In person he was slight, erect, and scarcely of middle height. His intellectuality was indicated by his high, broad forehead, and his bright, quick eye. His smile, which was habitual, was genial and seemed sincere. His features, generally, were pleasing. His manner was always courtly, and he made a study of deportment. No professional diplomat of the Old World, living in the atmosphere of courts, could have been more polished. Contemporaries have described him as “extraordinarily bright and attractive, but without anything supercilious.”[159] In social life he was a favorite. Few men of his period were better fitted for the drawing-room. An entertaining talker, he could converse intelligently upon a multitude of subjects and could pass from a political conference with the Kitchen Cabinet to a social call on Adams, or a chat with Clay, without effort or embarrassment. Fond of feminine society, he could be as charming to a débutante as to a grande dame, and we find him delighting the brilliant Mrs. Livingston with his intellectual charm, while captivating her daughter, Cora, with his juvenile levity. Fastidious to a degree, he could enjoy the unconventional moments of Jackson in his shirt-sleeves and with his pipe, and make the pleasure mutual. This premier of an Administration that contemporaries of the Opposition loved to describe as plebeian and vulgar “was perhaps as polished and captivating a person as the social circles of the Republic have ever known.”[160] As we shall see, nothing ruffled him. He never forgot his dignity nor lost his temper. He was all suavity. He was all art. He lives in history as a politician and President and is never thought of as an orator. He belonged rather to the type of parliamentary speaker which followed the scintillating period when Pitt declaimed in stately sentences and Fox thundered with emotional eloquence--the conversational type which is still prevalent at Westminster. He made no pretense to an artful literary style, but his speeches were in good taste. We have the tradition that he not only prepared his speeches with infinite care, which is probable, but that he rehearsed them before a mirror, which is debatable. It is said that on his retirement from the Senate, and at the sale of his household goods at auction, “it was noticed that the carpet before the large looking-glass was worn threadbare,” and that “it was there that he rehearsed his speeches.”[161] That he was something of an artist and an actor we shall see in the course of the recital of the events of the Jackson Administration.