Of the four men, Dana was
the most marked. Without dogmatism or self-assertion, he seemed
always to be fully in sight, a figure that completely filled a
well-defined space. He, too, talked well, and his mind worked
close to its subject, as a lawyer's should; but disguise and
silence it as he liked, it was aristocratic to the tenth
generation.
In that respect, and in that only, Charles Sumner was like him,
but Sumner, in almost every other quality, was quite different
from his three associates -- altogether out of line. He, too,
adored English standards, but his ambition led him to rival the
career of Edmund Burke. No young Bostonian of his time had made
so brilliant a start, but rather in the steps of Edward Everett
than of Daniel Webster. As an orator he had achieved a triumph by
his oration against war; but Boston admired him chiefly for his
social success in England and on the Continent; success that gave
to every Bostonian who enjoyed it a halo never acquired by
domestic sanctity. Mr. Sumner, both by interest and instinct,
felt the value of his English connection, and cultivated it the
more as he became socially an outcast from Boston society by the
passions of politics. He was rarely without a pocket-full of
letters from duchesses or noblemen in England. Having sacrificed
to principle his social position in America, he clung the more
closely to his foreign attachments.
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