The development in Mr. Davis of the high and rare qualities, requisite to parliamentary leadership, was rapid and decisive. His nature instinctively aspires to influence and power, and under no circumstances could it rest contented in an attitude of inferiority. Independence, originality, and intrepidity, added to earnest and intelligent conviction; unwavering devotion to principle and purpose; a will stern and inexorable, and a disposition frank, courteous, and generous, are features of character which rarely fail to make a representative man. After the death of Mr. Calhoun, he was incomparably the ablest exponent of States' Rights principles, and even during the life of that great publicist, Mr. Davis, almost equally with him, shared the labors and responsibilities of leadership. His personal courage is of that knightly order, which in an age of chivalry would have sought the trophies of the tourney, and his moral heroism fixed him immovably upon the solid rock of principle, indifferent to the inconvenience of being in a minority and in no dread of the storms of popular passion. His faith in his principles was no less earnest than his confidence in his ability to triumphantly defend them. In the midst of the agitation and excitement of 1850, Henry Clay, the Great Compromiser, whose brilliant but erring genius so long and fatally led estray, from the correct understanding of the vital issue at stake between the North and the South, a numerous party of noble and true-hearted Southern gentlemen, furnished the occasion of an impressive illustration of this quality. Turning, in debate, to the Mississippi Senator, he notified the latter of his purpose, at some future day, to debate with him elaborately, an important question of principle. "Now is the moment," was the reply of the intrepid Davis, ever eager to champion his beloved and imperiled South, equally against her avowed enemies, and the not less fatal policy of those who were but too willing to compromise upon an issue vital to her rights and dignity. And what a shock of arms might then have been witnessed, could Clay have dispelled thirty years of his ripe three-score and ten! Each would have found a foeman worthy of his steel. In answer to this bold defiance, Clay, like Hotspur, would have rushed to the charge, with visor up and lance _couchant_; and Davis, another Saladin, no less frank than his adversary, but far more dexterous, would have met him with a flash of that Damascus scymetar, whose first blow severed the neck of the foeman.