Webster's manner in many parts, it would be in vain to attempt to give any one not present the faintest idea. It has been my fortune to hear some of the ablest speeches of the greatest living orators on both sides of the water; but I must confess I never heard anything which so completely realized my conception of what Demosthenes was when he delivered the oration for the crown."

"

Sprung from a revolutionary stock," said Caleb Cushing, in a review of Webster's speeches, "nurtured in the very domains of 'the mountain goddess, Liberty,' he rose to fame and usefulness in the bosom of his native State. So surely as the bright stars shall move on untiringly in their celestial paths on high to glad the eye and lead the footsteps of unborn generations of men,—so surely as genius, honor, patriotism, will continue to be prized on earth when the passions of the hour shall have fretted themselves into extinction and oblivion,

so sure is it that the time will come when New Hampshire will esteem it her pride and her glory to have given birth and maturity to Daniel Webster. And yet, such are the corruptions of party, and such the infamy to which it sometimes degrades the daily press, that, as Mr. Webster feelingly remarked in his speech at Concord, it has been his fortune, whether in public life or out of it, to be pursued by a degree of reproach and accusation in his native State such as never fell to the lot of any other of her public men.

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"Of the speeches delivered by Mr. Webster in the Senate, those devoted to the great constitutional questions display Mr. Webster without a competitor. By a succession of unrivalled speeches in exposition of disputed texts or constructions of the constitution,- by the profound knowledge of historical facts displayed in them, the acuteness, sagacity and comprehensiveness of view which they exhibit, and the patriotic zeal which animates them in every line,- he has earned for himself a most peculiar and most exalted position in the public eye, as the great expounder and champion of the fundamental law of the Union. So long as the government of the United States shall endure, or the memory of its honor and its liberty survive the overthrow of its institutions, so long as our example shall occupy a page in the history of human freedom,- so long must the speeches of Mr. Webster be read, studied, admired. On these he may confidently rely for the respect and applause of his country, while living; on these, for a fame lasting as the undying spirit of constitutional liberty itself. Neither in the Philippic orations of Demosthenes, nor in the consular ones of

Cicero, nor in whatever class among the speeches of Burke, or Pitt, or Canning, is there anything more thoroughly imbued and saturated with the very essence of immortality than in these constitutional speeches of Daniel Webster.

"It is one of the characteristic traits of Mr. Webster's speeches,whether at the bar, in political assemblies, or in Congress, that there is nothing in them discursive; no digressions from the straightforward path of his argument, no mere episodes of embellishment, no commonplace arts of oratory. They are models of severe unity of design, of consummate and beautiful simplicity of execution, like some masterpiece of statuary carved in the blended grace and majesty of antique art. He sends forth no scattered rays, to dazzle with their brilliancy, and bewilder while they dazzle, but pours a steady stream of light, concentrated in a broad beam of effulgence upon the point he would illumine. His mind never stops on the course, like Atalanta, to gather the golden fruits which glitter in its path, and thus ultimately lose the prize of the race in pursuit of the delusive temptations of the moment. For this reason, it is impossible to do justice to any of his more elabo→ rate efforts by bare extracts, when every sentence is an essential part of one grand whole, and nothing can be spared from the finished perfection of the work, nothing added, without marring its excellent symmetry. Yet, amid all the dignity, strength and singleness, which distinguish his productions, there is an occasional vividness of imagery, so apposite, that it seems to be innate in the very substance of the matter, rather than a mere illustration,-like the native lustre of a gem, belonging to the primitive organization of its elements. It is not difficult, therefore, to select passages which, fragments though they be, are beautiful and striking in themselves, and bear witness what that is of which they are but severed parts. You do not see the magnificent temple, in its admirable whole; but even the solitary column, the broken frieze, torn from its pediment, bespeak the grandeur of the Parthenon. The following passage elucidates a great principle, by a happy recurrence to historical facts:

"We are not to wait till great public mischiefs come,' says Webster, 'till the government is overthrown, or liberty itself put in extreme jeopardy. We should not be worthy sons of our fathers, were we so to regard great questions affecting the general freedom. Those fathers accomplished the Revolution on a strict question of principle. The Parliament of Great Britain asserted a right to tax the

colonies, in all cases whatsoever; and it was precisely on this question that they made the Revolution to turn. The amount of taxation was trifling; but the claim was inconsistent with liberty,— and that was, in their eyes, enough. It was against the recital of an act of Parliament, rather than against any suffering under its enactments, that they took up arms. They went to war against a preamble. They fought seven years against a declaration. They poured out their treasures and their blood, like water, in a contest in opposition to an assertion which those less sagacious, and not so well schooled in the principles of civil liberty, would have regarded as barren phraseology, or mere parade of words. They saw, in the claim of the British Parliament, a seminal principle of mischief- the germ of unjust power; they detected it, dragged it forth from underneath its plausible disguises, struck at it, nor did it elude either their steady eye or their well-directed blow, till they had extirpated and destroyed it, to the smallest fibre. On this question of principle, while actual suffering was yet afar off, they raised their flag against a power, to which, for purposes of foreign conquest and subjugation, Rome, in the height of her glory, is not to be compared, a power which has dotted over the surface of the whole globe with her possessions and military posts,whose morning drum-beat, following the sun, and keeping company with the hours, circles the earth daily with one continuous and unbroken strain of the martial airs of England.'

