upon the field of his glory, but without the slightest prospect of reaching the Presidency. Indeed, that splendid orb which has so long lighted our heavens is rapidly descending toward the horizon, and will soon disappear from it forever.

The theory of our Government requires a first-rate man to be placed at the head of the administration. In England, the sovereign power is vested in a hereditary monarch. His capacity is a matter of no great moment; the first minister of the crown is responsible for the government. But with us, the sovereignty resides with the people, and the President ought to be a man of the highest order, for he holds the same relation to our government that the Prime Minister holds to the British government.

In reviewing Mr. CLAY's career, the wonder is that he could have failed to become President. The statue of Brutus, left out of the procession, will awaken inquiry as to the cause. Cromwell is not allowed to rank with the sovereigns of England, although he controlled the government as Protector, and gave the country the wisest and most brilliant administration which it ever enjoyed. HENRY CLAY, who has impressed his great character upon the institutions of this country, never became its President. But it is perhaps well that he died without reaching that station.

His immortal words, "I would rather be right than be President," will thrill upon the hearts of the statesmen of the country, and animate them to a nobler aim than a mere lust of power.

They will strive to serve their country, and to bear with them to the grave the consciousness of deserving its honors, even if the laurel should never encircle their brows.

Mr. CLAY'S fame is imperishable; no office could have added to its towering grandeur, or have shed upon it any additional luster. It was becoming that he should die, as he had lived, "THE GREAT COMMONER."

EULOGY

OF THE LATE

COL. ALEXANDER K. M'CLUNG.

DELIVERED IN THE HALL OF THE HOUSE OF REPRESENTATIVES OF THE STATE OF MISSISSIPPI, OCT. 11, 1852.

LADIES AND GENTLEMEN:

We have met to commemorate the life and services of HENRY CLAY. After a long life-after a long, useful, and illustrious career he has passed away. The fiery and aspiring spirit, whose earthly life was one long storm, has at length sunk to rest. Neither praise nor censure can now reach him. When his haughty soul passed away from the earth, and the grave closed over his dust, it also entombed, in its dark and narrow chamber, the bitterness of detraction, and the tiger ferocity of party spirit, with which he had so long wrestled. Death has hallowed his name and burnished his services bright in the memory of his countrymen. We have met to express, in the manner which the custom of our country has established, our appreciation of those services and our sense of his glory. We have met, not as partisans or friends-political or personal-of the illustrious dead, but as Americans, desirous to do honor to a great American.

In attempting to discharge the duty which has been imposed upon me, I shall avoid the indiscriminate eulogy which is the

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proverbial blemish of obituaries and funeral discourses, and shall essay, however feebly, to present Mr. CLAY as he was, or, at least, as he seemed to me. Great beings-grand human creatures-scattered sparsely throughout time, should be painted with truth. An indiscriminate deluge of praise drowns mediocrity and greatness in the same grave, where none can distinguish between them. When that greatest of all Englishmen, Oliver Cromwell, sat to the painter, Lely, for his portrait, whose pencil was addicted to flattery, he said: "Paint me as I am; leave not out one wrinkle, scar, or blemish, at your peril." He wished to go to the world as he was; and greatness is wise in wishing it. No man the world ever saw was equally great in every quality of intellect and in every walk of action. All men are unequal; and it is tasteful, as well as just, to plant the praise where it is true, rather than to drown all individuality and all character in one foaming chaos of eulogy.

HENRY CLAY was most emphatically a peculiar and stronglymarked character; incomparably more peculiar than any of those who were popularly considered his mental equals. Impetuous as a torrent, yet patient to gain his ends; overbearing and trampling, yet winning and soothing; haughty and fierce, yet kind and gentle; dauntlessly brave in all kinds of courage, yet eminently prudent and conservative in all his policy, all these moral attributes, antithetical as they seem, would shine out under different phases of his conduct.

