“to this early practice of the art of all arts that I am indebted for the primary and leading impulses that stimulated my progress, and have shaped and moulded my entire destiny.”

We should be glad to know more of this self-training; but Mr. Clay’s “campaign” biographers have stuffed their volumes too full of eulogy to leave room for such instructive details.  We do not even know the books from which he declaimed.  Plutarch’s Lives were favorite reading with him, we accidentally learn; and his speeches contain evidence that he was powerfully influenced by the writings of Dr. Franklin.  We believe it was from Franklin that he learned very much of the art of managing men.  Franklin, we think, aided this impetuous and exaggerating spirit to acquire his habitual moderation of statement, and that sleepless courtesy which, in his keenest encounters, generally kept him within parliamentary bounds, and enabled him to live pleasantly with men from whom he differed in opinion.  Obsolete as many of his speeches are, from the transient nature of the topics of which they treat, they may still be studied with profit by young orators and old politicians as examples of parliamentary politeness.  It was the good-natured and wise Franklin that helped him to this.  It is certain, too, that at some part of his earlier life he read translations of Demosthenes; for of all modern orators Henry Clay was the most Demosthenian.  Calhoun purposely and consciously imitated the Athenian orator; but Clay was a kindred spirit with Demosthenes.  We could select passages from both these orators, and no man could tell which was American and which was Greek, unless he chanced to remember the passage.  Tell us, gentle reader, were the sentences following spoken by Henry Clay after the war of 1812 at the Federalists who had opposed that war, or by Demosthenes against the degenerate Greeks who favored the designs of Philip?

“From first to last I have uniformly pursued the just and virtuous course,—­asserter of the honors, of the prerogatives, of the glory of my country.  Studious to support them, zealous to advance them, my whole being is devoted to this glorious cause.  I was never known to walk abroad with a face of joy and exultation at the success of the enemy, embracing and announcing the joyous tidings to those who I supposed would transmit it to the proper place.  I was never known to receive the successes of my own country with trembling, with sighs, with my eyes bent to the earth, like those impious men who are the defamers of their country, as if by such conduct they were not defamers of themselves.”

Is it Clay, or is it Demosthenes?  Or have we made a mistake, and copied a passage from the speech of a Unionist of 1865?

After serving four years as clerk and amanuensis, barely earning a subsistence, Clay was advised by his venerable friend, the Chancellor, to study law; and a place was procured for him in the office of the Attorney-General of the State.  In less than a year after formally beginning his studies he was admitted to the bar.  This seems a short preparation; but the whole period of his connection with Chancellor Wythe was a study of the law.  The Chancellor was what a certain other chancellor styles “a full man,” and Henry Clay was a receptive youth.