4

The manners of Daniel Webster in public speaking are remarkable. "It is in reply that he comes out in the majesty of intellectual grandeur," says Col. Knapp, "and lavishes about him the opulence of intellectual wealth; it is when the darts of the enemy have hit him, that he is all might and

words of weight and fire. eloquence is founded on no

Hear him then, and you

soul; it is then that he showers down Hear him then, and you will say that his model, ancient or modern, however strong may be the resemblance to any one of them; that he never read the works of a master for imitation; all is his own, excellences and defects. He resembles no American orator we have ever heard. He does not imitate any one in the remotest degree: neither the Addisonian eloquence of Alexander Hamilton, which was the day-spring in a pure and vernal atmosphere, full of health and beauty; nor does he strive for the sweetness of Fisher Ames, whose heart, on all great occasions, grew liquid, and he could pour it out like water. Ames waved the wand of the enchantress, and a paradise arose, peopled with

ethereal beings, all engaged in pursuing an immortal career." In Mr. Webster's eloquence, one is sensible that there is a vast and indefinite back-ground of character. The oratory is but as a little jet out of a great reservoir, from which it is not missed. He would at times overwhelm you, and draw himself back again before you recovered your self-possession. The orator is but a fraction of the man,— the man standing indefinitely great behind the mere orator. He is delightfully felicitous in illustration. How effective, for instance, the passage where, in remarking on the vast extent of this republic, the two great seas of the world washing the one and the other shore, in the conception of which, says Webster, we may realize the beautiful description of the ornamental edging of the buckler of Achilles :

"The person of Mr. Webster is singular and commanding," says Knapp. "His height, above the ordinary size, about five feet eleven inches. He is broad across the chest, and stoutly and firmly built; but there is nothing of clumsiness either in his form or gait. His head is very large; his forehead high, with good-shaped temples. He has a large, black, solemn-looking eye, that exhibits strength and steadfastness, which sometimes burns, but never sparkles. His lips, when his countenance is in repose, shut close-Lavater's mark of firmness; but the changes of his lips make no small part of the strong and varied expressions of his face. His hair is of a raven-black, of great thickness, and is generally worn rather short; his eyebrows are thick, more than commonly arched, and bushy,— which, on a slight contraction, give his features the appearance of sternness. But the general expression of his face, after it is properly examined, is rather mild and amiable than otherwise. His movements in the senate-chamber and in the street are slow and dignified. His voice, once heard, is always remembered; but there is no peculiar sweetness in it; its tones are rather harsh than musical; still, there is great variety in them. Some have a most startling penetration; others, of a softer character, catch the ear, and charm it down to the most perfect attention. His voice has nothing of that monotony which palls upon the ear; it may be heard all day without fatiguing the audience. His emphasis is

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strong, and his enunciation clear, and so distinct that not a syllable escapes any of his hearers. The compass of his voice is so great, that it fills any room, however large, with perfect ease to himself; and Willis, our native poet, who saw him nearly twenty years after the graphic description of Knapp was written, says: "Sombre as the lines of his face are, unlighted with health or impulse, the eyes so cavernous and dark, the eyelids so livid, eyebrows so heavy and black, and the features so habitually grave, it is a face of strong affections, genial, and foreign to all unkindness. There is not a trace in it where a pettishness or a peevishness could lodge, and no means in its sallow muscles for the expression of an intellectual littleness or perversion. It is all broad and majestic, all expansive and generous. The darkness in it is the shadow of a Salvator Rosa,— a heightening of grandeur, without injury to the clearness. His physical superiority and noble disposition are in just balance with his mind. Webster, incapable of the forecast narrowness which makes the scope of character converge when meridian ambition and occupation fill it no longer, will walk the broadening path that has been divergent and liberalizing from his childhood to the present hour, till he steps from its expanding lines into his grave." At the festival of the Sons of New Hampshire, General Dearborn said of Daniel Webster, "that, on all occasions when he put forth the full energies of his mind, he appeared in the senate-chamber like the lion-hearted Richard in the tournament of Ashley de la Zouch, ready to meet all combatants; and woe betide those who received the ponderous and crushing blows of his mighty intellectual mace!" Mr. Webster is a member of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, Massachusetts Historical, New England Genealogic, and American Antiquarian Societies.

SAMUEL LORENZO KNAPP.

AUGUST 5, 1826. EULOGY ON ADAMS AND JEFFERSON.

Was born at Newburyport, in 1774; and was educated at Phillips' Academy, in Exeter, where he shone as one of the most brilliant scholars, especially in declamation. He graduated at Dartmouth Col