own history needs the canvas, or why these aerial young
women should so comfortably usurp the place of the Guerriere and
Constitution, the dauntless little boat between the fires on Lake
Erie, or the unsurpassed sea-scenes of storm and calm along our own
coast.

But there is far more than all this pride of the eyes to detain you
within the Capitol: there is the great arena where our political
athletes contend, and where, by daily observation of their faces,
daily hearing of their voices, daily notice of their manners, one
becomes familiar as if by personal acquaintance with the heroes of the
day. In past times the heroes were such as Webster, Calhoun and Clay.
Now they are others--men whom this belittling age of the telegraph and
the reporter brings so near us that there is at least little chance
of their ever looming up in undue proportion through the mists of
tradition. It is Henry Wilson, sitting in the Vice-President's chair,
a notable example of the possibilities in a republic; or it is
Sumner, with that gray head which all men honor as a type of political
integrity, albeit not untinctured with arrogance; or it is another
sort of man that engages your attention, one whom you recognize at
once, for certainly there is no one but knows that face--a face so
easy to caricature that there is no insult of the pencil that has
not been offered it, but which is not the less expressive of an
indomitable will, an untamable spirit, and a mind like a torch,
throwing light on everything it approaches. From the instant that
General Butler rises the discussion, however dull before, bristles
into excitement, and one could hardly wish for an hour of racier
enjoyment than is afforded by the debate when he desires to gain
a point over able but envious opponents, who never attack him
single-handed, and to meet whom, their shafts flying on every side, he
brings up his subtlety of argument, his readiness, his audacity, his
wit and repartee and forensic skill, till he winds them in their
own toils. Perhaps while you have been observing these and other
notabilities of the day, another personage has come upon the floor by
prescriptive right of past membership, and has arrested your gaze.
He is a gentleman of portly presence, who looks out of a pair of keen
dark eyes, and still possesses some of the great personal beauty
for which in his youth he was remarkable. He is the last of the
old statesmen; he has had a part in many of the scenes tha