One who was very near to Toombs in his last days said of him when he was dead: "It was a thing of sorrow to see this majestic old man pausing to measure his poor strength with a confirmed habit, rising, struggling, falling, and praying as he drifted on."
General Toombs used to say that Webster was the greatest man he ever knew, that Clay managed men better, and Calhoun was the finest logician of the century. "The two most eloquent men I ever heard were Northern men," said he; "Choate and Prentiss." "Pierce," he used to say, "was the most complete gentleman I ever saw in the White House. He was clever and correct. Zachary Taylor was the most ignorant. It was amazing how little he knew. Van Buren was shrewd rather than sagacious. Tyler was a beautiful speaker, but Webster declared that a man who made a pretty speech was fit for nothing else."
Toombs met Abraham Lincoln while he was in Congress. He related that Mr. Lincoln once objected to sitting down at table because he was the thirteenth man. Toombs told him that it was better to die than to be a victim to superstition. At the Hampton Roads Conference, President Lincoln expressed to Judge Campbell his confidence in the honesty and ability of Robert Toombs. He was a great reader. General Toombs often said that if the whole English literature were lost, and the Bible and Shakespeare remained, letters would not be much the poorer. Shakespeare was his standard. He was fond of Swedenborg, and in his early youth relished Tom Paine.
General Toombs had a great affinity for young men, upon whom he exerted a great influence. He once said to a party of friends that gambling was the worst of evils because it impoverished the pocket while it corrupted the mind. "How about drinking, General?" he was asked. "Well, if a man is old and rich he may drink, for he will have the sympathy of his sober friends and the support of his drinking ones."
CHAPTER XXXI.
HIS LAST DAYS.
In 1880 General Toombs appeared in Atlanta, and addressed the Georgia Legislature in behalf of the candidacy of General A. R. Lawton for the United States Senate. His appearance, as he walked up the aisle, grim, venerable, and determined, awoke wild applause. He preserved his power of stirring the people whenever he spoke, but his speech was not as racy and clear as it had been. "This was one of the occasions," to quote from a distinguished critic of Toombs, "when the almost extinct volcano glowed again with its wonted fires—when the ivy-mantled keep of the crumbling castle resumed its pristine defiance with deep-toned culverin and ponderous mace; when, amid the colossal fragments of the tottering temple, men recognized the unsubdued spirit of Samson Agonistes."
His last public speech was in September, 1884, when the people of Washington carried him the news of Cleveland's election to the Presidency. He came to his porch and responded briefly, almost inaudibly, to the serenade, but he was full of the gratification which Southern people felt over that event. He declared that he did not know that there was enough manhood in the country as to break loose from party ties and elect a President. The fact had revived his hope for the whole country. He had, before this, taken a gloomy view of the nation. He had, on one occasion, declared that the injection into the body politic of three million savages had made good government forever impossible. He had afterward said that the American Constitution rested solely upon the good faith of the people, and that would hardly bind together a great people of diverse interests. "Since 1850," he once said, "I have never believed this Union to be perpetual. The experience of the last war will deter any faction from soon making an effort at secession. Had it not been for this, there would have been a collision in 1876." But the election of Cleveland he regarded as a national, rather than a sectional victory—a non-partisan triumph in fact; and it was at this time, the first occasion since the war, that he expressed regret that he had not regained his citizenship and gone back into public life.