"General Roger A. Pryor's Decoration Day address wins golden opinions. It was brave, patriotic, and statesman-like. He grasps the situation. He does not take much stock in bygones, thinks gravestones are made to leave behind and not to tie to, and would rather have a live man with average common sense than the biggest obituary that was ever written. General Pryor is one of the few men who have a to-morrow."—_Evening Express_, June 12.
The _Springfield Republican_, May 31, says:—
"The Grand Army fellows who opposed inviting Roger A. Pryor to deliver the address at Brooklyn yesterday probably feel pretty well ashamed of themselves by this time. Certainly they would have deprived the country of a very desirable speech if they had succeeded in preventing his speaking."
Broad as were the views of the ex-rebel at this time, the Southern papers indorsed him:—
"General Roger A. Pryor's address on Decoration Day, at Brooklyn, New York, is quite remarkable. It is very brilliant and very eloquent. There is logic, but it is 'logic on fire,' as Macaulay said of Lord Chatham. There is a magnificent sweep in the sentences, and high and patriotic thought throughout. It reminds us in its glow and passion, in its rich and flowing rhetoric, and in its exquisite diction of Edmund Burke's tremendous speech on the 'Nabob of Arcot's Debts.' We do not think any man can accompany the orator, with his kindling, intense periods and sonorous, ornate style, with his lofty thought and impassioned eloquence, without a responsive thrill of emotion and a feeling of pride that this master of speech is a Southron."
"The address of General Roger A. Pryor delivered on Decoration Day at Brooklyn, N. Y., is a brilliant production. Like everything emanating from him, it is full of fine thought and fine sentiment, with a sweeping array of glowing genius, all clothed in a diction simple, pure, and as opposite as if the idea and language had been born together from a brain entirely original and independent in its conceptions. The spirit of the address, too, is national, catholic, patriotic, and grandly American from beginning to end.
"Pryor is a man of splendid parts, and Virginia has reason to be proud of him."—(Richmond, Va.)