Though so long honored, and so many years the depositary of public honors and public trusts, Mr. Macon's was the rare merit of never having solicited any one to vote for him, or even intimated a wish that he should; and though no one shared more fully the confidence of a large circle of influential friends, his is the praise of never having solicited the slightest interest for his own preferment. Public honors sought him; he prized them only as the reward of faithful and virtuous performance, and regarded place as the means merely of bringing him in nearer contact with public duty. He made no popular harangues, seeking to avoid temptation of being betrayed into promises which he could not or would not fulfill, or into protestations which his heart would not sanction. He was never found rambling through his Congressional District, seeking to engineer himself into popular favor by means which self-respect and a just sense of the rights of others forbade. His rule was to attend punctually, once a year, if health permitted, the first court held in each county in his district after his return from Congress. There he met his constituents, there he received their greetings and heard their complaints; there, without simulation, gave a full account of his stewardship. In his intercourse with them he was easy, frank, and communicative, never withholding his opinion upon matters of public concernment, and always inviting them to the exercise of the utmost freedom of thought and of speech as the highest privilege of freemen and the surest guard of liberty. He never attended what, in his own characteristic language, he called "a man-dinner," regarding all such political pageants as having too much deceptious exterior, and as being too little calculated to better the popular heart or enlighten the popular mind. And when, upon his retirement from Congress, a large portion of his old constituents tendered him the compliment of a public dinner, he declined it in a brief note, saying that "he had never been at such a show, and that he had already received the most gratifying proofs of their good-will and esteem." To shun all ostentatious display and the emptiness of pride was, with him, a _principle_; and to do good to his fellow-men, and to society, a rule of action which he scrupulously observed, always abstaining, in the employment of his faculties, and in the use of the abundant goods with which frugal industry had blessed him, from the gratification of any passion, the indulgence of which prudence forbade to others less favored by fortune--thus teaching, by both precept and example, the necessity of temperance, frugality and industry, as the surest and best foundation for contentment and plenty.