Mr. Blaine was so strong and so weak, so delicate and so tenacious, that he was as constant a puzzle to those who loved him as to his enemies, to the best-informed as to the most ill-informed.  Those very near to him took the liberty of laughing at him about his two overcoats, and his going to bed and sending for a doctor in the afternoon, and getting off with gayety to the opera in the evening; about an alleged indigestion followed by eating a confection that would have tested the hardihood of a young candy-eater.  One who studied him with affection wrote of him that he had an association of qualities giving at once sensitiveness and endurance, and we were indebted to this for the faculties, the capacities, that made up the man whose influence had been so remarkable and his popularity a phenomenon.  He was of fine sensibilities, and there was nothing on earth or in the air that did not tell him something.  He was like an instrument of music that a breath would move to melody, and that was ever in tune for any wind that blew, and yet had patient strength, and wore like steel.  He had a rare make-up of refinement and power, and life was sweeter and brighter and more costly far to him than to the ordinary man.

It was after his first and, as it turned out, final defeat for the Presidency, in his earliest effort for the office, that his fame grew splendid.  His campaigning was fascinating, and his speeches, as the years passed, took greater variety.  In his tour when a candidate in 1884, his addresses were marvellous in aptitude and in a thousand felicities.  There was much said of the fact that he was not a lawyer, and an affected superiority to him by gentlemen whose profession permitted “fees,” and there was a system of deprecation to the effect that he only harangued, that he had neither originality nor grace.  But after Garfield’s death and the retirement of the Secretary from the Cabinet, he turned to writing history “as a resource,” and his great work is of permanent value to the country, while his Garfield oration is one of the masterpieces of the highest rank; and there came straight from his brain two far-flashing ideas—­that of the union of American nations, and to protect the policy of protection with reciprocity—­and in the two there is the manifestation of that crowning glory of public life which enters the luminous atmosphere of immortality—­statesmanship.  That he had not the opportunity of the execution of these policies—­of guiding and shaping their triumph—­was not his fault but his fate.  Their time may be coming but slowly, yet it surely will come.  His zeal in behalf of making the protective principle irresistible by associating it intimately with reciprocity, was so strong that he grew impatient when others were tedious in comprehension; and there was a story of his concluding a sharp admonition to the laborers on the tariff schedules by “smashing his new silk hat on a steam-heater in the committee-room.”  He was asked by a friend who rode out with him to see the statue that he thought the most accurate and impressive of all the likenesses of Lincoln and was fond of driving to see, located in a park east of the Capitol—­that by Story—­whether he had “smashed a new silk hat” on a steam-heater on behalf of reciprocity; and he softly responded, “It was not a new hat.”