[Illustration: JEFFERSON DAVIS.] The Old South intellectually was a fitting complement to its unique social system. The charge has often been made against it that it produced few if any great writers and left no lasting impress upon the literature of the times. If this were true, it could be answered that the Old South was true to its distinctive mission. It needed to produce great thinkers, and it produced them, as the half-century of its dominating leadership attests. An Elizabethan age, with its coterie of great writers, comes to any nation only at long intervals, and under conditions which are of providential rather than of human ordering. The Southern man, by tradition, inheritance, and choice, and by virtue of a certain philosophic temper which seemed to inhere in his race, was trained to think and to speak clearly, and especially upon grave matters of public import. He was a born politician in the best sense of that much-abused term. Like Hannibal, he was led early in life to the altars of his country and dedicated to its service. He coveted the power and the authority of the rostrum rather than the pen. In the beauty of field and forest, of bright stream and blossoming flower, of song and sunshine, or in the historic incidents of the Old South, he had ample inspiration and material for his pen, if he had cared to use it. But it was ever his ambition and delight to stand before his countrymen on some great public day, and set forth the length and breadth of some great argument, patiently studied and thought out in his library and now made luminous and inspiring to the listening multitude. If it were true that the South had no great writers, I could even content myself by recalling how, when one of its brilliant thinkers and orators cast his spell upon the culture of old Boston, the finest editorial writer of that city of writers placed over his leading editorial the next morning the question, “What could be finer?”