"No man is lord of anything, Though in and of him there is much consisting, Till he communicate his part to others; Nor doth he of himself know them for aught, Till he behold them formed in the applause Where they're extended, which like an arch, reverberates The voice again; or, like a gate of steel, Fronting the sun, receives and renders back His figure and his heat." To have rescued from comparative forgetfulness the career of one so great--a career obscured by the smoke of war which interposed to check the results of labors so valuably and eminently rendered, is a task for the privilege of which any might feel profoundly grateful. CHARLES C. LANGDON Coming from New England to Alabama in the bud of manhood, Mr. Langdon gradually rose from a clerkship in a country store to a rank of distinction in his adopted state. The conditions of his early life forbade the acquisition of a thorough education, as on his father's Connecticut farm he had to perform the duties of a common laborer, and avail himself of what advantages were afforded in a winter school in his native New England. These conditions did not prevent, however, an early ambition to attain to something in life worth while, and though twice defeated for the legislature in Alabama, he was undaunted, but the rather encouraged, because in each instance he was defeated by a scratch. In his first defeat he lost the object of his aspiration by just eleven votes, and in the second race he was defeated by fourteen. Mr. Langdon's early life was characterized by a series of misfortunes, but the grit with which he would each time face afresh the future, indicated the texture of his character. By means of rigid economy he succeeded in the accumulation of some capital, with which he entered into the cotton commission business in Mobile, in connection with the Honorable Martin A. Lee, of Perry County, but his business was engulfed in the financial disaster of 1836-7. In the first whig convention ever held in Alabama he became the nominee of that party for the legislature, and while again sustaining defeat he had conducted the campaign with ability so signal that his party purchased The Mobile Advertiser as its organ, and placed in control of it Mr. Langdon. His facile pen won him fresh distinction, and in two successive terms he was chosen for the legislature from Mobile County, first in 1839 and again in 1846. For a period of eight years he devoted himself to editorial work, and in 1848 was elected mayor of Mobile, to which position he was annually elected for a period of seven years, save one. Meanwhile he continued the chief exponent of the whig party for the state, and for the success attained by that party indebtedness was due Mr. Langdon.