Lincoln was greatly disappointed with the speech, which was written out and read and lacked the spontaneity and fire which Lincoln

had anticipated. At the close of the meeting, Lincoln secured an introduction to the great man and was invited to Ashland. The disappointment of the speech was deepened by his intercourse with Clay. Long afterward he said of Clay that though he was polished in his manners, hospitable and kindly, he betrayed a certain consciousness of superiority and an almost offensive imperiousness. This deeply wounded the sensitive soul of Lincoln. He felt that Clay did not regard him or any other person as his equal. This lesson added to Lincoln's experience of human nature and was referred to by him in after life as a disappointment almost as wounding as the defeat of Henry Clay for the Presidency.

The examples of Clay, Calhoun, and Webster are often cited as proving that America's greatest statesmen do not reach the Presidency. In the public career of Clay were four sharp and painful disappointments. As we have already seen, he was defeated in 1824, when Andrew Jackson was chosen by the House of Representatives. Again, in 1840, he hoped to be nominated by the

Whig National Convention, but was distanced by General William Henry Harrison. He was actually nominated, but defeated, in 1844, when Polk was elected. Finally, in 1848, he expected

to receive the nomination of his party convention at Baltimore, but was again disappointed, General Taylor, the hero of the Mexican war (a war to which Clay gave no countenance) being the nominee. At this point Clay's patience broke down and he refused to support the nomination

before the people, choosing rather to sulk in his

tent.

Henry Clay died in Washington, June 29, 1852, in the seventy-sixth year of his age, preceding Webster to the grave only five months. With lamentation and mourning that filled all the land, the great leader was borne to his beloved Kentucky, where a magnificent monument reared by the hands of his admirers marks his last restingplace.