evented showing fair play in New York in 1884. Blaine lost in his
illness coincident with the Cincinnati convention the confidence of
the country in his firm health and strength, and that handicapped him
to his grave. Perhaps it is even more important that he lost faith
in himself as a strong man, and had almost a superstition that if he
became President it would be for him personally a fatality. And yet
he was intellectually a growing man for fifteen years after his
Cincinnati defeat. His greater works, his most influential ideas, the
full fruition of his gifts, were after that catastrophe.

Mr. Blaine was so strong and so weak, so delicate and so tenacious,
that he was as constant a puzzle to those who loved him as to his
enemies, to the best-informed as to the most ill-informed. Those
very near to him took the liberty of laughing at him about his two
overcoats, and his going to bed and sending for a doctor in the
afternoon, and getting off with gayety to the opera in the evening;
about an alleged indigestion followed by eating a confection that
would have tested the hardihood of a young candy-eater. One who
studied him with affection wrote of him that he had an association
of qualities giving at once sensitiveness and endurance, and we were
indebted to this for the faculties, the capacities, that made up
the man whose influence had been so remarkable and his popularity a
phenomenon. He was of fine sensibilities, and there was nothing on
earth or in the air that did not tell him something. He was like an
instrument of music that a breath would move to melody, and that was
ever in tune for any wind that blew, and yet had patient strength, and
wore like steel. He had a rare make-up of refinement and power, and
life was sweeter and brighter and more costly far to him than to the
ordinary man.

It was after his first and, as it turned out, final defeat for the
Presidency, in his earliest effort for the office, that his fame grew
splendid. His campaigning was fascinating, and his speeches, as the
years passed, took greater variety. In his tour when a candidate in
1884, his addresses were marvellous in aptitude and in a thousand
felicities. There was much said of the fact that he was not a lawyer,
and an affected superiority to him by gentlemen whose profession
permitted "fees," and there was a system of deprecation to the effect
that he only harangued, that he had neither originality nor grace. But
after Garfield's death