What were the sources of Jackson's pre-eminent greatness, of his invariable success, of his resistless personal influence, of his deep hold upon the minds of his fellows? He was no orator, he was no writer, he had in fact no faculty of expression, he was unsustained by wealth, he never courted the multitude, he relied upon no external assistances. What he did, he achieved for himself, without aid, directly, and by the mere force of his own nature. Neither education, nor family, nor the accidents of fortune, nor the friendship of the powerful, helped to raise him aloft, and push him forward in his career. The secret of his elevation, then, was this,--that he saw the Right and loved it, and was never afraid to pursue it, against all the allurements of personal ambition, and all the hostility of the banded sons of error. There have been many men of a larger reach and compass of mind, and some of a keener insight and sagacity, but none, of a more stern, inflexible, self-sacrificing devotion to what they esteemed to be true. He carried his life in his hand, ready to be thrown away at the call of honor or patriotism, and it was this unswerving integrity, which commended him so strongly to the affections of the masses. Whatever men may be in themselves, their hearts are always prone to do homage to honesty. They love those whom they can trust, or only hate them, because their justice and truth stands in the way of some cherished, selfish object. Jackson's will was imperious; the report does not follow the flash more rapidly than his execution of a deed followed the conception of it; or rather his thought and his act were an instinctive, instantaneous, inseparable unity. Like a good marksman, as soon as he saw his object he fired, and generally with effect. This impulsive decision gave rise to some over-hasty and precipitate movements, but, in the main, was correct. What politicians, therefore, could only accomplish if at all by a slow and cunning process of intrigue, what diplomatists reached by long-winded negotiations, he marched to, without indirection, with his eye always on the point, and his whole body following the lead of the eye. We do not mean that he was utterly without subtlety,--for some subtlety is necessary to the most ordinary prudence, and is particularly necessary to the forecast of generalship,--but simply that he never dissimulated, never assumed disguise, never carried water on both shoulders, as the homely phrase has it, and never went around an obstacle, when he could level it, or push it out of the way. The foxy or feline element was small in a nature, into which so much magnanimity, supposed to be lionlike, entered.