George Clinton possessed more popular manners than either Schuyler or Scott. Indeed, it has been given to few men in New York to inspire more passionate personal attachment than George Clinton. A patriot never lived who was more bitter in his hostility to English misrule, or more uncompromising in his opposition to toryism. He was a typical Irishman--intolerant, often domineering, sometimes petulant, and occasionally too quick to take offence, but he was magnetic and generous, easily putting himself in touch with those about him, and ready, without hesitation, to help the poorest and carry the weakest. This was the kind of man the people wanted for governor. Clinton came of a good family. His great-grandfather, a too devoted adherent of Charles I., found it healthful to wander about Europe, and finally to settle in the north of Ireland, out of reach of Cromwell's soldiers, and out of sight of his ancestral patrimony. By the time Charles II. came to the throne, the estate was lost, and this friend of the Stuarts lived on in the quiet of his secluded home, and after him, his son; but the grandson, stirred by the blood of a Puritan mother, exchanged the North Sea shore for the banks of the Hudson, where his son breathed the air that made him a leading spirit in the war for American independence. Clinton's youth is one record of precocity. Before the war began he passed through a long, a varied, even a brilliant career, climbing to the highest position in the State before he had reached the age when most men begin to fill responsible places. At fifteen he manned an American privateer; at sixteen, as a lieutenant, he accompanied his father in a successful assault upon Fort Frontenac; at twenty-six, in the colonial legislature, he became the rival of Philip Schuyler in the leadership and influence that enabled a patriotic minority to resist the aggressions of Great Britain; at thirty-six, holding a seat in the Second Continental Congress, he voted for the Declaration of Independence, and commanded a brigade of Ulster County militia. The election which occurred in June was not preceded by a campaign of speaking. People were too busy fighting to supplement a campaign of bullets with one of words. But Jay sent out an electioneering letter recommending Philip Schuyler for governor and George Clinton for lieutenant-governor. This was sufficient to secure for these candidates the conservative vote. It showed, too, Jay's unconcern for high place. He was modest even to diffidence, an infirmity that seems to have depressed him at times as much as it did Nathaniel Hawthorne in a later day.