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THE MINISTER PLENIPOTENTIARY.

Mr. Henry Ward Beecher went to Great Britain already well known at home as the favorite preacher of a large parish, an ardent advocate of certain leading reforms, one of the most popular lecturers of the country, a bold, outspoken, fertile, ready, crowd-compelling orator, whose reported sermons and speeches were fuller of catholic humanity than of theological subtilties, and whose sympathies were of that lively sort which are apt to leap the sectarian fold and find good Christians in every denomination.  He was welcomed by friendly persons on the other side of the Atlantic, partly for these merits, partly also as “the son of the celebrated Dr. Beecher” and “the brother of Mrs. Beecher Stowe.”

After a few months’ absence he returns to America, having finished a more remarkable embassy than any envoy who has represented us in Europe since Franklin pleaded the cause of the young Republic at the Court of Versailles.  He kissed no royal hand, he talked with no courtly diplomatists, he was the guest of no titled legislator, he had no official existence.  But through the heart of the people he reached nobles, ministers, courtiers, the throne itself.  He whom the “Times” attacks, he whom “Punch” caricatures, is a power in the land.  We may be very sure, that, if an American is the aim of their pensioned garroters and hired vitriol-throwers, he is an object of fear as well as of hatred, and that the assault proves his ability as well as his love of freedom and zeal for the nation to which he belongs.

Mr. Beecher’s European story is a short one in time, but a long one in events.  He went out a lamb, a tired clergyman in need of travel; and as such he did not strive nor cry, nor did any man hear his voice in the streets.  But in the den of lions where his pathway led him he remembered hid own lion’s nature, and uttered his voice to such effect that its echoes in the great vaulted caverns of London and Liverpool are still reaching us, as the sound of the woodman’s axe is heard long after the stroke is seen, as the light of the star shines upon us many days after its departure from the source of radiance.

Mr. Beecher made a single speech in Great Britain, but it was delivered piecemeal in different places.  Its exordium was uttered on the ninth of October at Manchester, and its peroration was pronounced on the twentieth of the same month in Exeter Hall.  He has himself furnished us an analysis of the train of representations and arguments of which this protracted and many-jointed oration was made up.  At Manchester he attempted to give a history of that series of political movements, extending through half a century, the logical and inevitable end of which was open conflict between the two opposing forces of Freedom and Slavery.  At Glasgow his discourse seems to have been almost unpremeditated.  A meeting of one or two Temperance advocates, who had come to greet him as a brother