The speaker of the House of Representatives is Mr. Clay, a delegate from Kentucky, and who, not long ago, acted a conspicuous part, as one of the American commissioners at Ghent.[117] He is a tall, thin, and not very muscular man; his gait is stately, but swinging; and his countenance, while it indicates genius, denotes dissipation. As an orator, Mr. Clay stands high in the estimation of his countrymen, but he does not possess much gracefulness or elegance of manner; his eloquence is impetuous and vehement; it rolls like a torrent, but like a torrent which is sometimes irregular, and occasionally obstructed. Though there is a {354} want of rapidity and fluency in his elocution, yet he has a great deal of fire and vigour in his expression. When he speaks he is full of animation and earnestness; his face brightens, his eye beams with additional lustre, and his whole figure indicates that he is entirely occupied with the subject on which his eloquence is employed. In action, on which Demosthenes laid such peculiar emphasis, and which was so highly esteemed among the ancients, Mr. Clay is neither very graceful nor very imposing. He does not, in the language of Shakespear, "so suit the word to the action, and the action to the word, as not to o'erstep the modesty of nature." In his gesticulation and attitudes, there is sometimes an uniformity and awkwardness that lessen his merit as an orator, and in some measure destroy the impression and effect his eloquence would otherwise produce. Mr. Clay does not seem to have studied rhetoric as a science, or to have paid much attention to those artificial divisions and rhetorical graces and ornaments on which the orators of antiquity so strongly insist. Indeed, oratory as an art is but little studied in this country. Public speakers here trust almost entirely to the efficacy of their own native powers for success in the different fields of eloquence, and search not for the extrinsic embellishments and facilities of art. It is but rarely they unite the Attic and Rhodian manner, and still more rarely do they devote their attention to the acquisition {355} of those accomplishments which were, in the refined ages of Greece and Rome, considered so essential to the completion of an orator. Mr. Clay, however, is an eloquent speaker; and notwithstanding the defects I have mentioned, very seldom fails to please and convince. His mind is so organized that he overcomes the difficulties of abstruse and complicated subjects, apparently without the toil of investigation or the labour of profound research. It is rich, and active, and rapid, grasping at one glance, connections the most distant, and consequences the most remote, and breaking down the trammels of error and the cobwebs of sophistry. When he rises to speak he always commands attention, and almost always satisfies the mind on which his eloquence is intended to operate. The warmth and fervor of his