hat fascination of personality which
makes friends and gains adherents.

Consumed by a gnawing desire of the presidency, beaten for the
nomination in 1852, destroying the serenity of the land two years later
by contending that Congress had no right to limit slavery in the
territories, in the vain hope of winning southern support, but finding
himself instead dubbed traitor and Judas Iscariot, receiving thirty
pieces of silver from a club of Ohio women, travelling from Boston to
Chicago "by the light of his own effigies," which yelling crowds were
burning at the stake, and finally hooted off the stage in his own city,
certainly it would seem that Douglas's public career was over forever.

But he managed to live down his blunder and to regain much of his old
strength by reason of his winning personality; yet made another blunder
when he agreed to meet Abraham Lincoln in debate--and one which cost him
the presidency. For his opponent drove him into corners from which he
could find no way out except at the risk of offending the South. In
those days, one had to be either for or against slavery; there was no
middle course, and the man who attempted to find one, fell between two
stools, as Douglas himself soon learned.

Last scene of all, pitted against that same Abraham Lincoln who had
greased the plank for him and shorn him of his southern support, in the
presidential contest of 1860, defeated and wounded to death by it, for
he knew that never again would he be within sight of that long-sought
prize; yet rising nobly at the last to a height of purest patriotism,
declaring for the Union, pledging his support to Lincoln, pointing the
way of duty to his million followers, and destroying at a blow the
South's hope of a divided North--let us do Stephen A. Douglas, that
justice, and render him that meed of praise; for whatever the mistakes
and turnings and evasions of his career, that last great work of his
outweighed them all.

A man who had a great reputation in his own day as an orator and
statesman, but whose polished periods appeal less and less to succeeding
generations was Edward Everett--an evidence, perhaps, that the head
alone can never win lasting fame. Everett was a New Englander; a Harvard
man, graduating with the highest honors; and two years later, pastor of
a Unitarian church in Boston. There his eloquence soon attracted
attention, and won him a wide reputation. At the age of twenty-one, he
was appointed profess