Page:Six Months at the White House.djvu/76

Rh musingly, if this was official dignity as President. "No," replied Judge Bates, "that is of little consequence. His deficiency is in the element of will.  I have sometimes told him, for instance, that he was unfit to be intrusted with the pardoning power.  Why, if a man comes to him with a touching story, his judgment is almost certain to be affected by it.  Should the applicant be a woman, a wife, a mother, or a sister,—in nine cases out of ten, her tears, if nothing else, are sure to prevail."

Mr. Seward, whose conversation much of the time, while sitting, was like that of a man soliloquizing aloud, told me on one occasion two or three good stories. Referring to the numerous portraits painted of him at different times, he said, that of all artists whom he had known, Henry Inman was most rapid in execution. For the full-length portrait, painted while he was Governor, for the city of New York, Inman required but two or three sittings of an hour each, with an additional quarter of an hour for the standing figure. This drew out something from me in relation to Elliott's whole length of him, painted at the same period. "My experience with Elliott," he rejoined, "who was then in the beginning of his career, was a very different affair. He seemed to think me like Governor Crittenden's hen." Laugh-