"Mr. Clay has lived at Ashland forty years. The place bore the name when he came to it, as he says, probably on account of the ash timber, with which it abounds; and he has made it the most delightful retreat in all the West. The estate is about six hundred acres large, all under the highest cultivation, except some two hundred acres of park, which is entirely cleared of underbrush and small trees, and is, to use the words of Lord Morpeth, who staid at Ashland nearly a week, the nearest approach to an English park of any in this country. It serves for a noble pasture, and here I saw some of Mr. Clay's fine horses and Durham cattle. He is said to have some of the finest in America; and if I am able to judge I confirm that report. The larger part of his farm is devoted to wheat, rye, hemp, &c., and his crops look most splendidly. He has also paid great attention to ornamenting his land with beautiful shade trees, shrubs, flowers, and fruit orchards. From the road which passes his place on the northwest side, a carriage-road leads up to the house, lined with locust, cypress, cedar, and other rare trees, and the rose, jasmine, and ivy, were clambering about them, and peeping through the grass and the boughs, like so many twinkling fairies, as we drove up. Mr Clay's mansion is nearly hidden from the road by the trees surrounding it, and is as quiet and secluded, save to the throng of pilgrims continually pouring up there to greet its more than royal possessor, as though it were in the wilderness."

Here let the house, the lawn, the wood, the farm, pass, if they will, from the mind. They are all well in their way, and were doubtless well adapted in his time to smooth the care-worn brow, and soothe the care-fraught breast of the lofty, gallant, frank, winning statesman, who gave and still gives them all their interest. Be our thoughts concentrated on him who still lives, and speaks, and sways, though the clay which enrobed him has been hid from our sight for ever, rather than on the physical accessories which, but for him, though living to the corporal sense, are dead to the informing soul.

For it was not here, in this comfortable mansion, beneath those graceful, hospitable, swaying trees, that The Great Commoner was born and reared; but in a rude, homely farm-house,[19] which had any man given five hundred dollars for, he would have been enormously swindled, unless he paid in Continental money,—in a primitive, rural, thinly peopled section of Hanover County (near Richmond), Virginia; where his father, Rev. John Clay, a poor Baptist preacher, lived, and struggled, and finally died, leaving a widow and seven young children, with no reliance but the mother's energies and the benignant care of the widow's and orphan's God. This was in 1782, near the close of the Revolutionary War, when so much of the country as had not been ravaged by the enemy's forces, had been nearly exhausted by our own, and by the incessant exactions of a protracted, harassing, desolating, industry-paralyzing civil war. The fifth of these seven children was Henry, born on the 12th of April, 1777, who remained in that humble home until fourteen years of age, when his mother, who had married a second time, being about to remove to Kentucky, placed him in a store at Richmond, under the eye of his oldest brother, then nearly or quite of age, but who died very soon afterwards, leaving Henry an orphan indeed. He was thus thrown completely on his own exertions, when still but a child, and without having enjoyed any other educational advantages than such as were fitfully afforded by occasional private schools, in operation perhaps two or three months in a year, and kept by teachers somewhat ruder than the log tenement which circumscribed their labors. Such was all the "schooling" ever enjoyed by the ragged urchin, whose bright summer days were necessarily given to ploughing and hoeing in the corn-fields, barefoot, bareheaded, and clad in coarse trowsers and shirt, and whose daily tasks were diversified by frequent rides of two or three miles to the nearest grist-mill, on a sorry cob, bestrode with no other saddle than the grain-bag; whence many of his childhood's neighbors, contrasting, long afterward, the figure he cut in Congress, at Ghent, in Paris or London, with that which they had seen so often pass in scanty garb, but jocund spirits, on these family errands, recalled him to mind in his primitive occupation as The Mill-Boy of the Slashes, by which sobriquet he was fondly hailed by thousands in the pride of his ripened renown.

Forty-five years after his childish farewell to it, Henry Clay stood once more (in 1840), and for the last time, in the humble home of his fathers, and was rejoiced to find the house where he was born and reared, still essentially unchanged. Venerable grandames, who were blooming matrons in his infancy, had long since indicated to their sons and daughters the room wherein he was born; and the spring whence the family had drawn their supplies of water wore a familiar aspect, though the hickory which formerly shaded it, and was noted for the excellence of its nuts, had passed away. Over the graves of his father and grandparents the plough had passed and repassed for years, and he only fixed their position by the decaying stump of a pear-tree, which had flourished in his childhood, and often ministered to his gratification. Beyond these, nothing answered to the picture in his memory, and he would not have recognized the spot, had he awoke there unconscious of the preceding journey. Familiar groves and orchards had passed away, while pines which he left shrubs, just dotting with perennial green the surface of the exhausted "old fields," unhappily too common throughout the Southern States, had grown up into dense and towering forests, which waved him a stately adieu, as he turned back refreshed and calmed, to the heated and dusty highway of public life.

