urifiers. We
shall meet, as we ought, whoever invades our rights, with the bayonet.
We are the gentlemen of this land, and gentlemen always make revolutions
in history."

This was said in the tone of an injured, but haughty man, with perfect
intellectual poise and earnestness, yet with a fervor of feeling that
brought the speaker erect in his chair.

The significance of the last remarks, which the writer can make oath he
has preserved _verbatim_, being somewhat calculated to draw on a debate,
of course wholly unfitted to the time and place, the writer, apologizing
for having taken so much time at a formal interview, and receiving, of
course, a most courteous invitation to renew the call, found himself,
after but twenty minutes' conversation, on the street, in the lonely
December evening, with a mind full of reflections.

The utter recklessness concerning life and property with which the
splendid intellect, under the lead of the ungovernable passions of this
man, was plunging the nation into a civil war of which no one could
foresee the end, was the thought uppermost. Certainly, the abstract
manliness of asserting rights supposed to be infringed it was in itself
impossible not to respect. But the man seemed to love war for its own
sake, as pugnacious schoolboys love sham-fights, with a sort of glee in
the smell of the smoke of battle. The judicial calmness of statesmanship
had entirely disappeared in the violence of sectional passion. Perhaps
he might be capable of ruining his country from pure love of turbulence
and power, could he but find a pretext of force sufficient to blind
first himself and then others. Yet Robert Toombs, in the Senate Chamber,
takes little children in his arms, and is one of the kindest of the
noblemen of Nature in the sphere of his unpolitical sympathies. The
reader who is familiar with Mr. Toombs's speeches will need no assurance
that he spoke frankly.[A]

[Footnote A: Ten days later, in the Senate, with a face full of the
combined erubescence of revolutionary enthusiasm and unstatesmanlike
anger, Mr. Toombs closed a speech to the Northern Senators in the
following amazing words, (_Congressional Globe_, 1860-61, p. 271,)
which justify, it will be seen, every syllable of the report of the
conversation upon the same points:--

"You will not regard confederate obligations; you will not regard
constitutional obligations; you will not regard your oaths. What am I to
do? Am I a freeman? Is my S