the law. Ezekiel, not yet graduated, came also and took a school in Short-street. Daniel helped his brother in the school. Edward Everett was one of the pupils, a marvellous boy," with no equal, it was thought, in all New England, making the promise he has since fulfilled.

Mr. Webster was admitted to the bar in 1805, with a prophecy of eminence from Mr. Gore, a prophecy which

might easily be made: such a head was its own fortuneteller. His legal studies over, refusing a lucrative office, he settled down as a lawyer at Boscawen, in New Hampshire. Thence went to Portsmouth in 1807, a lawyer of large talents, getting rapidly into practice; "known all over, the State of New Hampshire," known also in Massachusetts. He attended to literature, wrote papers in the Monthly Anthology, a periodical published in the "Athens of America" -so Boston was then called. He printed a rhymed version of some of the odes of Horace, and wrote largely for the "Portsmouth Oracle."

In 1808 he married Miss Grace Fletcher, an attractive and beautiful woman, one year older than himself, the daughter of the worthy minister of Hopkinton, N. H. By this marriage he was the father of two daughters and two sons. But, alas for him! this amiable and beloved woman ceased to be mortal in 1828.

In 1812, when thirty years of age, he was elected to the House of Representatives. In 1814 his house was burned,

a great loss to the young man, never thrifty, and then struggling for an estate. He determined to quit New Hampshire, and seek a place in some more congenial spot. New Hampshire breeds great lawyers, but not great fortunes. He hesitated for a while between Boston and Albany. "He doubted;" so he wrote to a friend, if he "could make a living in Boston." But he concluded to try; and in 1816 he removed to Boston, in the State which had required his ancestor, Rev. Stephen Bachiller, "to forbeare exercising

his gifts as a pastor or teacher publiquely in the Pattent," "for his contempt of authority, and till some scandles be removed."*

In 1820, then thirty-eight years old, he is a member of the Massachusetts Convention, and is one of the leading members there; provoking the jealousy, but at the same time distancing the rivalry, of young men Boston born and Cambridge bred. His light, taken from under the New Hampshire bushel at Portsmouth, could not be hid in Boston. It gives light to all that enter the house. In 1822 he was elected to Congress from Boston; in 1827, to the Senate of the United States. In 1841 he was Secretary of State; again a private citizen in 1843; in the Senate in 1845, and Secretary of State in 1850, where he continued, until, "on the 24th of October, 1852, all that was mortal of Daniel Webster was no more!"

He was ten days in the General Court of Massachusetts; a few weeks in her Convention; eight years Representative in Congress; nineteen, Senator; five, Secretary of State. Such is a condensed map of his outward history.

Look next at the Headlands of his life. Here I shall speak of his deeds and words as a citizen and public officer.

He was a great lawyer, engaged in many of the most important cases during the last forty years; but, in the briefness of a sermon, I must pass by his labors in the law.

I know that much of his present reputation depends on his achievements as a lawyer; as an "expounder of the Constitution." Unfortunately, it is not possible for me to say how much credit belongs to Mr. Webster for his constitutional arguments, and how much to the late Judge Story. The publication of the correspondence between these gentle

Records of Mass. General Court, Oct. 3, 1632.

men will perhaps help settle the matter; but still much exact legal information was often given by word of mouth, during personal interviews, and that must for ever remain hidden from all but him who gave and him who took. However, from 1816 to 1842, Mr. Webster was in the habit of drawing from that deep and copious well of legal knowledge, whenever his own bucket was dry. Mr. Justice Story was the Jupiter Pluvius from whom Mr. Webster often sought to elicit peculiar thunder for his speeches, and private rain for his own public tanks of law. The statesman got the lawyer to draft bills, to make suggestions, to furnish facts, precedents, law, and ideas. He went on this aquilician business, asking aid, now in a "bankruptcy bill," in 1816 and 1825; then in questions of the law of nations, in 1827; next in matters of criminal law in 1830; then of constitutional law in 1832; then in relation to the Northeastern boundary in 1838; in matters of international law again, in his negotiations with Lord Ashburton, in 1842. "You can do more for me than all the rest of the world," wrote the Secretary of State, April 9, 1842, "because you can give me the lights I most want; and, if you furnish them, I shall be confident that they will be true lights. I shall trouble you greatly the next three months." And again, July 16, 1842, he writes, "Nobody but yourself can do this." But, alas! in his later years the beneficiary sought to conceal the source of his supplies. Jupiter Pluvius had himself been summoned before the court of the Higher Law.

case.

