e, most precious in a great man, which enables him
to adhere to his own line of action despite the excited appeals of
friends and the menaces of variable public opinion; and his constant
purpose was to assert his principles, to fight for them, and present
them to the public in the way most likely to give them the same hold
upon other minds which they had upon his own. In fact, he was not so
much a journalist, in the proper meaning of that term, as a
pamphleteer or writer of leading articles.

In this sphere of effort he had scarcely an equal. His command of
language was extraordinary, tho he had little imagination and his
vocabulary was limited; but he possest the faculty of expressing
himself in a racy, virile manner, within the apprehension of every
reader. As he treated every topic in a practical rather than a
philosophical spirit, and with strong feeling rather than infallible
logic, so he never wrote above the heads of the public. What he said
was plain, clear, striking. His illustrations were quaint and homely,
sometimes even vulgar, but they never failed to tell. He was gifted
also with an excellent humor which greatly enlivened his writing. In
retort, especially when provoked, he was dangerous to his antagonist;
and tho his reasoning might be faulty, he would frequently gain his
cause by a flash of wit that took the public, and, as it were, hustled
his adversary out of court. But he was not always a victorious
polemic. His vehemence in controversy was sometimes too precipitate
for his prudence; he would rush into a fight with his armor
unfastened, and with only a part of the necessary weapons; and as the
late Washington Hunt[44] once exprest it, he could be more damaging to
his friends than to his opponents....

[Footnote 44: Governor of New York in 1851-53, having been elected by
the Whigs.]

The occasional uncertainty of his judgment was probably due, in a
measure, to the deficiency of his education. Self-educated men are not
always endowed with the strong logical faculty and sure good sense
which are developed and strengthened by thorough intellectual culture.
Besides, a man of powerful intellect who is not regularly disciplined
is apt to fall into an exaggerated mental self-esteem from which more
accurate training and information would have preserved him. But the
very imperfection of Greeley's early studies had a compensation in the
fact that they left him, in all the tendencies and habits of his mind,
a