No words can depict the bitterness of Calhoun’s disappointment and mortification at being distanced by a man whom he despised so cordially as he did Van Buren.  To comprehend it, his whole subsequent career must be studied.  The numerous covert allusions to the subject in his speeches and writings are surcharged with rancor; and it was observed that, whenever his mind reverted to it, his manner, the tone of his voice, and every gesture testified to the intensity of his feelings.  “Every Southern man,” said he on one occasion,

“who is true to the interests of his section, and faithful to the duties which Providence has allotted him, will be forever excluded from the honors and emoluments of this government, which will be reserved only for those who have qualified themselves by political prostitution for admission into the Magdalen Asylum.”

His face, too, from this time, assumed that haggard, cast-iron, intense, introverted aspect which struck every beholder.

Miss Martineau, in her Retrospect of Western Travel, has given us some striking and valuable glimpses of the eminent men of that period, particularly of the three most eminent, who frequently visited her during her stay in Washington.  This passage, for example, is highly interesting.

“Mr. Clay sitting upright on the sofa, with his snuffbox ever in his hand, would discourse for many an hour in his even, soft, deliberate tone, on any one of the great subjects of American policy which we might happen to start, always amazing us with the moderation of estimate and speech which so impetuous a nature has been able to attain.  Mr. Webster, leaning back at his ease, telling stories, cracking jokes, shaking the sofa with burst after burst of laughter, or smoothly discoursing to the perfect felicity of the logical part of one’s constitution, would illuminate an evening now and then.  Mr. Calhoun, the cast-iron man, who looks as if he had never been born and could never be extinguished, would come in sometimes to keep our understandings on a painful stretch for a short while, and leave us to take to pieces his close, rapid, theoretical, illustrated talk, and see what we could make of it.  We found it usually more worth retaining as a curiosity, than as either very just or useful.  His speech abounds in figures, truly illustrative, if that which they illustrate were true also.  But his theories of government (almost the only subject upon which his thoughts are employed), the squarest and compactest that ever were made, are composed out of limited elements, and are not, therefore, likely to stand service very well.  It is at first extremely interesting to hear Mr. Calhoun talk; and there is a never-failing evidence of power in all that he says and does, which commands intellectual reverence; but the admiration is too soon turned into regret, into absolute melancholy.  It is impossible to resist the conviction, that all this force can be at best but useless, and