could not read the story of their public career without going
to sleep. They never said anything worth quoting, and never
did anything that any other equally good and sensible man
would not have done in their place. I have a huge respect
for them. I can never myself attain to their excellence.
Yet I would as lief spend my life as an omnibus horse as live
theirs.

But we have occasionally some delightful exceptions. It
so happens that some of the best, most attractive men I have
known, were from the South. They are men who stood by the
Southern people through thick and thin during the Rebellion,
and in resisting every attempt on the part of the victorious
Northern majority to raise the colored people to a political
equality. They have all of them, I believe, been Free Traders.
In general they have opposed the construction of the Constitution
which has prevailed in New England and throughout the North,
and in which I have myself always believed.

I have never had much personal intimacy with any of them.
I have had some vigorous conflicts with one or two of them.
Yet I have had from each before our association ended, assurances
of their warm personal regard. One of them, perhaps, on the
whole, the most conspicuous, is Lucius Q. C. Lamar. His
very name, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus, indicates that his
father must have looked for his example for his son to follow
far away from the American life about him.

Lamar was one of the most delightful of men. His English
style, both in conversation and in public speaking, was fresh
and original, well adapted to keep his hearers expectant and
alert, and to express the delicate and subtle shades of meaning
that were required for the service of his delicate and subtle
thought.

He had taken the part of the South with great zeal. He told
me shortly before he left the Senate that he thought it was
a great misfortune for the world that the Southern cause had
been lost. He stood by his people, as he liked to call them,
in their defeat and in their calamity without flinching or
reservation. While he would, I am sure, have done nothing
himself not scrupulously honorable, and while there was nothing
in his nature of cruelty, still less of brutality, yet he
did not stop to inquire into matters of right and wrong when
a Southerner had got into trouble, by reason of anything a
white Democrat had done in conflict with the National authority.
Yet Mr. Lamar desired most sincerel