=104.= A LECTURE OF DR. RUSH.
At length, however, though the class of the winter, all told, amounted to less than a hundred, a sufficient number had arrived to induce the professors to commence their lectures; and the introductory of Dr. Rush was a performance of deep and touching interest, and never, I think, to be forgotten (while his memory endures), by any one who listened to it, and was susceptible of the impression it was calculated to make. It consisted in a well-written and graphical description of the terrible sweep of the late pestilence; the wild dismay and temporary desolation it had produced; the scenes of family and individual suffering and woe he had witnessed during its ravages; the mental dejection, approaching despair, which he himself had experienced, on account of the entire failure of his original mode of practice in it, and the loss of his earliest patients (some of them personal friends); the joy he felt on the discovery of a successful mode of treating it; the benefactions which he had afterwards the happiness to confer; and the gratulations with which, after the success of his practice had become known, he was often received in sick and afflicted families. The discourse, though highly colored, and marked by not a few figures of fancy and bursts of feeling, was, notwithstanding, sufficiently fraught, with substantial matter to render it no less instructive than it was fascinating.
[Footnote 29: A native of North Carolina; prominent as a physician and controversialist.]
* * * * *
=Thomas H. Benton, 1783-1858.= (Manual, p. 487.)
From the "Thirty Years' View of the United States Senate."
=105.= THE CHARACTER OF MACON.[30]
He was above the pursuit of wealth, but also above dependence and idleness, and, like an old Roman of the elder Cato's time, worked in the fields at the head of his slaves in the intervals of public duty, and did not cease this labor until advancing age rendered him unable to stand the hot sun of summer…. I think it was the summer of 1817,—that was the last time (he told me) he tried it, and found the sun too hot for him,—then sixty years of age, a senator, and the refuser of all office. How often I think of him, when I see at Washington robustious men going through a scene of supplication, tribulation, and degradation, to obtain office, which the salvation of the soul does not impose upon the vilest sinner! His fields, his flocks, and his herds, yielded an ample supply of domestic productions. A small crop of tobacco—three hogsheads when the season was good, two when bad—purchased the exotics which comfort and necessity required, and which the farm did not produce. He was not rich, but rich enough to dispense hospitality and charity, to receive all guests in his house, from the president to the day laborer—no other title being necessary to enter his house but that of an honest man;… and above all, he was rich enough to pay as he went, and never to owe a dollar to any man.
… He always wore the same dress,—that is to say, a suit of the same material, cut, and color, superfine navy-blue,—the whole suit from the same piece, and in the fashion of the time of the Revolution, and always replaced by a new one before it showed age. He was neat in his person, always wore fine linen, a fine cambric stock, a fine fur hat with a brim to it, fair top-boots—the boot outside of the pantaloons, on the principle that leather was stronger than cloth.
… He was an habitual reader and student of the Bible, a pious and religious man, and of the "Baptist persuasion," as he was accustomed to express it.