In spite
of the proverb, it is not in a single day, or in a very few years, that
a man can be reckoned "as dead as Julius Caesar." We feel little
interest in scraps from the pens of old gentlemen, ambassadors,
governors, senators, heads of departments, even presidents though they
were, who lived lives of praiseworthy respectability, and whose powdered
heads and black knee-breeches have but just vanished out of the drawing-
room. Still less do we value the blotted paper of those whose
reputations are dusty, not with oblivious time, but with present
political turmoil and newspaper vogue. Really great men, however, seem,
as to their effect on the imagination, to take their place amongst past
worthies, even while walking in the very sunshine that illuminates the
autumnal day in which we write. We look, not without curiosity, at the
small, neat hand of Henry Clay, who, as he remarks with his habitual
deference to the wishes of the fair, responds to a young lady's request
for his seal; and we dwell longer over the torn-off conclusion of a note
from Mr. Calhoun, whose words are strangely dashed off without letters,
and whose name, were it less illustrious, would be unrecognizable in his
own autograph. But of all hands that can still grasp a pen, we know not
the one, belonging to a soldier or a statesman, which could interest us
more than the hand that wrote the following:
"Sir, your note of the 6th inst.
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