"I have never had the art to get my hands
into the Treasury," I was fain to answer, "You the whole man are in
the Treasury yourself." He was indeed in our politics a fund and
never-broken bank of moral wealth. Justice was his inspiration. He was
a prophet by equity. Righteousness was his genius; and humanity, in
any lack of imagination, his insight and foresight. He was without
spot. He wore ermine though he sat not on the bench. John Jay had not
cleaner hands, nor John Marshall a more honest will; Hamilton and
Jefferson were no more patriotic in contending than he in every legal
or congressional strife; and Story, his favorite teacher, and whose
favorite pupil he was, no more opulent in knowledge or innocent in its
use.

As an antagonist, handling questions of motive or policy, he was as
frank as the lion-hearted Richard and simple as a child.

From those early debates to which I listened, on prison discipline,
thirty years ago, to his latest speech on the Centennial Exhibition,
this candor, amounting to generosity and magnanimity, was plain as the
sun.

He had no tricks, no management, no intrigue. He showed his hand.

Could he not prevail by openness and sincerity, he would not prevail
at all.

If he started no new ideas or measures that have been adopted
precisely in the way he conceived, or shape he gave, he mightily
sustained all good ones, and of their goodness he would not abate a
tithe.

Of this rectitude benignity was the crown. Sternly exposing what he
thought mean or unworthy in any proceeding or adversary, his severity
was in his argument and rhetoric rather than in the feeling of his
soul. Without a sweet disposition no man could have had such a smile.
Without some grandeur of design no man ever displayed such a
countenance and port, handsome and sublime. In his intentness and
earnestness, he did not suspect the liability of his expressions to
the charge of a vindictiveness he was unconscious of in his own
breast. It was like a philippic of Demosthenes; it was a Ciceronian
oration against some Catiline, real or supposed. A poetic sort of
revenge was all he meant to take, although his language to opponents,
whom perhaps he sometimes mistook, may be subject to blame. Pity he
was so devoid of humor to recommend or soften his strokes!

His old peace doctrine, doubtless, mainly prompted his battle-flag
resolution, while the time of offering it and his nearly
contemporaneous break with his party seeme