I need not detain this audience with a lengthened biographical sketch of Mr. CLAY. The leading historical incidents of his life are universally known. He was born in Virginia, certainly not later than 1775, most probably a year or two earlier. His parentage was extremely humble. At the age of twenty, twentyone, or twenty-two, he emigrated to Lexington, Kentucky, where he undertook to pursue the great American road to eminencethe bar. For this career, it would have seemed, at that time, that his advantages were small, indeed. Young, poor, and unconnected, with scarcely ordinary attainments of education, he entered the lists with numerous and able competitors. Yet, HENRY CLAY, destitute as he was of all adventitious advantages,

was not destined to struggle upward along the weary and laborious path through which mediocrity toils to rank. The cedar imbedded in barren rocks, upon the mountain side, with scarcely soil to feed its roots, will tower above the tallest of the forest; for it is its nature so to do. So this great Genius at once shot up like a shaft. He rose to high rank at the bar. In 1799 he was elected to the Kentucky Legislature; in 1806, to the U. S. Senate; in 1811, to the House of Representatives; and there began his national career. Since that time Mr. CLAY has filled a large space in the public eye. His career has been checkered, stormy and tempestuous. Now the object of universal praise; now attacked with very general censure; now culminating upon the crest of fortune's wave; then dashed upon the rocks and overwhelmed with roar and clamor. It was his fate at periods of his career to drain to the bottom that measure of relentless hate with which mean souls resent the imperial pride of haughty genius. It was his fate to feel that constant success is the only shield which greatness and glory can rear against the poison of envy and slander's venomous sting.

"He who ascends the mountain top shall find

Its loftiest peaks most wrapped in clouds and snow;

He who surpasses or subdues mankind,

Must look down on the hate of those below:

Though far above the sun of glory glow,

And far beneath the earth and ocean spread

Round him are icy rocks, and loudly blow

Contending tempests on his naked head,

Thus to reward the toils which to those summits led."

That strong mind was tried by every extremity of fortune, and if sometimes inflated by success, yet borne up by the alldeathless thirst for renown, the grand incentive to all great toils or glorious deeds, he was never depressed by defeat. He faced his enemies, he faced fortune, and he faced defeat, with the same dauntless heart and the same unquailing brow, in youth and in age, regardless when or how they came, or what the peril might be. Yet, when most overborne with calumny; when hatred raged fiercest against his person, and he was most stained with

slander-even at that time, to enemies as to friends, he was an object of admiring respect. When lashed into fury by disappointment, defeat, and opposition, and the stormy passions of his tempestuous soul raged like a whirlwind, his bitterest opponents would gaze curiously upon him with a strange mixture of hatred, fear, and admiration.

There are many phases in which it is necessary to regard Mr. CLAY, to reach a correct estimate of his character; and to accomplish their delineation without a degree of jumbling confusion, is a work of some difficulty. As an orator he was brilliant and grand. None of his cotemporaries could so stir men's blood. None approached him in his mastery over the heart and the imagination of his hearers. Of all the gifts with which nature decks her favorites, not the greatest or grandest certainly, but the most brilliant, the most fascinating, and for the moment the most powerful, is exalted eloquence. Before its fleeting and brief glare, the steady light of wisdom, logic, or philosophy pales, as the stars fade before the meteor. With this choice and glorious gift nature had endowed Mr. CLAY beyond all men of the age. Like all natural orators, he was very unequal; sometimes sinking to commonplace mediocrity; then again, when the occasion roused his genius, he would soar aloft in towering majesty. He had little or none of the tinsel of Rhetoric, or the wordy finery which always lies within the reach of the Rhetorician's art. Strong passions, quick sensibility, lofty sentiment, powerful reason were the foundation of his oratory, as they are of all true eloquence. Passion, feeling, reason, wit, poured forth from his lips in a torrent so strong and inexhaustible, as to whirl away his hearers for the time, in despite of their opinions. Nor should it be forgotten, slight and unimportant as physical qualities may appear in our estimate of the mighty dead, that his were eminently fitted for the orator. A tall, slender, erect person, changing under the excitement of speech its loose flaccidity of muscle into the most vigorous and nerved energy; an eye, small indeed, but deep and bonily set, and flaming with expression; and last and most important of all, a voice deep, powerful, mellow, and rich beyond expression-rich is a feeble phrase