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 advancement――first 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.