ity to reason. His low cunning conspired with his devouring
egotism to make him throw off all the restraints of official decorum, in
the expectation that he would find duplicates of himself in the crowds
he addressed, and that mob diffused would heartily sympathize with Mob
impersonated. Never was blustering demagogue led by a distempered sense
of self-importance into a more fatal error. Not only was the great body
of the people mortified or indignant, but even his "satraps and
dependents," even the shrewd politicians--accidents of an Accident and
shadows of a shade--who had labored so hard at Philadelphia to weave a
cloak of plausibilities to cover his usurpations, shivered with
apprehension or tingled with shame as they read the reports of their
master's impolitic and ignominious abandonment of dignity and decency in
his addresses to the people he attempted alternately to bully and
cajole. That a man thus self-exposed as unworthy of high trust should
have had the face to expect that intelligent constituencies would send
to Congress men pledged to support _his_ policy and _his_ measures,
appeared for the time to be as pitiable a spectacle of human delusion as
it was an exasperating example of human impudence.

Not the least extraordinary peculiarity of these addresses from the
stump was the immense protuberance they exhibited of the personal
pronoun. In Mr. Johnson's speech, his "I" resembles the geometer's
description of infinity, having "its centre everywhere and its
circumference nowhere." Among the many kinds of egotism in which his
eloquence is prolific, it may be difficult to fasten on the particular
one which is most detestable or most laughable; but it seems to us that
when his arrogance apes humility it is deserving perhaps of an intenser
degree of scorn or derision than when it riots in bravado. The most
offensive part which he plays in public is that of "the humble
individual," bragging of the lowliness of his origin, hinting of the
great merits which could alone have lifted him to his present exalted
station, and representing himself as so satiated with the sweets of
unsought power as to be indifferent to its honors. Ambition is not for
him, for ambition aspires; and what object has he to aspire to? From his
contented mediocrity as alderman of a village, the people have insisted
on elevating him from one pinnacle of greatness to another, until they
have at last made him President of the United States. He mig