Fair Liberty strolled in solicitous mood,
Deep-pondering the future, unheeding her way,
She met goddess Nature beside a green wood.
‘Good mother,’ she cried, ‘deign to help me at need!
I must make for my guardians a Speaker to-day;
The first in the world I would give them.’ ‘Indeed!
When I made the first speaker, I made him of Clay.’”
Mr. Clay accepted the appointment in a brief but pertinent speech, in which he gave a succinct view of the duties of the chair, and presented the house his thanks for placing him in it.
In the course of the session, the subject of the Greek revolution came before congress. Mr. Webster, of Massachusetts, on the fifth of December, introduced it to the house, in a resolution ‘providing by law for defraying the expenses incident to the appointment of an agent or commissioner to Greece, whenever the president shall deem it expedient to make such appointment.’ This he sustained by a speech of great power. Mr. Clay brought to its support the same feelings, the same warm sympathies, and the same strength of argument that he had arrayed round the subject of South American independence. They both fought hard to procure the adoption of this resolution, but it was lost. The struggling Greek, however, Mr. Clay never lost sight of, and when he became secretary of state, succeeded in accomplishing that for them, in which he was defeated now.
While the question of recognition was before the house, Mr. Clay was violently assailed by a member from New Hampshire, recently arrived. It was thought his motive in doing this was to bring himself into notice, by attacking the most distinguished man in the house. He received such a rebuke from Mr. Clay, administered with mingled feelings of indignation and pity, as almost to wither his energies during the remainder of the session.