"It is," said he,
"to this early practice of the art of all arts that I am
indebted for the primary and leading impulses that
stimulated my progress, and have shaped and moulded my
entire destiny."
We should be glad to know more of this self-training; but Mr. Clay's
"campaign" biographers have stuffed their volumes too full of eulogy
to leave room for such instructive details. We do not even know the
books from which he declaimed. Plutarch's Lives were favorite reading
with him, we accidentally learn; and his speeches contain evidence
that he was powerfully influenced by the writings of Dr. Franklin. We
believe it was from Franklin that he learned very much of the art of
managing men. Franklin, we think, aided this impetuous and
exaggerating spirit to acquire his habitual moderation of statement,
and that sleepless courtesy which, in his keenest encounters,
generally kept him within parliamentary bounds, and enabled him to
live pleasantly with men from whom he differed in opinion. Obsolete as
many of his speeches are, from the transient nature of the topics of
which they treat, they may still be studied with profit by young
orators and old politicians as examples of parliamentary politeness.
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