The Bar has given few historically-great statesmen to the world,fewer than the Church, which Mr. Choate undervalues in a sentence which, we cannot help thinking, is below the dignity of the occasion, and jarringly discordant with the generally elevated tone of his address.

The hardy pioneers who, with their axes, made straight the pathway of an advancing civilization, were sturdy men who need not be undervalued to us of the mechanical age.

The things which in his darkness he did undervalue as trifles to be mocked at, he now can only mind and admire, since he became a child of light; now being delivered from that blindness and brutishness of spirit, which possesseth the world, (and possessed himself till he was transformed by the renewing of his mind) who esteem basely of spiritual things, and set them at nought, he prizeth as alone precious.

Unlearned men, who neither make, nor can make, any pretensions to a knowledge of grammar as a study, if they show themselves modest in what they profess, are by no means to be despised or undervalued for the want of such knowledge.