no
torch. He was not true to his ideal. He talked sometimes as though
his head was among the stars, but he stood in the gutter. In the
name of religion he tried to break the will of Stephen Girard--to
destroy the greatest charity in all the world; and in the name of
the same religion he defended the Fugitive Slave Law. His purpose
was the same in both cases. He wanted office. Yet he uttered a
few very great paragraphs, rich with thought, perfectly expressed.

Clay I never heard, but he must have had a commanding presence, a
chivalric bearing, an heroic voice. He cared little for the past.
He was a natural leader, a wonderful talker--forcible, persuasive,
convincing. He was not a poet, not a master of metaphor, but he
was practical. He kept in view the end to be accomplished. He
was the opposite of Webster. Clay was the morning, Webster the
evening. Clay had large views, a wide horizon. He was ample,
vigorous, and a little tyrannical.

Benton was thoroughly commonplace. He never uttered an inspired
word. He was an intense egoist. No subject was great enough to
make him forget himself. Calhoun was a political Calvinist--narrow,
logical, dogmatic. He was not an orator. He delivered essays,
not orations. I think it was in 1851 that Kossuth visited this
country. He was an orator. There was no man, at that time, under
our flag, who could speak English as well as he. In the first
speech I read of Kossuth's was this line: "Russia is the rock
against which the sigh for freedom breaks." In this you see the
poet, the painter, the orator.

S. S. Prentiss was an orator, but, with the recklessness of a
gamester, he threw his life away. He said profound and beautiful
things, but he lacked application. He was uneven, disproportioned,
saying ordinary things on great occasions, and now and then, without
the slightest provocation, uttering the sublimest and most beautiful
thoughts.

In my judgment, Corwin was the greatest orator of them all. He
had more arrows in his quiver. He had genius. He was full of
humor, pathos, wit, and logic. He was an actor. His body talked.
His meaning was in his eyes and lips. Gov. O. P. Morton of Indiana
had the greatest power of statement of any man I ever heard. All
the argument was in his statement. The facts were perfectly grouped.
The conclusion was a necessity.

The best political speech I ever heard was made by Gov. Richard J.
Oglesby of Illinois. It had ever