Martin Van Buren cannot be ranked as a great orator. He spoke too rapidly, and he was wanting in imagination, without which eloquence of the highest character is impossible. Besides, although his head was well formed and his face singularly attractive, his small figure placed him at a disadvantage. He possessed, however, a remarkable command of language, and his graceful, persuasive manner, often animated, sometimes thrilling, frequently impassioned, inspired confidence in his sincerity, and easily classed him among the ablest speakers. His best qualities consisted in his clearness of exposition, his masterly array of forcible argument, his faculty for balancing evidence, for acquiring and comparing facts, and for appreciating tendencies. When Van Buren entered the State Senate he was recognised as the Republican leader of his section. A recent biographer says that his skill in dealing with men was extraordinary, due no doubt to his temper of amity and inborn genius for society. "As you saw him once," wrote William Allen Butler, "you saw him always--always punctilious, always polite, always cheerful, always self-possessed. It seemed to any one who studied this phase of his character as if, in some early moment of destiny, his whole nature had been bathed in a cool, clear, and unruffled depth, from which it drew this lifelong serenity and self-control."[173] Any intelligent observer of public life must have felt that Martin Van Buren was only at the opening of a great political career. Inferior to DeWitt Clinton in the endowments which obtain for their possessor the title of a man of genius, he could, though thirteen years younger, weigh the strength of conflicting tendencies in the political world with an accuracy to which Clinton could not pretend. [Footnote 173: William Allen Butler, _Address on Martin Van Buren_ (1862).]