Having cleared up this matter so that our comatose cousins understood the relations of the dough and the apple in our national dumpling,—­to borrow one of their royal reminiscences,—­having eulogized the fidelity of the North to the national compact, he referred to the action of “that most true, honest, just, and conscientious magistrate, Mr. Lincoln,”—­at the mention of whose name the audience cheered as long and loud as if they had descended from the ancient Ephesians.

Mr. Beecher went on to show how the North could not help fighting when it was attacked, and to give the reasons that made it necessary to fight,—­reasons which none but a consistent Friend or avowed non-resistant can pretend to dispute:  His ordinary style in speaking is pointed, staccatoed, as is that of most successful extemporaneous speakers; he is “short-gaited”; the movement of his thoughts is that of the chopping sea, rather than the long, rolling, rhythmical wave-procession of phrase-balancing rhetoricians.  But when the lance has pricked him deep enough, when the red flag has flashed in his face often enough, when the fireworks have hissed and sputtered around him long enough, when the cheers have warmed him so that all his life is roused, then his intellectual sparkle becomes a steady glow, and his nimble sentences change their form, and become long-drawn, stately periods.

“Standing by my cradle, standing by my hearth, standing by the altar of the church, standing by all the places that mark the name and memory of heroic men who poured their blood and lives for principle, I declare that in ten or twenty years of war we will sacrifice everything we have for principle.  If the love of popular liberty is dead in Great Britain, you will not understand us; but if the love of liberty lives as it once lived, and has worthy successors of those renowned men that were our ancestors as much as yours, and whose example and principles we inherit to make fruitful as so much seed-corn in a new and fertile land, then you will understand our firm, invincible determination—­deep as the sea, firm as the mountains, but calm as the heavens above us—­to fight this war through at all hazards and at every cost.”

When have Englishmen listened to nobler words, fuller of the true soul of eloquence?  Never, surely, since their nation entered the abdominous period of its existence, recognized in all its ideal portraits, for which food and sleep are the prime conditions of well-being.  Yet the old instinct which has made the name of Englishman glorious in the past was there, in the audience before him, and there was “immense cheering,” relieved by some slight colubrine demonstrations.