lished between strong natures so opposite in character, was never disturbed by any collision in the courts. In a letter written, I think, a few weeks after he had made that "Reply to Hayne" which is conceded to be one of the great masterpieces of eloquence in the recorded oratory of the world, Webster wrote jocularly to Mason: "I have been written to, to go to New Hampshire, to try a cause against you next August. If it were an easy and plain case on our side, I might be willing to go; but I have some of your pounding in my bones yet, and I don't care about any more till that wears out."

It may be said that Webster's argument in the celebrated "Dartmouth College Case," before the Supreme Court of the United States, placed him, at the age of thirty-six, in the foremost rank of the constitutional lawyers of the country. For the main points of the reasoning, and for the exhaustive citation of authorities by which the reasoning was sustained, he was probably indebted to Mason, who had previously argued the case before the Superior Court of New Hampshire; but his superiority to Mason was shown in the eloquence, the moral power, he infused into his reasoning, so as to make the dullest citation of legal authority tell on the minds he addressed.

There is one incident connected with this speech which proves what immense force is given to simple words when a great man- great in his emotional nature as well as great in logical power is behind the words. "It is, sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it." At this point the orator's lips quivered, his voice choked, his eyes filled with tears, all the memories of sacrifices endured by his father and mother, his brothers and sisters, in order that he might enjoy its rather scanty advantages of a liberal education, and by means of which he was there to plead its cause before the supreme tribunal of the nation, rushed suddenly upon his mind in an overwhelming flood. The justices of the Supreme Court-great lawyers, tried and toughened by experience into a certain obdurate sense of justice, and insensible to any common appeal to their hearts - melted into unwonted tenderness, as, in broken words, the advocate proceeded to state his own indebtedness to the "small college," whose rights and privileges he was there to defend. Chief Justice Marshall's eyes were filled with tears; and the eyes of the other justices were suffused with a moisture similar to that which afflicted the eyes of the Chief. As the orator gradually recovered his accustomed stern composure of manner, he turned to the counsel on the other side, one of whom, at least, was a graduate of Dartmouth, and in his deepest and most thrilling tones, thus concluded his argument: "Sir,

I know not how others may feel; but for myself, when I see my Alma Mater surrounded, like Cæsar in the senate-house, by those who are reiterating stab after stab, I would not, for this right hand, have her turn to me and say, Et tu quoque, mi fili! — And thou too, my son.' The effect was overwhelming; yet by what simple means was it produced, and with what small expenditure of words! The eloquence was plainly "in the man, in the subject, and in the occasion," but most emphatically was it in the MAN.

Webster's extreme solicitude to make his style thoroughly Websteriana style unimitated because it is in itself inimitable-is observable in the care he took in revising all his speeches and addresses which were published under his own authority. His great Plymouth oration of 1820 did not appear in a pamphlet form until a year after its delivery. The chief reason of this delay was probably due to his desire of stating the main political idea of the oration, that government is founded on property, so clearly that it could not be misconceived by any honest mind, and could only be perverted from its plain democratic meaning by the ingenious malignity of such minds as are deliberately dishonest, and consider lying as justifiable when lying will serve a party purpose. It is probable that Webster would have been President of the United States had it not been for one short sentence in this oration, "Government is founded on property." It was of no use for his political friends to prove that he founded on this general proposition the most democratic views as to the distribution of property, and advised the enactment of laws calculated to frustrate the accumulation of large fortunes in a few hands. There were the words, words horrible to the democratic imagination, and Webster was proclaimed an aristocrat, and an enemy to the common people. But the delay in the publication of the oration may also be supposed to have been due to his desire to prune all its grand passages of eloquence of every epithet and image which should not be rigorously exact as expressions of his genuine sentiments and principles. It is probable that the Plymouth oration, as we possess it in print, is a better oration, in respect to composition, than that which was heard by the applauding crowd before which it was originally delivered. It is certain that the largeness, the grandeur, the weight of Webster's whole nature, were first made manifest to the intelligent portion of his countrymen by this noble commemorative address.

Yet it is also certain that he was not himself altogether satisfied with this oration; and his dissatisfaction with some succeeding popular speeches, memorable in the annals of American eloquence, was

expressed privately to his friends in the most emphatic terms. On the day he completed his magnificent Bunker Hill oration, delivered on the 17th of June, 1825, he wrote to Mr. George Ticknor: "I did the deed this morning, i. e. I finished my speech; and I am pretty well persuaded that it will finish me as far as reputation is concerned. There is no more tone in it than in the weather in which it has been written; it is perpetual dissolution and thaw." Every critic will understand the force of that word "tone." He seemed to feel that it had not enough robust manliness, that the ribs and backbone, the facts, thoughts, and real substance of the address, were not sufficiently prominent, owing to the frequency of those outbursts of magnetic eloquence, which made the immense audience that listened to it half crazy with the vehemence of their applause. On the morning after he had delivered his eulogy on Adams and Jefferson, he entered his office with his manuscript in his hand, and threw it down on the desk of a young student at law whom he specially esteemed, with the request, "There, Tom, please to take that discourse, and weed out all the Latin words."

