OCR Text |
Show He Was Faithful to Burke Rufus Choate Owed His Manner of Thought and His Style to Close Study of That Master of English. When Rufus Choate, universally . conceded to be one of the greatest of American lawyers and orators, and a most brilliant student of the classics class-ics and English literature and history, entered Dartmouth college in 1815, Rev. Dr. Alvan Bond, who was for nearly forty years pastor of a Congregational Con-gregational church at Norwich, Conn., and in his day one of the foremost clergymen of his denomination, was a tutor at Dartmouth. "Rufus Choate became a student under me in Latin," Doctor Bond told my father years afterward. "I thought that when he entered the classroom for the first time he was the handsomest hand-somest lad I had ever seen. His hair was brown and very curly, his eyes were dark, he had a beautiful complexion. com-plexion. But it was, after all, a singular intellectual revelation which was In his face, his manner, and his speech which especially attracted me, and I am sure, all of his fellow students. stu-dents. "His translations of the Latin classics were beyond any comparison the finest that I ever heard in the classroom. They were faithful in expressing ex-pressing the meaning of the Latin text, but, meaning of the Latin translations, Rufus Choate's were expressed ex-pressed in singularly beautiful English. Eng-lish. I never tired of hearing him translate. "A little later I discovered that besides be-sides having a great gift for the Latin classes, young Choate was a precocious pre-cocious reader of the English classics. I remember that In a casual after- class conversation with him one day he. remarked that, greatly as he admired ad-mired Milton and Bacon, and fascinated fasci-nated as he was by Shakespeare, nevertheless nev-ertheless he thought that In some things, especially in his command of the English language, Burke was the superior of any of them. "Choate was graduated from Dartmouth Dart-mouth shortly after I finished my tutorship there and entered the ministry, min-istry, and I heard little or nothing of him after that until he had gained a reputation both as a lawyer and as an orator, though 1 had looked for him to take up literature and become a teacher, teach-er, probably In Dartmouth. Then, one day, in reading a speech that he had delivered, I was struck with the thought that he had been influenced in his manner of thought and his style by a close study of Burke Instantly there came back tc me most vividly the remark that Rufus Choate, when a college lad, had made to me about Burke. Since then I have read speech after speech of Choate's and they all make it plain to me that, as a man, he has been faithful to his boyhood admiration for Edmund Burke. And perhaps because he has been so faithful faith-ful is one great reason why he Is so great an orator, so wonderful a master mas-ter of the English language." Many years after my father had told me of this talk with Dr. Bond It became known to me that Rufus Choate, at the time his cousin, Joseph H. Choate, formerly ambassador to Great Britain, was beginning the study of law, wrote Jo the latter these words: "Remember that these four are the great mlnd3 of England: Shakespeare, Bacon, Milton and Burke. And remember, also, that of these Burke Is not the least." (Copyright, 1911, by E. J. Edwards. All Rights Reserved.) |