CLEVENGERS INDIAN CHIEF. Engraved for the U. S. Magazine & Democratic Review. Henry G.Langley KwYork. THE volume before us, as we learn from the preface, was compiled for the purpose of presenting in a manageable shape the series of speeches delivered by the great statesman whose name it bears, from his resignation of the VicePresidency to his retirement from the Senate. Comprising a collection of arguments on the chief topics of political interest among his countrymen, framed with consummate skill, and fraught with remarkable conclusiveness, it will rank in future, whatever may be the reception with which it meets at present, among the text books from which the republican creed is to be constructed. Immediate popularity, we apprehend, will not be its fate. The great mass of readers will lift it up, will dub its contents with the vulgar nickname of "metaphysical," will put it down, and according to their political bias will rank it afterwards as an abstruse vindication of orthodox faith or a subtle apology for paradoxical heresies. So was Chillingworth treated by the multitude who were unwilling to take the trouble of finding out the reason of the faith that was in them; and yet, notwithstanding the fact that his great argument ran through but two editions and fell into few hands, to him is to be attributed the fortitude with which the Protestant faith has withstood the attacks of a power as re * Speeches of John C. Calhoun. 8vo. markable for its rigor as for its discípline. Luther spoke to the great body of the people, and by the fire of his invective, roused them to indignation against the Roman Court. Chillingworth spoke, if not to the people themselves, at least to such among them as were willing to take upon themselves the burthen of the national thinking. To such-the Lord High Chancellors of the third estate, the keepers of the consciences of the Commons-his great argument was addressed; and through them the result to which he had arrived-the tenet of the sacred inviolability of private judgment-was brought home to the people at large, at a moment when their hearts, inflamed and excited by the appeals of the reformers, were ready to receive and embrace a doctrine, by which alone the Reformation could be justified. We fear that even at our own age, when common schools are at work in every little village over the face of our young and vast country, the day of opinions taken at second-hand is not over. Everything is taught among us, from aërology that begins the Encyclopedia, to zoötomy that ends it, and yet we must not forget, that though the most abstruse sciences are introduced to the school-boy's vision, they are carried through the concave lens of primer tuition. We read the capNew York: Harper and Brothers. 1843. tion and the corollary, but we do not trouble ourselves with the demonstration which is between them. When we reflect upon the habit of thought which is thus acquired, and when we contrast the beautiful but severe argumentation which distinguishes the speeches before us, with the loose and nerveless declamation which pervades the oratory of the day, we confess we have our doubts of the immediate success of a work whose object is to elevate the reason, and not to amuse the imagination. If the principles it contains and the reasoning on which they are based are not now adopted, it shall be the work of time to vindicate the truth of the one and to unfold the beauty of the other. It is our object at present to give a rapid and general sketch of the circumstances which produced them, and the features they display. Mr. Calhoun's speeches fall into three great eras; beginning, first, with the war struggle of 1812; secondly, with the State-Rights controversy of 1834; and lastly, with the sub-treasury conflict of 1837. With the first, Mr. Calhoun came into public life. Ordinarily, the texture of the legislature preserves a uniform aspect, from the fact that though new members must necessarily be introduced, they are introduced, like fresh strands into a rope, at such regular interval as to maintain the continuity of the seriesbut at the time of the late war, with which Mr. Calhoun's political career opened, there was poured into Congress a stream of new members, who, from their numbers, their ability, and their energy, took into their hands the whole business of legislation. With the war, in fact, parliamentary eloquence in the United States may be said to commence. Giants had shown themselves in earlier days, it is true, for it is impossible that a conflict so vehement as that of the Revolution should fail in calling into action the whole intellect of the country; but long before the war of 1812, the great men of the revolution had retired from the council chamber. Patrick Henry shook the Richmond court-house as passionately in the convention which deliberated on the Federal Constitution, as he had when he aroused the House of Burgesses by his splendid invective against the British King; but Patrick Henry had retired from public life, on the establishment of the General Government; and though in the days of Mr. Adams he was prevailed on to be a candidate for Congress, before the day of meeting took place, the tongue of the orator was motionless in the grave. John Adams made his last speech at the dissolution of the Continental Congress, and though for twelve years longer he formed a part of the government, his