomparable Irving in his own peculiar walks; but in power of rapid and exact acquisition of knowledge, in variety and comprehensiveness of research, in the perfectly methodical arrangement of his learning, in the sovereign command over the vast mass of his resources, in the warmth and rich coloring of style, in correctness, in the use of words, in the finished neatness of composition, he excelled all.

  Everett never impresses you, as do Webster and Clay, with the feeling that the man is more puissant than his periods. His expressions do not suggest a region of thought, a dim vista of imagery, an oceanic depth of feeling, beyond what is compassed by his sentences. He never seems to struggle with language in order to wrest from it words enough for his wealth of thought. It is not an example of “Strength, half leaning on its own right arm,” but of Beauty endowed with every natural and artificial charm. Nevertheless, let us not fail to do justice to Mr. Everett’s real merits, for he has many and great ones. The great charm of his orations does not lie in any one trait, but in their symmetry and finish, the proofs they exhibit on every page that they are the products of the most careful culture. The style seems to us the very perfection of the epideictic, or demonstrative style. Artificial it undoubtedly is, and occasionally, though rarely, may betray the artist’s tooling; but it is a style formed by the most assiduous painstaking, and polished by a taste as exquisitely sensitive as a blind man’s touch.

  The elegant volume by which he is best remembered, twenty-seven “Orations,” selected and published in 1836, shows his strength and weakness, his learning, frequent fancy, and fair judgment, on the one side; his ambition beyond his powers, early overtasked, on the other. Discoursing on a wide range of subjects—of which the refrains are America and Greece, the Mayflower, Patriotism, Reform, the Progress of Discovery, Concord, Lexington, and the inevitable Bunker Hill—these speeches are always able, but only by fits inspiring. They are “too long,” and smell of the lamp. The writer exhausts his hearers by ransacking history and literature with an approach to pedantry. In his great address on the Republic, delivered August 26, 1824, before the Phi-Beta-Kappa Society, we have, at one opening of the book, the Parthenon, the Theseum, the Alexandrian and Periclean ages, Callimachus, Pindar, Lycophron, Sophocles, Aristotle, Aristophanes of Byzantium, Apollonius of Rhodes, Alcæus, Menander, Horace, Lucretius, Tacitus, Constantine, Dante, Petrarch, Boccaccio, Machiavelli, Guicciardini, Galileo, Ariosto, Tasso, Cervantes, Corneille, and Racine—all doubtless illustrating the orator’s position, but heaped up with bewildering rapidity. Everett’s work, carefully elaborated and richly adorned, is that of the first of rhetoricians rather than a genuine orator.

  Edward Everett, in his best literary work, was second to no eminent author of his day in the quiet majesty of his presence and address, so that all who came within the circle of his influence were chastened and uplifted.

  The great euphemist of that age; he studied and polished his speeches until they reached a pitch of rhetorical perfection unexampled since the days of Greek and Latin oratory. The fashion has gone by for such elaborate art and artifice, but it was precisely suited to the audiences to which Everett appealed. He appeared to remain always in a state of admiring contemplation of pensive reminiscence, of glowing premonition over something, it mattered little what. His smooth-flowing, musical sentences have nowhere a hitch or a discord; he rang all the changes on sweetness, pathos, sentiment, optimistic prophecy. He exploited the requirements of culture to the ultimate degree of fastidiousness; even religion and morality, under his touch, are made to seem pretty, touching and graceful, rather than searching or sublime. There was a ladylike quality in his deliverances—a deficiency of rugged and resonant masculine fibre—which removes them somewhat from the sympathies of to-day.

  Throughout these four volumes [“Orations and Speeches”], comprising the utterances of more than forty years, every paragraph seems a studied, masterly work of art. Everett’s natural feeling was warm and spontaneous; but he had acquired and he unswervingly maintained that incessant self-control which his generation held among the highest ideals of conduct. So whatever he publicly uttered, and still more whatever he suffered himself to print, was deliberately considered to the minutest detail.

  With the exception of his reply to English, his lives of Washington, John Stark, and John Lovell, and the Mount Vernon Papers, the great preponderance of all that Everett allowed to go to print, consisted of addresses and orations; these were gathered into four volumes, issued at intervals during a period of twenty years. On these public utterances, and on his reputation rather than on his performances as a scholar, rests Everett’s claim to be considered as an American man of letters. The claim, however, must be allowed, in spite of the fact that no single work of great repute is credited to him.