Yet I have had from each before our association ended, assurances
of their warm personal regard. One of them, perhaps, on the
whole, the most conspicuous, is Lucius Q. C. Lamar. His
very name, Lucius Quintus Cincinnatus, indicates that his
father must have looked for his example for his son to follow
far away from the American life about him.
Lamar was one of the most delightful of men. His English
style, both in conversation and in public speaking, was fresh
and original, well adapted to keep his hearers expectant and
alert, and to express the delicate and subtle shades of meaning
that were required for the service of his delicate and subtle
thought.
He had taken the part of the South with great zeal. He told
me shortly before he left the Senate that he thought it was
a great misfortune for the world that the Southern cause had
been lost. He stood by his people, as he liked to call them,
in their defeat and in their calamity without flinching or
reservation. While he would, I am sure, have done nothing
himself not scrupulously honorable, and while there was nothing
in his nature of cruelty, still less of brutality, yet he
did not stop to inquire into matters of right and wrong when
a Southerner had got into trouble, by reason of anything a
white Democrat had done in conflict with the National authority.
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