ematical mind; while the winning man in 1856 was a heavy player,
devoid of skill, whose decisive advantage was that he had been out of
the game for four years. Mr. Seward, too, was within an ace of
winning, when an old quarrel between two New York editors swept his
cards from the table.

No: the President of the United States is not prime minister, but
chief magistrate, and he is subject to that law of nature which places
at the head of regular governments more or less respectable Nobodies.
In Europe this law of nature works through the hereditary principle,
and in America through universal suffrage. In all probability, we
shall usually elect a person of the non-committal species,--one who
will have lived fifty or sixty years in the world without having
formed an offensive conviction or uttered a striking word,--one who
will have conducted his life as those popular periodicals are
conducted, in which there are "no allusions to politics or religion."
And may not this be part of the exquisite economy of nature, which
ever strives to get into each place the smallest man that can fill it?
How miserably out of place would be a man of active, originating,
disinterested spirit, at the head of a strictly limited,
constitutional government, such as ours is in time of peace, in which
the best President is he who does the least? Imagine a live man thrust
out over the bows of a ship, and compelled to stand as figure-head,
lashed by the waves and winds during a four years' voyage, and
expected to be pleased with his situation because he is gilt!

Daniel Webster so passionately desired the place, that he could never
see how far he was from the possibility of getting it. He was not such
timber as either Southern fire-eaters or Northern wire-pullers had any
use for; and a melancholy sight it was, this man, once so stately,
paying court to every passing Southerner, and personally begging
delegates to vote for him. He was not made for that. An elephant does
sometimes stand upon his head and play a barrel-organ, but every one
who sees the sorry sight sees also that it was not the design of
Nature that elephants should do such things.

A Marshfield elm may be for half a century in decay without exhibiting
much outward change; and when, in some tempestuous night, half its
bulk is torn away, the neighborhood notes with surprise that what
seemed solid wood is dry and crumbling pith. During the last fifteen
years of Daniel Webster's life, h