Page:The Presidents of the United States, 1789-1914, v. II.djvu/40

20 LIVES OF THE PRESIDENTS formal deference with natural dignity and genuine cordiality. Intensely partisan in his opinions and easily startled by the red rag of "Hamiltonian Federalism," he never carried the contentions of the political arena into the social sphere. The asperities of personal rivalry estranged him for a time from Calhoun, after the latter denounced him in the senate in 1837 as "a practical politician," with whom "justice, right, patriotism, etc., were mere vague phrases," but with his great Whig rival, Henry Clay, he maintained unbroken relations of friendship through all vicissitudes of political for tune. As a lawyer his rank was eminent. Though never rising in speech to the heights of oratory, he was equally fluent and facile before bench or jury, and equally felicitous whether expounding the in tricacies of fact or of law in a case. His manner was mild and insinuating, never declamatory. With out carrying his judicial studies into the realm of jurisprudence, he yet had a knowledge of law that fitted hm to cope with the greatest advocates of the New York bar. The evidences of his legal learning and acute dialectics are still preserved in the New York reports of Cowen, Johnson, and Wendell. As a debater in the senate, he always went to the pith of questions, disdaining the arts of rhetoric. As a writer of political letters or of state papers, he carried diffusiveness to a fault, which sometimes hinted at a weakness in positions requir-