Henry Ward Beecher drew the largest house, and produced great enthusiasm
by comparing the United States to an elephant,--though at that time
there can hardly be said to have been any United States; but the fine
oratory of Wendell Phillips made the strongest impression, rather too
rhetorical to be permanent--but it was intense while it lasted. A young
lady who was obliged to take laughing-gas a few days after his lecture
on Toussaint L'Ouverture repeated passages from it with appropriate
gestures, in the dentist's chair, and finally concluded, not with the
name of the negro statesman, but of the Concord high-school teacher.
Phillips was an especial favorite with the older ladies of the town, who
organized a local anti-slavery society in his honor, and held a meeting
of it whenever he came there.
But neither Phillips nor Beecher could equal a lecture by the Unitarian
clergyman on the naval policy of England, which was based on valuable
facts and might well be compared to a few grains of wheat in the midst
of infinite chaff.
Judge Hoar did not lecture before the lyceum, which seemed strange, for
he was not only a man of vigorous intellect, but had, as Lowell said,
"More wit and gumption and shrewd Yankee sense
Than there are mosses on an old stone-fence,"
and he could have made any subject interesting in which he was
interested himself.
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