d to betray an unfair and
personal bias of which he was unaware.

Sensible of his great and long importance to the government, an
egoistic, assuming, imperious, irascible inclination may to some have
appeared to be disclosed; but he ingenuously felt he had a title to be
consulted and that it was a slight and insult to set him aside. Let
the administration that refused him as an instrument beware lest it
become a hammer in the hands of inferior men, whose success will be
suicide, and itself the tool! This may an inspiration from his coffin
prevent! Massachusetts has honored herself at least as much as she did
her son, and cast from yonder halls one ray of comfort on his seat in
the Senate and on his death-bed in rescinding the censure on his
course; for his memory is among her trophies,--no banner more so that
hangs beneath the cupola above the marble floor,--and she is the
inheritor of his renown; for if "Providence made Washington childless
that the country might call him father," Sumner is without offspring
that the State may be his mourner.

This freedom from all selfish heat or hate, one distinction of the
statesman from the politician, is a trait too rare to pass without
emphasis and applause.

An example, indeed, to the ordinary run of village contrivers, caucus
packers, and municipal aspirants, of a man who never pulled a wire,
rolled a log, laid a pipe, listened in a lobby, whispered in the ear
what might not be proclaimed on the house-top, held a man by the
button, or blew any trumpet but of the public good, however in his
magnificent self-respect he might be falsely accused of wishing to
blow only his own!

If a jealous personal honor ever had apology or excuse, it was how
ample and entire in the case of a man--the only one in our
annals--appointed to wear the shining crown of martyrdom before his
translation, to get up out of his own blood and recover from the foul
assassin's bludgeon after medical tortures of the surgeon's moxa in
combustion on his disabled spine, such as Sequard says he never
applied to any other living creature.[A]

So he rose to bear the same unflinching testimony, no more groaning
under the fire of reproach than of the burning cotton; and if proud of
his position, with perfect consistency modest too.

I did not and at this distance of cooling time do not approve all the
phraseology he employed on that senatorial occasion; but his weapons
were words, and, however rough and affront