William C. Preston, fresh from oratorical triumphs in the Nullification contest, entered the Senate at the age of thirty-eight. Few have made a more favorable début in that body. His fame as an orator had preceded him, and Clay’s plans had dedicated the panic session to perfervid oratory. It is impossible to understand, from his speeches in the “Congressional Globe,” the extravagant enthusiasm of so stern a critic as Adams. But we cannot discount the common verdict of his contemporaries who considered him one of the most consummate of orators, and “one of the greatest rhetoricians and declaimers of his generation.”[687] From another we learn that “many thought him the most finished orator the South had produced,” and that he “could arouse his audiences to enthusiasm, and then move them to tears.”[688] Not least among the truimphs of his art was his power to sway a mob in the street as well as move the case-hardened critics of the Senate house. Poet and painter, as he was, it is not surprising that in the heat of advocacy his feelings often predominated over his judgment, and his superheated imagination sometimes led him beyond the realms of reality, but these very weaknesses were to delight the enemies of the Jackson Administration, led to the daily assault by Clay. Thus, in his first year in the Senate, he took his place, far in advance of most of his colleagues, and side by side with Clay, Webster, Calhoun, and Clayton. In addition to Preston, the Opposition was to be further strengthened by the arrival with the panic session of Leigh. Intellectually, he was one of the strongest men in a State of strong men, and at the bar he was recognized as a great constitutional and civil lawyer. As an orator, he was fluent, fiery, intense, impressive. Wise, who was himself no mean master of English, has described him as “a purist in his Anglo-Saxon,” and as having a style “equal to that of the Elizabethan age of English literature.”[689] Like Prentiss, he was a small man who loomed large when speaking, and, like him, too, he had one short leg and wore a cork on the sole of his shoe. Unlike Prentiss, he capitalized his infirmity oratorically. Wise found that, while his mannerisms were not graceful, they “always excited sympathy for his infirmity.” His voice, which was no small part of his oratorical equipment, has been described as “clear, soft, flute-like, not loud, but like murmuring music.”[690] His manner, his speaking method, his very appearance, fitted in well with Clay’s programme of dramatic, lugubrious oratory, and he at once moved to his place beside the panic orators, and played a conspicuous and theatrical part. Thus, with the panic at its flood, with Benton moving to the front of the Administration forces, and with Clay’s oratorical battery strengthened, it is time to look in upon the Senate. CHAPTER XII THE BATTLE OF THE GODS I