Much of Mr. Webster's fame as a Constitutional lawyer rests on his celebrated argument in the Dartmouth College But it is easy to see that the facts, the law, the precedents, the ideas, and the conclusions of that argument, had almost all of them been presented by Messrs. Mason and Smith in the previous trial of the case.*

* See the Report of the Case of the Trustees of Dartmouth College, &c. Portsmouth, N. H. [1819.]

Let me speak of the public acts of Mr. Webster in his capacity as a private citizen. Here I shall speak of him chiefly as a public orator.

Two juvenile orations of his are still preserved, delivered while he was yet a lad in college.* One is a fourth of July oration, a performance good enough for a lad of eighteen, but hardly indicating the talents of its author. The sentiments probably belong to the neighborhood, and the diction to the authorities of the college:

"Fair Science, too, holds her gentle empire amongst us, and almost innumerable altars are raised to her divinity from Brunswick to Florida. Yale, Providence, and Harvard now grace our land; and DARTMOUTH, towering majestic above the groves which encircle her, now inscribes her glory on the registers of fame! Oxford and Cambridge, those oriental stars of literature, shall now be lost, while the bright sun of American science displays his broad circumference in uneclipsed radiance."—p. 10.

Here is an opinion which he seems to have entertained at the end of his life. He speaks of the formation of the Constitution:

"We then saw the people of these States engaged in a transaction, which is undoubtedly the greatest approximation towards human perfection the political world ever yet experienced; and which will perhaps for ever stand, in the history of mankind, without a parallel.”—p. 8, 9.

* “An Oration pronounced at Hanover, N. H. the 4th day of July, 1800, being the Twenty-fourth Anniversary of Independence, by Daniel Webster, member of the Junior Class, Dartmouth University.

"Do thou, great Liberty, inspire our souls,
And make our lives in thy possession happy,
Or our deaths glorious in thy just defence," &c.

"Hanover, 1800." 8vo. pp. 15.

"Funeral Oration, occasioned by the Death of Ephraim Simonds, of Templeton, Mass., a Member of the Senior Class in Dartmouth College, who died at Hanover (N. H.), on the 18th of June, 1801, æt. 26. By Daniel Webster, a class-mate of the deceased. Et vix sentiunt dicere lingua. Vale. Hanover, 1801." 8vo. pp. 13.

In 1806, he delivered another Fourth-of-July address at Concord, N. H.,* containing many noble and generous opinions:

"Patriotism," said he, "hath a source of consolation that cheers the heart in these unhappy times, when good men are rendered odious, and bad men popular; when great men are made little, and little men are made great. A genuine patriot, above the reach of personal considerations, with his eye and his heart on the honor and the happiness of his country, is a character as easy and as satisfactory to himself as venerable in the eyes of the world. While his country enjoys freedom and peace, he will rejoice and be thankful; and, if it be in the councils of Heaven to send the storm and the tempest, he meets the tumult of the political elements with composure and dignity. Above fear, above danger, above reproach, he feels that the last end which can happen to any man never comes too soon, if he fall in defence of the law and the liberty of his country."- p. 21.

In 1812, he delivered a third Fourth-of-July address at Portsmouth. The political storm is felt in the little harbor of Portsmouth, and the speaker swells with the tumult of the sea. He is hostile to France; averse to the war with England, then waging, yet ready to fight and pay taxes for it. He wants a navy. He comes "to take counsel of the dead," with whom he finds an "infallible criterion."

But, alas! "dead men tell no tales," and give no counsel. There was no witch at Portsmouth to bring up Washington quickly. His subsequent deference to the money-power begins to appear: "The Federal Constitution was adopted for no single reason so much as for the protection of commerce." "Commerce has paid the price of independence." It has been committed to the care of the general government, but "not as a convict to the safe keeping of a jailor," "not for close confinement." He wants a navy to protect it. Such.were

the opinions of Federalists around him.

* "An Anniversary Address, delivered before the Federal Gentlemen of Concord and its Vicinity, July 4, 1806. By Daniel Webster. Concord, N. H., 1806." 8vo. pp. 21.

"An Address delivered before the Washington Benevolent Society at Portsmouth, July 4, 1812. By Daniel Webster. Portsm. N.H." 8vo. pp. 27. He delivered also other Fourth-of-July addresses, which I have not seen.