duties were such as to leave no field for the exertion of those extraordinary powers which had swayed the revolutionary councils. It is true that Mr. Rufus King, Mr. Pickering, and Mr. J. Quincy Adams had been in the Senate, and that Mr. Madison was for some years in the lower House; that the late Chief Justice Marshall was there, also, for one or two sessions, and Mr. Josiah Quincy for almost the whole period between Mr. Jefferson's inauguration and Mr. Madison's retirement; but yet, adinirable as were the speeches of Mr. King, Mr. Madison, Mr. Marshall, and Mr. Quincy, they are as remarkable for their entire freedom from those features which provoke enthusiasm, as they are for the display of those which produce acquiescence. There were two men, it is true, in the lower House, during Mr. Madison's Presidency, who deviated from the track which had been rigidly mapped down, but those two, eminent as were their abilities, were of a character rather to repel than to excite imitation. Fisher Aines was one, and even after we have made full allowance for the morbidness of sensibility, to which every speck on the horizon appeared an omen of destruction, and which carried its fears and its suspicions so far, as to make complete sympathy impossible, we must still stop to admire the splendor of an intellect which produced, almost without effort, a series of speeches whose coloring is as rich as their perspective is distorted. Fisher Ames loved his country with fervor and honesty, and had been, if we recollect rightly, somewhat of a democrat in his earlier days; but whatever may have been his boyish creed, the horrors of the French Řevolution, and the treachery of the French Government, drove him from his moorings. One great calamity hung before his eyes, confusing his intellect and dis which pervades Mr. Randolph's speeches, it is impossible to be deaf to the exquisitely beautiful passages with which they abound. Sometimes a snatch of reasoning steals upon us so logically turned as to almost startle our judgment into acquiescence. Sometimes come flashes of wit, polished into a sharpness that pierces the nerves, and yet beautiful as may be the interlude, so great is the din and confusion into which the context is thrown, that the impression left on the senses is bewilderment and not conviction. The mind is exhausted with the effort it has been forced to make of analyzing that in which there is no analysis, and of discovering the drift of passages between which there is no connection. How different is the impression left between that which remains after listening to those last remarkable discourses of Mr. Ames! We leave them with the feelings which follow when we have witnessed the pageantry of a solemn funeral. There are the plumes, and the trappings, and the imposing insignia of the final journey, and yet the eye takes no pleasure in the outside show when it falls upon the coffin and its emblements. It may have been a mock funeral, it may have been a commemorative service for one for whom we cared little. The coffin itself may have been empty, and the cloak and sword the mere substitutes of the undertaker, but still the heart is subdued. torting his affection; and that was the danger of a French alliance, offensive and defensive. Perhaps the difficulty he found in proving, by the ordinary process of reasoning, the probability of a treaty so wild, led him to resort to the less conclusive weapons of the rhetorician; but, however that may have been, his latter speeches present little else than a collection of metaphors, sometimes false, but always striking, of pictures as gorgeous as they are gloomy, and of appeals to what he called the ashes of the patriutism of the country, couched in language as powerful as it is pathetic. There is a dirge-like sadness about the famous speech in which he took leave of public life, which is one of the most touching things we know of in political history. A subdued minor tone pervades the whole, which is such as we would suppose a man would utter who felt that the time for exertion was over, and that all that remained for him, was to sound his country's requiem. There are none of those fierce and indignant bursts with which his former speeches abounded; resembling, from their shrill and vehement passion, rather the war-cry of a savage horde, than the charge of a disciplined army. There are none of those rich and glowing appeals which almost persuade us against our will, to enter into a crusade against contingencies unlikely as they are terrible. But there is something more sublime in Mr. Randolph failed, in the long run, the sad and deep note with which the from his want of stability. We queslamentations of the dying statesman tion whether he possessed the power of were uttered, than in the more varied sitting down for any length of time in a eloquence of his former efforts. It is fixed position. There is an old French then, when the orator has ceased to legend in which Saint Cecilia is said to upbraid, and continues only to lament, have been startled, when playing on the that we begin to sympathize, and it is harpsichord, by a continued rustling then that we become fully conscious and flapping in the air around her. She of the worth of intellect so splendid, looked round, and discovering a flock of and of patriotism so pure. cherubs who had been attracted by the melody to which she had given rise, she