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 Sevres 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 be stayed even at the last, by reviving in them the veneration for Washington, a sentiment shared by both.  The delivery of his oration on Washington as a means to that end was well meant, but pathetic in its complete futility to accomplish such a purpose.  So small a spill of oil upon a sea so raging!  He was a master of beautiful periods, and I desire here to record my testimony that he also possessed a power for off-hand speech.  The tradition is that his utterances were all elaborately studied, down to the gestures and the play of the features.  I have heard him talk on the spur of the moment, starting out from an incident close at hand and touching effectively upon circumstances that arose as he proceeded.

Of the two men, often seen side by side, so similar in tastes, education, and character, both for the same cause ostracised from public life by their common wealth, a repugnance to reform which scouted all counting of costs, Winthrop impressed me in my young days as being the abler.  His public career closed early, but he had time to show he could be vigorous and finely eloquent.  I remember him most vividly as I saw him presiding at a Commencement dinner, a function which he discharged with extraordinary felicity.  He had an alertness, as he stood lithe and graceful, derived perhaps from his strain of Huguenot blood.  His wit was excelling, his learning comprehensive and well in hand.  He was no more weighed down by his erudition than was David by his sling.  Encomium,