His career, which had been like the blaze of the sun in the fierceness of its glory, melted into a passing away as tranquil as a summer evening. The majestic energy of an indomitable will gave way to the gentleness of a heart rich in the tenderest affections. No man in private life more completely possessed the hearts of all around him; no man ever retired from public life with more complete mastery of the affections of the people. No man was more truly and typically American in his ideas; no man expressed them more boldly or more sincerely. He was always, under all circumstances, wholly sincere and true. I cannot do better, in closing, than to quote from George Bancroft, the historian. “Up to the last,” he says, “he dared do anything that it was right to do. He united personal and moral courage beyond any man of whom history keeps the record. “Before the nation, before the world, before coming ages, he stands forth the representative, for his generation, of the American mind. And the secret of his greatness is this; by intuitive conception he shared and possessed all the creative ideas of his country and his time; he expressed them with dauntless intrepidity; he enforced them with an immovable will; he executed them with an electric power that attracted and swayed the American people. The nation, in his time, had not one thought of which he was not the boldest and clearest expositor. “Not danger, not an army in battle array, not wounds, not widespread clamor, not age, not the anguish of disease, could impair in the least degree the vigor of his steadfast mind. The heroes of antiquity would have contemplated with awe the unmatched hardihood of his character; and Napoleon, had he possessed his disinterested will, could never have been vanquished. He conquered the wilderness; he conquered the savage; he conquered the bravest veterans trained on the battlefields of Europe; he conquered everywhere in statesmanship; and when death came to get the mastery over him, he turned the last enemy aside as tranquilly as he had done the feeblest of his adversaries, and passed from earth in the triumphant consciousness of immortality.” Notwithstanding the fact of his incomparable successes at the bar, on the bench, in Congress and on the field of battle, which demonstrate his sense and genius, and although his state papers compare well with those of any President, there are yet those living who believe him to have been illiterate. If Colonel Colyar’s masterly “Life and Times of Andrew Jackson” had naught else to commend it, it would deserve the commendation of the American people in its complete refutation of the charge of illiteracy, all-sufficient and incontestable.[2]