of contempt or the angry cry of insulted honor will better comport with his dignity.
Unfortunately, the threat of a challenge, which would have been wrong under any circumstances, in this case turned out to be even ludicrous. Two days afterwards another “card” appeared in the “National Intelligencer,” in which George Kremer, a Representative from Pennsylvania, avowed himself as the author of the letter. George Kremer was one of those men in high political station of whom people wonder “how they ever got there;” an insignificant, ordinarily inoffensive, simple soul, uneducated, ignorant, and eccentric, attracting attention in Washington mainly by a leopard-skin overcoat of curious cut which he was in the habit of wearing. This man now revealed himself as the great Henry Clay's antagonist, declaring himself “ready to prove, to the satisfaction of unprejudiced minds, enough to satisfy them of the accuracy of the statements which were contained in that letter.” The thought of a duel with George Kremer in his leopard-skin overcoat appeared at once so farcical that the most passionate duelist would not have seriously entertained it. As Daniel Webster wrote to his excellent brother Ezekiel, who lived on a farm in New Hampshire, “Mr. Kremer is a man with whom one would think of having a shot about as soon as with your neighbor, Mr. Simeon Atkinson, whom he somewhat resembles.”
The rashness of Clay's fierce proclamation was
