In his broadly balanced characteristics there is, too, a latent, reserved force, which makes us fancy that he might, when commissioner to England, in 1774, have paid a visit to Burns in Scotland and suggested to him, as advice to others, those shrewd lines:—
“Ay free, aff han’ your story tell,
When wi’ a bosom crony;
But still keep something to yoursel
Ye scarcely tell to ony.”
In fact, it is upon this felt reserve of uncommunicated goodness that we anchor our loving trust, feeling that the flukes cannot be uplifted nor our confidence drag. Among the few historical characters that red-mark the past 5873 years of the accepted chronology of our race, Franklin stands among the first half-dozen who reconcile us to public greatness, whose individuality is not obscured, whose virtues are not hazed, whose purity is not flecked anywhere by any soil from the public highways.
A very fine lady was our aunt, Mrs. James Madison. That is very manifest by even a casual glance at her carefully arranged head-gear, her elaborately disposed hair, her effectively adjusted shawl, her well-studied laces and thoughtfully selected jewelry, collars, cuffs, and gloves. A little too fine, perhaps, to be cordially loved. A young modest person would, in spite of her assuring ease of manner, feel respectfully uneasy in her presence; but so respectable, so highly respectable she was, and still shows in her portrait, that we are all very proud of her. If she was exacting, she gave in return and to all equal measures of refined courtesy and attention. She was very elegant in her manners, but she was patronizing. Very impressive with her grand airs, but still patronizing. She lit up the White House with the radiance of cultivated beauty, the refinements of courtly ease and high-bred manner, but still was she patronizing.
She had gone through a third of a century of years when the eighteenth century died. She afterwards so cajoled and pleasantly imposed upon Time, that he forgot to score several notches against her, and she reached her eighty-second year, about six months before the next half-century was complete, before it occurred to him that the handsome old lady, with the smooth rosy face, had actually gained twelve lustres on the allotted human term. While her husband was not President until 1809, and continued so only eight years, our Aunt Madison acted like a President’s wife before she went into the Federal mansion, and carried her high head-dress and head under it, like a Presidentess, thirty-two years after he left the Executive residence.
On the next page of our album is an awkward, tall, ungainly, raw-boned figure, slightly stooping in the shoulders. How it was got together it is difficult to conjecture, how kept together still more puzzling. With a sallow complexion, iron-bound brow, stern lines running down and apparently holding immovably a large, rigid mouth, with a face like a large, well-filled, cheerful barn, with the door open, our good-hearted, noble-souled cousin, Patrick Henry, looks out at us as if he had been stared at before. Fortunately, our Aunt Madison is on the other side of the leaf, and cannot be disturbed by his slovenly dress. The features show an uneducated man, yet one of strong individuality, a capacity for great endurance, a fearlessness of personal consequences, and a will which would, even if the traces were cut, draw the load by the bit. Of course he loved a fishing-rod and gun, and told stories all day long. Much pith there was in his daily gathered anecdotes, which he extracted from all passing things, and put into the indolent, good-for-nothing crowd that hung around the tavern, or which crystallized around the stove in his too readily neglected law office. Up to his twenty-fourth year he had been a farmer and country store-keeper; but as his only interest in the farm was the fish which ran through its liquid ways, and as his account of stock stopped at the fish-hooks, powder, and ball, which he speedily borrowed of himself without charge, he naturally failed to acquire anything but sport out of either. He and Henry Clay were born near each other. Neither of them makes a good portrait; both were careless of their personal appearance, and each was as generous as an apple-tree in full bearing, or a shower in June, which slakes the thirst of lazy meadows lying on their backs with their mouths wide open.
But what a treat it must have been to hear Patrick Henry speak. The small dishonesties of rhetoric he scorned. To its greatest opportunities, however, he strode with a master’s step and might. His long, sallow features then glowed, the stern lines melted into an illuminating intellectual beauty, his crooked figure, a moment before like a telescope placed on end and sliding by sections into itself, then stretched out and up into manliest exaltation, and erect, grandiose dignity. His keen words, like the battle-axe of the Douglas, cleaved the subject from head to chine. His large natural thoughts rushed up the summits of argument, as the free winds sweep the hills, without labor or effort, and shook all brains, wise or unwise, dull or quick, cultured or untutored, bending their tops before his resistless march, and shaking all their obstinate roots by his relentless grasp. No grander storm of logic, invective, irony, wit, humor, sharp demonstration, soul-rousing appeal, or tender pathos ever passed over an audience and stirred them from the deep depths of their nature than that which he awoke. No class interests, like those of the Virginia parsons for their tobacco tithes, no selfish isolations, like the petty claims of neighborhood squires, no encroachments on popular rights, like the Stamp Act or tea duties, could withstand the noble sweep of his eloquence. The tribune of the people, he was regarded, ere he had reached his thirty-fifth year, as without exception the greatest orator in America, if not in the world.