Though Mr. Calhoun acknowledged, in his own winning way, the involuntary tributes of friendship and admiration, he courteously declined, whenever he could with propriety, public testimonies of homage which were offered to him. His wife shared with him this unostentatious spirit, preferring the voice of friendship to the acclamations of the multitude. I have heard some of his family say that they coveted nothing, not even the presidency, for him. They, with many of us who knew him, felt that even the first gift of a great nation could not add one gem to his crown--that crown of genius and virtue, whose glorious beauty no mortal power could illumine with new effulgence. His sincerity was perfect. What he thought he said. He was no diplomatist. Some of his theories might seem paradoxical, but a paradox is not necessarily a contradiction. He has been accused of inconsistency. Those who thus accuse him do him grievous wrong. Nothing is more inconsistent than to persist in a uniform belief when changing circumstances demand its modification. How absurd to preserve a law which in the progress of society has become null and obsolete! for instance, granting to a criminal "the benefit of clergy." "Nothing," says a distinguished English writer, "is so revolutionary as to attempt to keep all things fixed, when, by the very laws of nature, all things are perpetually changing. Nothing is more arrogant than for a fallible being to refuse to open his mind to conviction." When Mr. Calhoun altered his opinion, consistency itself required the change.