Famous Americans of Recent Times | Page 3

magnificently branching trees of his Kentucky forests, and his
handwriting had the neatness and delicacy of a female copyist. There
was a careless, graceful ease in his movements and attitudes, like those
of an Indian, chief; but he was an exact man of business, who docketed
his letters, and could send from Washington to Ashland for a document,
telling in what pigeon-hole it could be found. Naturally impetuous, he
acquired early in life an habitual moderation of statement, an habitual
consideration for other men's self-love, which made him the pacificator
of his time. The great compromiser was himself a compromise. The
ideal of education is to tame men without lessening their vivacity,--to
unite in them the freedom, the dignity, the prowess of a Tecumseh,
with the serviceable qualities of the civilized man. This happy union is
said to be sometimes produced in the pupils of the great public schools

of England, who are savages on the play-ground and gentlemen in the
school-room. In no man of our knowledge has there been combined so
much of the best of the forest chief with so much of the good of the
trained man of business as in Henry Clay. This was one secret of his
power over classes of men so diverse as the hunters of Kentucky and
the manufacturers of New England.
It used to be accounted a merit in a man to rise to high station from
humble beginnings; but we now perceive that humble beginnings are
favorable to the development of that force of character which wins the
world's great prizes. Let us never again commend any one for "rising"
from obscurity to eminence, but reserve our special homage for those
who have become respectable human beings in spite of having had
every advantage procured for them by rich fathers. Henry Clay found
an Eton, and an Oxford in Old Virginia that were better for him than
those of Old England. Few men have been more truly fortunate in their
education than he. It was said of a certain lady, that to know her was a
liberal education; and there really have been, and are, women of whom
that could be truly averred. But perhaps the greatest good fortune that
can befall an intelligent and noble-minded youth is to come into
intimate, confidential relations with a wise, learned, and good old man,
one who has been greatly trusted and found worthy of trust, who knows
the world by having long taken a leading part in its affairs, and has
outlived illusions only to get a firmer footing in realities. This, indeed,
is a liberal education; and this was the happiness of Henry Clay.
Nothing in biography is so strange as the certainty with which a
superior youth, in the most improbable circumstances, finds the mental
nourishment he needs. Here, in the swampy region of Hanover County,
Virginia, was a barefooted, ungainly urchin, a poor widow's son,
without one influential relative on earth; and there, in Richmond, sat on
the chancellor's bench George Wythe, venerable with years and honors,
one of the grand old men of Old Virginia, the preceptor of Jefferson,
signer of the Declaration of Independence, the most learned man in his
profession, and one of the best men of any profession. Who could have
foreseen that this friendless orphan, a Baptist preacher's son, in a State
where to be a "dissenter" was social inferiority, should have found in
this eminent judge a friend, a mentor, a patron, a father?
Yet it came about in the most natural way. We catch our first glimpse

of the boy when he sat in a little log school-house, without windows or
floor, one of a humming score of shoeless boys, where a good-natured,
irritable, drinking English schoolmaster taught him to read, write, and
cipher as far as Practice. This was the only school he ever attended, and
that was all he learned at it. His widowed mother, with her seven young
children, her little farm, and two or three slaves, could do no more for
him. Next, we see him a tall, awkward, slender stripling of thirteen, still
barefoot, clad in homespun butternut of his mother's making, tilling her
fields, and going to mill with his bag of corn strapped upon the family
pony. At fourteen, in the year 1791, a place was found for him in a
Richmond drug-store, where he served as errand-boy and youngest
clerk for one year.
Then occurred the event which decided his career. His mother having
married again, her husband had influence enough to procure for the lad
the place of copying clerk in the office of the Court of Chancery. The
young gentlemen then employed in the office of that court long
remembered the entrance among them of their new comrade. He was
fifteen at the