But the most interesting person, as statesman, hat I saw in Washington, was Thomas Corwin, of Ohio, commonly called Tom Corwin. This was a later period. Circumstances, or the chances of conversation, sometimes lead to acquaintance and friendship, which years of ordinary intercourse fail to bring about. It happened, the first time I saw Mr. Corwin, that some observation I made upon political normality seemed to strike him as a new thought; suppose it was a topic seldom touched upon in Washington society. It led to a good deal of conversation, then and afterwards; and I must say that a more high-principled and religiously minded statesman I have never met with than Mr. Corwin. When he was preparing to deliver his celebrated [114] speech in the Senate against the war with Mexico, he told me what he was going to say, and asked me if I thought he could say it and not be politically ruined by it. I answered that I did not know; but that I would say it if it did ruin me. The day came for his speech, and I never saw the Senate Chamber so densely packed as it was to hear him. He told me that he should not speak; more than half an hour; but he did speak three hours, not only against the Mexican war, but against the system of slavery, in the bitterest language. His friends in Ohio told me, years after, that it did ruin him. But for that, they said, he would have been President of the United States. Thackeray came to Washington while I was here. He gave his course of lectures on "the English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century." His style, especially in his earlier writings, had one quality which the critics did not seem to notice; it was not conventional, but spun out of the brain. With the power of thought to take hold of the mind, and a rich, deep, melodius voice, he contrived, without one gesture, or my apparent emotion in his delivery, to charm away an hour as pleasantly as I have ever felt it in a lecture. What he told me of his way of composing confirms me in my criticism on his style.-He did not dash his pen on paper, like Walter Scott, and write off twenty pages without stop-[115] ping, but, dictating to an amanuensis,--a plan which leaves the brain to work undisturbed by the pen-labor,--dictating from his chair, and often from his bed, he gave out sentence by sentence, slowly, as they were moulded in his mind. Thackeray was sensitive about public opinion; no writer, I imagine, was ever otherwise. I remember, one morning, he was sitting in our parlor, when letters from the mail came in. They were received with some eagerness, of course, and he said, "You seem to be pleased to have letters; I am not."--"No?" we said.--"No. I have had letters from England this morning, and they tell me that 'Henry Esmond' is not liked."