The boy Henry, spent five years in Richmond,—only the first in the store where his mother had placed him; three of the others in the office of Mr. Clerk-in-Chancery Peter Tinsley; the last in that of Attorney-General Brooke. From Mr. Tinsley, he learned to write a remarkably plain, neat, and elegant hand,—more like a schoolmistress's best, than a great lawyer and politician, and this characteristic it retained to the last. From Mr. Tinsley, Mr. Brooke, and perhaps still more from the illustrious Chancellor Wythe, who employed him as his amanuensis, and repaid him with his friendship and counsel, young Clay derived his knowledge of the principles of Common Law, whereof he was, all his life, a devoted champion. At length, in November, 1797, when still lacking some months of his legal majority, he left Richmond and Virginia, for the location he had chosen—namely, the thriving village of Lexington, in the then rapidly growing Territory of Kentucky—the home of his eventful adult life of more than half a century. How he here was early recognized and honored as a Man of the People, and rapidly chosen (1803) member of the Legislature, once (1806) appointed to fill a vacancy in the United States Senate, and soon after (1809) elected out of, and by the legislature, to fill another and longer vacancy in that same dignified body; chosen in 1811 a Member of the more popular branch of Congress, and, immediately on his appearance on its floor, elected its Speaker—probably the highest compliment ever paid to a public man in this country—appointed thence (1814) a Plenipotentiary to Göttingen (afterwards changed to Ghent), to negotiate a Treaty of Peace with Great Britain, which was signed near the close of that year; re-elected, immediately on his return, to a seat in the House, and to the Speakership, which he retained thenceforth (except during a temporary retirement from public life, rendered necessary by heavy pecuniary losses as an indorser), down to March 3d, 1825, when he finally retired from the House on being appointed Secretary of State by President John Q. Adams; quitting this station for private life on the Inauguration of President Jackson in 1829, returning to the Senate in 1831, and continuing one of its most eminent and influential members till 1842, when he retired, as he supposed for ever; but was returned, by an unanimous vote of the Legislature, in 1849, and dying a Senator in Washington on the 29th of June, 1852, aged more than seventy-five years, of which more than half had been spent in the public service, and nearly all, since his majority, in active, ardent, anxious familiarity with public men and public measures,—this is no place to set forth in detail. The merest glance is all we can give to the public, official career of Henry Clay.

For our business is not here with Tariffs, Banks, Vetoes, and Presidential contests or aspirations. Our theme is the man Henry Clay,—what he was intrinsically, and in his daily dealings with, and deportment toward, his fellow-beings. If there be a better mode of developing his character than Plutarch's, we have not now time to ascertain and employ it, so we must e'en be content with that.

A tall, plain, poor, friendless youth, was young Henry, when he set up his Ebenezer in Lexington, and, after a few months' preliminary study, announced himself a candidate for practice as an attorney. He had not even the means of paying his weekly board. "I remember," he observed in his Lexington speech of 1842, "how comfortable I thought I should be, if I could make £100 Virginia money, per year; and with what delight I received my first fifteen shilling fee. My hopes were more than realized. I immediately rushed into a lucrative practice."

Local tradition affirms that the Bar of Lexington, being unusually strong when Mr. Clay first appeared thereat, an understanding had grown up among the seniors, that they would systematically discountenance the advent of any new aspirants, so as to keep the business remunerating, and preserve each other from the peril of being starved out. It was some time, therefore, before young Clay obtained a case to manage in Court; and when he did appear there, the old heads greeted the outset of his argument with winks, and nods, and meaning smiles, and titters, intended to disconcert and embarrass him. So they did for a few minutes; but they soon exasperated and roused him. His eyes flashed, and sentence after sentence came pouring rapidly out, replete with the fire of eloquence and genius. At length, one of the old heads leaned across the table and whispered to another, "I think we must let this young man pass." Of course they must!—the case was as plain as the portliest of noses on the most rubicund of faces. Henry Clay passed, nem. con., and his position and success at that Bar were never more disputed nor doubted.

General Cass, in his remarks in the Senate on the occasion of Mr. Clay's death, has the following interesting reminiscence:

"It is almost half a century since he passed through Chilicothe, then the seat of government of Ohio, where I was a member of the Legislature, on his way to take his place in this very body, which is now listening to this reminiscence, and to a feeble tribute of regard from one who then saw him for the first time, but who can never forget the impression he produced by the charms of his conversation, the frankness of his manner, and the high qualities with which he was endowed."