Boone was the simpler and sincerer soul, the graver and more dignified figure; Crockett the more magnetic personality, the more plausible, if at times less candid, man. One man was practically as ignorant as the other. Boone had no taste for political life, and his sole wish was to live ever a little beyond that civilization of which he was the pioneer and guide. Crockett, built also of good, common, human clay, for two-thirds of his life seemed animated by no greater ambition. Then all at once we see him turned politician. He succeeds, and his name grows larger than his neighborhood and country. Not knowing the basis of the tariff, ignorant of the text of the Constitution, master of the practice, but unable to explain the theory, of a caucus or a town meeting, he finds himself owner of a seat in the United States Congress, fairly the central figure of that Congress, the cynosure not only of the South but of the East and North. He is at this time nothing but a great, good-humored boy, the very type alike of an open-handed generosity, and an open-mouthed and sometimes ill-timed levity. He is the product of political accident. Yet, wonder of wonders, we find this man, quite past the time usually assigned as the limit for the development and fixing of a man’s character, suddenly blossoming out into a second development, a second manhood, more thoughtful and more dignified than that of his early days. Without education when he started for the halls of Congress, he gains that education more rapidly than did ever man before. Crockett returned to his home a graver and broader man. Even his speech had gained freedom, ease and clarity, though still he delighted, perhaps more in jest than otherwise, to bring in the crudities of expression, the quips and quirks of that language through which he had, to his own surprise and without his own plan, won his sudden notoriety—a notoriety that was later to turn to fame. There is not to be found in all the history of American statesmanship so swift and sound a ripening into mature thought as that of this backwoodsman, the first political “mugwump” or independent; who engaged in politics for reasons of self-interest, and then all at once grew big enough to set self-interest aside and to do what seemed to him wise and right—a type of statesmanship now well-nigh defunct in America. And yet we see him, in the pang of his first decisive political defeat, growing bitter at his reverses, losing the genial philosophy of his earlier years, even renouncing his country, and forthwith turning away from family, friends and commonwealth to seek a new fortune in an alien land.