To President Madison, dead or
alive." The responding toast by Major Lomax was: "To the Prince Regent,
drunk or sober." The British officer who had proposed the toast to
Madison immediately sprang to his feet and with much indignation
inquired: "Do you mean to insult me, sir?" The quick rejoinder was: "I
am responding to an insult!"

I met Charles Sumner soon after his first appearance in the United
States Senate as the successor of Daniel Webster, who had become
Secretary of State. He was a man of striking appearance and bore himself
with the dignity so characteristic of the statesmen of that period.
"Sumner is one of them literary fellows," was the facetious criticism of
the Hon. Zachariah Chandler of Michigan, who a few years later became
one of his colleagues in the Senate, and who in earlier life was
accumulating a large fortune while Mr. Sumner, in his Massachusetts
home, was engaged in those intellectual and scholarly pursuits which
eventually made him one of the ripest and most accomplished students in
the land. Chandler, however, in his own way, furnished a conspicuous
example to aspiring youths of the day, both by his earlier and
subsequent life, of what may be accomplished by determined application.

For a decade or more preceding the Civil War the political sentiment of
Washington, especially in reference to the violent anti-slavery
agitation then engrossing the thought of the country, was decidedly in
sympathy with the attitude of the South. It is not, therefore,
surprising that Sumner, whose radical views were known from Maine to
Texas, should have been received at first in Washington society with but
little cordiality. As the years passed along, he was rapidly forging
himself ahead to the leadership of his party in the Senate and, of
course, became strongly inimical to Buchanan's administration. He was
regarded with confidence and esteem by his own party, and, although
naturally both disliked and feared by his political opponents, it could
be truthfully said of him that he was

A man that fortune's buffets and rewards
Hast ta'en with equal thanks,

and that no attempts to socially ostracize or to deride him for his
political views and his intense application to his sense of duty
deterred the great Massachusetts statesman from pursuing the "even tenor
of his way."

An anecdote went the rounds of the Capital to the effect that, one
morning when a gentleman called to see Sumner at his rooms on