Hugh Swinton Legaré, cabinet officer, congressman, diplomat, lawyer, orator, editor, and writer, has for more than a century and a half since his death been held up as irrefutable proof that the antebellum South did produce intellectuals of the first rank. It cannot, however, be claimed that his towering intellect was distilled into literature of equivalent elevation. He did a great deal of writing in the course of an incredibly busy life, but Legaré never considered himself a writer; indeed, he sneered in periodical print at Thomas Moore's "determined propensity for book-making." The range of his interests, the depth of his reading, the dazzling extent of his linguistic abilities, his polyglot total recall of the riches he absorbed--all provoke wonder in the exclusive fraternity of his modern readers, but there is a sort of freakishness in the compendiousness of his mind. His fluency in so many...