The chapter of our history most abounding in all the elements of interest will be that one which will relate the rise and first national triumph of the Democratic party.  Young Clay came to the Kentucky stump just when the country was at the crisis of the struggle between the Old and the New.  But in Kentucky it was not a struggle; for the people there, mostly of Virginian birth, had been personally benefited by Jefferson’s equalizing measures, and were in the fullest sympathy with his political doctrines.  When, therefore, this brilliant and commanding youth, with that magnificent voice of his, and large gesticulation, mounted the wagon that usually served as platform in the open-air meetings of Kentucky, and gave forth, in fervid oratory, the republican principles he had imbibed in Richmond, he won that immediate and intense popularity which an orator always wins who gives powerful expression to the sentiments of his hearers.  We cannot wonder that, at the close of an impassioned address upon the Alien and Sedition Laws, the multitude should have pressed about him, and borne him aloft in triumph upon their shoulders; nor that Kentucky should have hastened to employ him in her public business as soon as he was of the requisite age.  At thirty he was, to use the language of the stump, “Kentucky’s favorite son,” and incomparably the finest orator in the Western country.  Kentucky had tried him, and found him perfectly to her mind.  He was an easy, comfortable man to associate with, wholly in the Jeffersonian taste.  His wit was not of the highest quality, but he had plenty of it; and if he said a good thing, he had such a way of saying it as gave it ten times its natural force.  He chewed tobacco and took snuff,—­practices which lowered the tone of his health all his life.  In familiar conversation he used language of the most Western description; and he had a singularly careless, graceful way with him, that was in strong contrast with the vigor and dignity of his public efforts.  He was an honest and brave young man, altogether above lying, hypocrisy, and meanness,—­full of the idea of Republican America and her great destiny.  The splendor of his talents concealed his defects and glorified his foibles; and Kentucky rejoiced in him, loved him, trusted him, and sent him forth to represent her in the national council.

During the first thirteen years of Henry Clay’s active life as a politician,—­from his twenty-first to his thirty-fourth year,—­he appears in politics only as the eloquent champion of the policy of Mr. Jefferson, whom he esteemed the first and best of living men.  After defending him on the stump and aiding him in the Kentucky Legislature, he was sent in 1806, when he was scarcely thirty, to fill for one term a seat in the Senate of the United States, made vacant by the resignation of one of the Kentucky Senators.  Mr. Jefferson received his affectionate young disciple with cordiality, and admitted him to his confidence.  Clay had been recently defending