Then, there was Webster, of the same age with Calhoun, though as yet only five years in public service; the most majestic personality which America has ever produced, though born of the hardy yeomanry of New England; profound in thought, grandly eloquent in speech, and royally impressive in bearing; full of good cheer, in spite of the puritanism of his ancestry, enjoying his friends and adored by his friends; a splendid lawyer, a great statesman, and an incomparable orator--in a word, a demigod; by no means so austere in character as in appearance; liable, as genius too often is, to sometimes break over the restraints of customary morality, but doing it in so grand and natural a manner as to make the rule which he had broken seem narrow, insignificant, and mean. [Sidenote: Henry Clay.] And then, there was Clay, the most genuine American of them all; rather superficial in thought, entrancing in his oratory, with a voice as winning as the siren's song, elegant and gallant in his manners, perfectly irresistible in conversation, jovial and cheery and happy, the prince of good fellows, loved and worshipped by everybody who knew him; enthusiastic in his patriotism, seeking to make his country not only independent of the world in all its policies but the leader of the world in civilization, a zealous propagandist of American republicanism, the "lion-hearted knight" of American statesmen. He was now in the prime of his manhood, forty-seven years of age. He had been a member of the Senate of the United States at thirty, but it was upon the floor of the House of Representatives, and as Speaker of the House, which office he again held, that he had won his most brilliant laurels. He was at the moment the great champion of the {135} tariff, of national internal improvements, and of the cause of the South American States in their struggle for independence against Spain and Portugal--of what he called the American system of political and industrial independence. Of his competitors only Crawford differed with him in regard to these principles in anything more than a slight degree. Crawford was considered as rather more particularistic, especially in his views on the question of internal improvements. But Clay, with his genial self-confidence and irresistible self-assertion, had assumed in the popular mind, as well as in the Congress, the part of the leading representative of these policies. He had the advantage or the disadvantage of that, whichever it might prove to be. [Sidenote: Andrew Jackson.]