discursive, sleepless, always thirsting for knowledge, was never content to walk along the beaten highway of the law, but was ever wandering into the flowery fields of poetry and philosophy on the right hand and the left.  These volumes show how untiring was his industry, how various were his attainments, how accurate was his knowledge, how healthy and catholic were his intellectual tastes.  The only thing for which he had no taste was repose; the only thing which he could not do was to rest.  When we see what his manner of life was, how for so many years the nightly vigil succeeded the daily toil, how the bow was always strung, how much he studied and wrote outside of his profession, even while bearing the burden and anxiety of an immense practice, we can only wonder that he lived so long.

The whole of the second volume and a full half of the first are occupied with Mr. Choate’s own productions, mainly speeches and lectures.  Many of these have been published before, but some of them appear in print for the first time.  Mr. Choate’s peculiar characteristics of style and manner—­his exuberance of language, his full flow of thought, his redundancy of epithet, his long-drawn sentences, stretching on through clause after clause before the orbit of his thought had begun to turn and enter upon itself—­are well known.  We cannot say that the contents of these volumes will add to the high reputation which Mr. Choate already enjoys as a brilliant writer, an eloquent speaker, a patriotic statesman; but we can and do say that the glimpses we herein get of his purely human qualities—­of that inner life which belongs to every man simply as man—­all add to the interest which already clings to his name, by showing him in a light and in relations of which the public who hung with delight upon his lips knew little or nothing.  He had long been one of the celebrities of the city; his face and form were familiar to his towns-people, and all strangers were anxious to see and hear him:  but, though he moved and acted in public, he dwelt apart.  His orbit embraced the three points of the court-room, his office, and his home,—­and no more.  He had no need of society, of amusement, of sympathy, of companionship.  We are free to say that we think it was a defect in his nature, at least a mistake in his life, that he did not cultivate his friendships more.  Few men of his eminence have ever lived so long and written so few letters.  But his diaries and journals, now for the first time given to the light, show us the inner man and the inner life.  Here he communed with himself.  Here he intrusted his thoughts, his hopes, his dreams, his aspirations to the safe confidence of his note-book.  No portions of the two volumes are to us of more interest than these diaries and journals.  They bear the stamp of perfect sincerity.  They show us how high his standard was, how little he was satisfied with anything he had done, how deep and strong were his love of knowledge