If Toombs could but be delineated to the life in his extempore action, advice, and phrase he would soon attain a lofty station in world literature. It mattered not what he was talking about,--an affair of business or of other importance, communicating information, telling an experience, complimenting a girl, disporting himself in the maddest merriment, as he often did after some great accomplishment,--his language flashed all the while with a planet-like brilliancy, and the matter was of a piece. Those of us who hang over Martial, how we learn to admire his perpetual freshness and variety! But when we compare him with Catullus, his master, we note that while his epigram is always splendid, the language is commonplace beside that of the other.[110] Toombs was even more than Martial in exhaustless productivity and unhackneyed point, and his words always reflected, like those of Catullus, the hues of Paradise. Perhaps a reader exclaims, "As I do not know Martial and Catullus your comparison is nothing to me." Well, I tell him that I have read Shakspeare from lid to lid more times than I can say, and that I have long been close friends with every one of his characters, all the way from Lear, Othello, Hamlet, and Macbeth at the top, down to his immortal clowns at the bottom. Surely with this experience it can be said of me, "The man has seen some majesty." I have often tried, and that with the help of a few intimates almost as deeply read in Shakspeare as myself, to find in the dainty plays an equal to Toombs throwing away everywhere around him with infinite prodigality gems of unpremeditated wisdom and phrase. Samuel Barnett, Linton Stephens, Henry Andrews and my cousin, his wife, Samuel Lumpkin, and S. H. Hardeman, all of whom knew him well, were among these. The end of every effort would be our agreement that Shakspeare himself could hardly have made an adequately faithful representation of Toombs.
The mental torture of the last three or four years of his life I must touch upon again. The most active anti-slavery partisan and most scarred soldier of the union will compassionate if he but contemplate. I met him only now and then. As I read his feelings--one eye quenched by cataract and the other failing fast; his contemporaries of the bar and political arena dead; the wife whom he loved better than he did himself sinking under a disease gradually destroying her mind; ever harrowed with the thought that his country was no more, and that he was a foreigner and exile in the spot which he had always called home,--though I was full of increasing joy over the benefit of emancipation to my people and gladness at the promise of reunited America, my tranquillity would take flight whenever he came into my mind. He was that spectacle of a good man in a hopeless struggle against fate that moves enemies to pity. To me his last state was more tragic and pathetic than that of Oedipus.