Famous Americans of Recent Times | Page 5

for their maintenance, he acquired a
repugnance to slavery which he never lost. The Chancellor's learning
and philosophy were not for him, and so he passed them by.
The tranquil wisdom of the judge was counteracted, in some degree, by
the excitements of the debating society. As he grew older, the raw and
awkward stripling became a young man whose every movement had a
winning or a commanding grace. Handsome he never was; but his
ruddy face and abundant light hair, the grandeur of his forehead and the
speaking intelligence of his countenance, more than atoned for the
irregularity of his features. His face, too, was a compromise. With all
its vivacity of expression, there was always something that spoke of the
Baptist preacher's son,--just as Andrew Jackson's face had the set
expression of a Presbyterian elder. But of all the bodily gifts bestowed
by Nature upon this favored child, the most unique and admirable was
his voice. Who ever heard one more melodious? There was a depth of
tone in it, a volume, a compass, a rich and tender harmony, which
invested all he said with majesty. We heard it last when he was an old
man past seventy; and all he said was a few words of acknowledgment
to a group of ladies in the largest hall in Philadelphia. He spoke only in
the ordinary tone of conversation; but his voice filled the room as the
organ fills a great cathedral, and the ladies stood spellbound as the
swelling cadences rolled about the vast apartment. We have heard
much of Whitefield's piercing voice and Patrick Henry's silvery tones,
but we cannot believe that either of those natural orators possessed an
organ superior to Clay's majestic bass. No one who ever heard him
speak will find it difficult to believe what tradition reports, that he was

the peerless star of the Richmond Debating Society in 1795.
Oratory was then in the highest vogue. Young Virginians did not need
to look beyond the sea in order to learn that the orator was the man
most in request in the dawn of freedom. Chatham, Burke, Fox,
Sheridan, and Pitt were inconceivably imposing names at that day; but
was not Patrick Henry the foremost man in Virginia, only because he
could speak and entertain an audience? And what made John Adams
President but his fiery utterances in favor of the Declaration of
Independence? There were other speakers then in Virginia who would
have had to this day a world-wide fame if they had spoken where the
world could hear them. The tendency now is to undervalue oratory, and
we regret it. We believe that, in a free country, every citizen should be
able to stand undaunted before his fellow-citizens, and give an account
of the faith that is in him. It is no argument against oratory to point to
the Disraelis of both countries, and say that a gift possessed by such
men cannot be a valuable one. It is the unmanly timidity and
shamefacedness of the rest of us that give to such men their
preposterous importance. It were a calamity to America if, in the
present rage for ball-playing and boat-rowing, which we heartily
rejoice in, the debating society should be forgotten. Let us rather end
the sway of oratory by all becoming orators. Most men who can talk
well seated in a chair can learn to talk well standing on their legs; and a
man who can move or instruct five persons in a small room can learn to
move or instruct two thousand in a large one.
That Henry Clay cultivated his oratorical talent in Richmond, we have
his own explicit testimony. He told a class of law students once that he
owed his success in life to a habit early formed, and for some years
continued, of reading daily in a book of history or science, and
declaiming the substance of what he had read in some solitary place,--a
cornfield, the forest, a barn, with only oxen and horses for auditors. "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