He was tall and he was homely, but in a way people generally find endearing. Amid all those high stocks and flowing locks, among all those grim statesmen and noble Romans who populated the first five decades of our Nineteenth-Century political life, his is one ol the lew genial figures. Over the gap of a century, he is still warm and likeable; a modern man might, one senses, sit down with him and not be lectured, orated at, or peppered with platitudes. A senator at 29 (a little illegally, since the Constitution requires a hoary 30), elected Speaker of the House the day he first took his seat in it, at 34, he seemed marked lor the highest America offers. That he fell short and never made the presidency, and took it with good humor, won him the nation’s heart. The people loved Henry Clay.

Leave aside the long career of over hall a century in almost every office but Number One, and examine Clay in the context of his private life, at home in Kentucky among his family and his friends. It the testimony of all the memorials to the Great Compromiser means anything, here is the explanation, or a good part of it anyway, of this enduring sample of popularity. America admires a home-lover, and this was a home-lover par excellence.

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