and settled in Lexington, Kentucky, where he commenced the practice of his profession before he was of full age.

The road to wealth, to honour, and fame, was open before him. Under our Constitution and laws he might freely employ his great faculties unobstructed by legal impediments, and unaided by exclusive privileges. Very soon Mr. CLAY made a deep and favourable impression upon the people among whom he began his career. The excellence of his natural faculties was soon displayed. Necessity stimulated him in their cultivation. His assiduity, skill, and fidelity in professional engagements secured public confidence. He was elected member of the Legislature of Kentucky, in which body he served several sessions prior to 1806. In that year he was elevated to a seat in the Senate of the United States.

At the bar and in the General Assembly of Kentucky, Mr. CLAY first manifested those high qualities as a public speaker which have secured to him so much popular applause and admiration. His physical and mental organization eminently qualified him to become a great and impressive orator. His person was tall, slender, and commanding. His temperament ardent, fearless, and full of hope. His countenance clear, expressive, and variable-indicating the emotion which predominated at the moment with exact similitude. His voice, cultivated and

modulated in harmony with the sentiment he desired to express, fell upon the ear like the melody of enrapturing music. His eye beaming with intelligence and flashing with coruscations of genius. His gestures and attitudes graceful and natural. These personal advantages won the prepossessions of an audience, even before his intellectual powers began to move his hearers; and when his strong common sense, his profound reasoning, his clear conceptions of his subject in all its bearings, and his striking and beautiful illustrations, united with such personal qualities, were brought to the discussion of any question, his audience was enraptured, convinced, and led by the orator as if enchanted by the lyre of Orpheus.

No man was ever blessed by his Creator with faculties of a higher order of excellence than those given to Mr. CLAY. In the quickness of his perceptions, and the rapidity with which his conclusions were formed, he had few equals and no superior. He was eminently endowed with a nice discriminating taste for order, symmetry, and beauty. He detected in a moment every thing out of place or deficient in his room, upon his farm, in his own or the dress of others. He was a skilful judge of the form and qualities of his domestic animals, which he delighted to raise on his farm. I could give you instances of the quickness and minuteness of his keen faculty of observation which never overlooked

any thing. A want of neatness and order was offensive to him. He was particular and neat in his handwriting, and his apparel. A slovenly blot or negligence of any sort met his condemnation; while he was so organized that he attended to, and arranged little things to please and gratify his natural love for neatness, order, and beauty, his great intellectual faculties grasped all the subjects of jurisprudence and politics with a facility amounting almost to intuition. As a lawyer, he stood at the head of his profession. As a statesman, his stand at the head of the Republican Whig party for nearly half a century, establishes his title to pre-eminence among his illustrious associates.

Mr. CLAY was deeply versed in all the springs of human action. He had read and studied biography and history. Shortly after I left college, I had occasion to call on him in Frankfort, where he was attending court, and well I remember to have found him with Plutarch's Lives in his hands. No one better than he knew how to avail himself of human motives, and all the circumstances which surrounded a subject, or could present them with more force and skill to accomplish the object of an argument.

Mr. CLAY, throughout his public career, was influenced by the loftiest patriotism. Confident in the truth of his convictions and the purity of his purposes, he was ardent, sometimes impetuous, in the pursuit of objects which he believed essential to the

general welfare. Those who stood in his way were thrown aside without fear or ceremony. He never affected a courtier's deference to men or opinions which he thought hostile to the best interests of his country; and hence he may have wounded the vanity of those who thought themselves of consequence. It is certain, whatever the cause, that at one period of his life Mr. CLAY might have been referred to as proof that there is more truth than fiction in those profound lines of the poet

"He who ascends the mountain top shall find

Its loftiest peaks most wrapt in clouds and snow;

He who surpasses or subdues mankind,

Must look down on the hate of those below:
Though far above the sun of glory glow,
And far beneath the earth and ocean spread.

Round him are icy rocks, and loudly blow

Contending tempests on his naked head,

And thus reward the toils which to those summits led."

Calumny and detraction emptied their vials upon him. But how glorious the change! He outlived malice and envy. He lived long enough to prove to the world that his ambition was no more than a holy aspiration to make his country the greatest, most powerful, and best governed on the earth. If he desired its highest office, it was because the greater power and influence resulting from such elevation would enable him to do more than he otherwise could for the progress and advancementfirst of his own countrymen, then of his whole race. His sympathies embraced all. The African slave,

the Creole of Spanish America, the children of renovated classic Greece-all families of men, without respect to color or clime, found in his expanded bosom and comprehensive intellect a friend of their elevation and amelioration. Such ambition as that, is God's implantation in the human heart for raising the down-trodden nations of the earth, and fitting them for regenerated existence in politics, in morals, and religion.

Bold and determined as Mr. CLAY was in all his actions, he was, nevertheless, conciliating. He did not obstinately adhere to things impracticable. If he could not accomplish the best, he contented himself with the nighest approach to it. He has been the great compromiser of those political agitations and opposing opinions which have, in the belief of thousands, at different times, endangered the perpetuity of our Federal Government and Union.

Mr. CLAY was no less remarkable for his admirable social qualities than for his intellectual abilities. As a companion, he was the delight of his friends; and no man ever had better or truer. They have loved him from the beginning, and loved him to the last. His hospitable mansion at Ashland was always open to their reception. No guest ever thence departed without feeling happier for his visit. But, alas! that hospitable mansion has already been converted into a house of mourning; already has intelligence of his death passed with electric velocity to that aged