felt bound to extend to her visiters the obvious rites of hospitality. "Sit down, gentlemen," she said, addressing the little troop. "No, madam," the spokesman replied, "we would rather not.” The musician suffered a little while longer to elapse, but becoming nervous herself from the incessant fanning behind her, she turned round once more and insisted that her guests should take chairs. "We cannot,' was the answer once more, and at last, the fore as We said that there were two men in the House who deviated from the path struck out by Mr. Madison, Mr. King, and Mr. Marshall, and between those two men there was a contrast most fixed and striking. Take Mr. Randolph's speech on the war question and compare it with that of Mr. Ames on the same subject, and you will observe an opposition as great as that between the requiem of Mozart and the Fra Diavolo of Auber. And yet, in spite of the wildness, the confusion, the hubbub, man being very much pressed, motioning behind, and showing how entirely innocent he was of all those parts that are underneath the shoulders, cried, not a little vexed, " you ought to know, madam, we have not the means of sitting.” There was a similar defect in Mr. Randolph's intellectual construction. Always fluttering about from one end of the horizon to the other, surprising both friends and foes by the extraordinary gyrations which he loved to perform, he exhibited to the end of his life a melancholy instance of the impotence of intellectual strength when separated from intellectual stability. Watch him in any one of his set speeches, and it will be a question whether in any other spectacle whatever you can discover so great a waste of power. Every succeeding paragraph has a different aim from those which preceded it; and from the utter confusion and opposition of the integral forces, the aggregate energy is destroy ed. had attempted to throw around the powers of the General Government, reversed, for a while, the poles of the two parties, and destroyed the force of political discipline. The restraints of party connection, or of hereditary association, were dissolved. The new members came into the Capitol, free as the winds, as far as their own consciences were concerned, to advocate or oppose any measure that might be brought forward; and when we look upon the numbers they exhibited, and the ability they possessed, we will not wonder either at the amount of their power, or the vigor of their exertions. From New Hampshire came Mr. Webster; from New York, Mr. Grosvenor, whose great parts were as readily acknowledged as they have been rapidly forgotten; Mr. Root, who still continues to be a vehement politician, and Mr. Betts, who now fills the honorable office of district judge for his native city; from New Jersey, the late Mr. Southard, whose long public services, and whose pure personal character, deserve the continued affections of his country; from Pennsylvania, Mr. Sergeant, Mr. C. J. Ingersoll, Mr. Ingham, and the late Judge Hopkinson, a man who united what few ever unite, brilliant parliamentary talents with high judicial merit; from Virginia, Mr. St. George Tucker, and the late Judge Barbour; from North Carolina, Mr. Gaston; from South Carolina, Mr. Lowndes, Mr. Cheves, and Mr. Calhoun; from Georgia, Mr. Forsyth; and from Kentucky, Mr. R. M. Johnson and Mr. Clay. You will see him at one moment sedulously hunting with a pack of allies to whom the glow of a common hatred has united him, but in the next instant, if a cross scent strikes him, he will be found scampering off in hot haste, and will return before long, loaded with the trophies of a victory over his own associates. And yet, notwithstanding his entire inefficiency on any immediate political object, it cannot be denied that Mr. Randolph has exercised a weighty influence, the character of which it is not for us to determine, on the oratorical taste of his country. It would be better for us if the exquisite beauty of his language, and the sparkling vivacity of his thoughts, had found more imitators, and his more objectionable peculiarities fewer. We said that Mr. Ames and Mr. Randolph were the only prominent men who, before the war of 1812, broke loose from the parliamentary model which had been established by the example of Mr. Madison, Mr. King, and Chief Justice Marshall. The war struggle, however, aroused new interests. The great conflict between the Hartford Convention on the one hand, and the General Government on the other, and the vivid sympathies awakened by the alternate victories or defeats of the American arms, called into action a new generation of statesmen. The restrictions which the federalists It was under such auspices that Mr. Calhoun took his seat. On the open-ing of the first session of the twelfth Congress, as we learn from the life with which the present volume opens, he first entered the Capitol, and was appointed by the Speaker on the committee of Foreign Relations, in conjunction with Mr. Peter B. Porter and Mr. Grundy, of the administration side, and Mr. Randolph and Mr. Key, of the opposition. It was in defence of the war measures projected by the committee that the opening speech in the collection before us was delivered, and it is worthy of observation how strongly the logical peculiarities of the orator stand out at a time when there was every temptation to rhetorical excess. Take, for instance, the passage where, |