combines so much impulse with so great a power of regulating the impulses
of himself and others as Franklin Pierce. The faculty, here exercised
and improved, of controlling an assembly while agitated by tumultuous
controversy, was afterwards called into play upon a higher field; for,
during his congressional service, Pierce was often summoned to preside in
committee of the whole, when a turbulent debate was expected to demand
peculiar energy in the chair.

He was elected a member of Congress in 1833, being young for the station,
as he has always been for every public station that he has filled. A
different kind of man--a man conscious that accident alone had elevated
him, and therefore nervously anxious to prove himself equal to his
fortunes--would thus have been impelled to spasmodic efforts. He would
have thrust himself forward in debate, taking the word out of the mouths
of renowned orators, and thereby winning notoriety, as at least the
glittering counterfeit of true celebrity. Had Pierce, with his genuine
ability, practised this course; had he possessed even an ordinary love of
display, and had he acted upon it with his inherent tact and skill,
taking advantage of fair occasions to prove the power and substance that
were in him, it would greatly have facilitated the task of his
biographer.

To aim at personal distinction, however, as an object independent of the
public service, would have been contrary to all the foregone and
subsequent manifestations of his life. He was never wanting to the
occasion; but he waited for the occasion to bring him inevitably forward.
When he spoke, it was not only because he was fully master of the
subject, but because the exigency demanded him, and because no other and
older man could perform the same duty as well as himself. Of the copious
eloquence--and some of it, no doubt, of a high order--which Buncombe has