Yes,
sir, this very day week I spoke for three hours against it,
and my friends, who forced me to make the effort, were good
enough to say that I never had made a more successful
speech; it must have had _some_ merit, sir; for I assure
you, whilst I was speaking, although the Northern mail was
announced, not a single member left his seat to look for
letters,--a circumstance which had not occurred before
during the session!'
"I endeavored to combat his objections to a Bankrupt Bill
subsequently, but, of course, without any success: _he felt
as a planter, and was very jealous of the influence of
merchants as legislators_."
There are flashes of sense and touches of pathos in some of his most
tory passages. As he was delivering in the House one of his emphatic
predictions of the certain failure of our experiment of freedom on
this continent, he broke into an apology for so doing, that brought
tears to many eyes. "It is an infirmity of my nature," said he,
"to have an obstinate constitutional preference of the true
over the agreeable; and I am satisfied, that, if I had had
an only son, or what is dearer, an only daughter,--which God
forbid!--I say, God forbid, for she might bring her father's
gray hairs with sorrow to the grave; she might break my
heart, or worse than that--what? Can anything be worse than
that? Yes, sir, I _might break hers_!"
His fable, too, of the caterpillar and the horseman was conceived in
arrogance, but it was pretty and effective.
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