republic should she forget his part in the constitution of 1877. That was deliverance from the unspeakable disgrace of nine years--a constitution made by ignorant negroes, also criminals who, to use the words of Ben Hill, sprang at one bound from State prisons into the constitutional convention, and some native deserters of the white race--the constitution so made kept riveted around our necks by the bayonet. The good work would have remained undone for many years had not Toombs advanced $20,000 to keep the convention, which had exhausted its appropriation, in session long enough to finish our own constitution. The railroad commission established by that instrument is really his doing. This post-bellum political career of his, in which he restored his stricken State to her autonomy and self-respect, has not yet won its full appreciation. If Toombs could but be delineated to the life in his extempore action, advice, and phrase he would soon attain a lofty station in world literature. It mattered not what he was talking about,--an affair of business or of other importance, communicating information, telling an experience, complimenting a girl, disporting himself in the maddest merriment, as he often did after some great accomplishment,--his language flashed all the while with a planet-like brilliancy, and the matter was of a piece. Those of us who hang over Martial, how we learn to admire his perpetual freshness and variety! But when we compare him with Catullus, his master, we note that while his epigram is always splendid, the language is commonplace beside that of the other.[110] Toombs was even more than Martial in exhaustless productivity and unhackneyed point, and his words always reflected, like those of Catullus, the hues of Paradise. Perhaps a reader exclaims, "As I do not know Martial and Catullus your comparison is nothing to me." Well, I tell him that I have read Shakspeare from lid to lid more times than I can say, and that I have long been close friends with every one of his characters, all the way from Lear, Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth at the top, down to his immortal clowns at the bottom. Surely with this experience it can be said of me, "The man has seen some majesty." I have often tried, and that with the help of a few intimates almost as deeply read in Shakspeare as myself, to find in the dainty plays an equal to Toombs throwing away everywhere around him with infinite prodigality gems of unpremeditated wisdom and phrase. Samuel Barnett, Linton Stephens, Henry Andrews and my cousin, his wife, Samuel Lumpkin, and S. H. Hardeman, all of whom knew him well, were among these. The end of every effort would be our agreement that Shakspeare himself could hardly have made an adequately faithful representation of Toombs.