The figure, Mr. Webster said, was an impromptu, suggested by a napkin on the dinner-table. He had paused, in his usual deliberate way, after the sentence, itself containing a figure beautiful in its appropriateness. "He smote the rock of the national resources, and abundant streams of revenue gushed forth." His eye fell upon a folded napkin; that suggested a corpse in its winding-sheet, and the figure was in his mind.
Grand as this rhetoric is, it is almost paralleled in vividness, while exceeded in wit, by a figure which Seargent S. Prentiss, of Mississippi, once used.
A Southern statesman, noted as a political tactician, had written a letter on the annexation of Texas. As public opinion in the South favored the measure, while in the North it was opposed, the tactician, whose object was to gain votes for his party, published two editions of his letter. The edition intended for the South was bold in its advocacy of annexation; but that designed for Northern circulation was remarkable for its ambiguity.
Mr. Prentiss denounced the trick on the "stump." Grasping the two letters, he threw them under his feet, saying,–
"I wonder that, like the acid and the alkali, they do not effervesce as they touch each other!"
"UP TO SNUFF."
A genial observer of our public men is amused at the political dexterity of those anxious to serve as presidential candidates. If he is a veteran, as well as a genial observer, he smiles as he compares these 'prentice hands with the master of political adroitness, Martin Van Buren.
Looking upon politics as a game, Mr. Van Buren played it with forecast and sagacity, and with the utmost good-nature.
"He was the mildest manner'd man
That ever scuttled"