touched upon in Washington
society. It led to a good deal of conversation, then and afterwards; and
I must say that a more high-principled and religiously minded statesman
I have never met with than Mr. Corwin.

When he was preparing to deliver his celebrated [114] speech in the
Senate against the war with Mexico, he told me what he was going to say,
and asked me if I thought he could say it and not be politically ruined
by it. I answered that I did not know; but that I would say it if it did
ruin me.

The day came for his speech, and I never saw the Senate Chamber so
densely packed as it was to hear him. He told me that he should not
speak; more than half an hour; but he did speak three hours, not only
against the Mexican war, but against the system of slavery, in the
bitterest language. His friends in Ohio told me, years after, that it
did ruin him. But for that, they said, he would have been President of
the United States.

Thackeray came to Washington while I was here. He gave his course of
lectures on "the English Humorists of the Eighteenth Century." His
style, especially in his earlier writings, had one quality which the
critics did not seem to notice; it was not conventional, but spun out
of the brain. With the power of thought to take hold of the mind, and
a rich, deep, melodius voice, he contrived, without one gesture, or my
apparent emotion in his delivery, to charm away an hour as pleasantly
as I have ever felt it in a lecture. What he told me of his way of
composing confirms me in my criticism on his style.-He did not dash
his pen on paper, like Walter Scott, and write off twenty pages without
stop-[115] ping, but, dictating to an amanuensis,--a plan which leaves
the brain to work undisturbed by the pen-labor,--dictating from his
chair, and often from his bed, he gave out sentence by sentence, slowly,
as they were moulded in his mind.

Thackeray was sensitive about public opinion; no writer, I imagine, was
ever otherwise. I remember, one morning, he was sitting in our parlor,
when letters from the mail came in. They were received with some
eagerness, of course, and he said, "You seem to be pleased to have
letters; I am not."--"No?" we said.--"No. I have had letters from
England this morning, and they tell me that 'Henry Esmond' is not
liked."

This led to some conversation on novels and novel-writing, and I
ventured to say: "How is it that not one of the English novelists has
ever drawn any high or a