Webster's liking for the Saxon element of our composite language was, however, subordinate to his main purpose of self-expression. Every word was good, whether of Saxon or Latin derivation, which aided him to embody the mood of mind dominant at the time he was speaking or writing. No man had less of what has been called "the ceremonial cleanliness of academical pharisees;" and the purity of expression he aimed at was to put into a form, at once intelligible and tasteful, his exact thoughts and emotions. He tormented reporters, proof-readers, and the printers who had the misfortune to be engaged in putting one of his performances into type, not because this or that word was or was not Saxon or Latin, but because it was inadequate to convey perfectly his meaning. Mr. Kemble, a great Anglo-Saxon scholar, once, in a company of educated gentlemen, defied anybody present to mention a single Latin phrase in our language for which he could not furnish a more forcible Saxon equivalent. "The impenetrability of matter" was suggested; and Kemble, after half a minute's reflection, answered, "The un-thorough-fareableness of stuff." Still, no English writer would think of discarding such an abstract, but convenient and accurate, term as "impenetrability," for the coarsely concrete and terribly ponderous word which declares that there is no possible thoroughfare, no road, by which we can penetrate that substance which we call "matter," and which our Saxon forefathers called "stuff." Wherever the Latin element in our language comes

in to express ideas and sentiments which were absent from the AngloSaxon mind, Webster uses it without stint; and some of the most resounding passages of his eloquence owe to it their strange power to suggest a certain vastness in his intellect and sensibility, which the quaint, idiomatic, homely prose of his friend, Mason, would have been utterly incompetent to convey. Still, he preferred a plain, plump, simple verb or noun to any learned phrase, whenever he could employ it without limiting his opulent nature to a meagre vocabulary, incompetent fully to express it.

Yet he never departed from simplicity that is, he rigidly confined himself to the use of such words as he had earned the right to use. Whenever the report of one of his extemporaneous speeches came before him for revision, he had an instinctive sagacity in detecting every word that had slipped unguardedly from his tongue, which he felt, on reflection, did not belong to him. Among the reporters of his speeches, he had a particular esteem for Henry J. Raymond, afterwards so well known as the editor of the New York Times. Mr. Raymond told me that, after he had made a report of one of Webster's speeches, and had presented it to him for revision, his conversation with him was always a lesson in rhetoric. "Did I use that phrase? I hope not. At any rate, substitute for it this more accurate definition." And then again: "That word does not express my meaning. Wait a moment, and I will give you a better one. That sentence is slovenly, -that image is imperfect and confused. I believe, my young friend, that you have a remarkable power of reporting what I say; but, if I said that, and that, and that, it must have been owing to the fact that I caught, in the hurry of the moment, such expressions as I could command at the moment; and you see they do not accurately represent the idea that was in my mind." And thus, Mr. Raymond said, the orator's criticism upon his own speech would go on, correction following correction, until the reporter feared he would not have it ready for the morning edition of his journal.

Webster had so much confidence in Raymond's power of reporting him accurately, that, when he intended to make an important speech in the Senate, he would send a note to him, asking him to come to Washington as a personal favor; for he knew that the accomplished. editor had a rare power of apprehending a long train of reasoning, and of so reporting it that the separate thoughts would not only be exactly stated, but the relations of the thoughts to each other-a much more difficult task - would be preserved throughout, and that the argument would be presented in the symmetrical form in which

it existed in the speaker's mind. Then would follow, as of old, the severe scrutiny of the phraseology of the speech; and Webster would give, as of old, a new lesson in rhetoric to the accomplished reporter who was so capable of following the processes of his mind.

The great difficulty with speakers who may be sufficiently clear in statement and cogent in argument is that turn in their discourse when their language labors to become figurative. Imagery makes palpable to the bodily eye the abstract thought seen only by the eye of the mind; and all orators aim at giving vividness to their thinking by thus making their thoughts visible. The investigation of the process of imagination by which this end is reached is an interesting study. Woe to the speaker who is ambitious to rise into the region of imagination without possessing the faculty! Everybody remembers the remark of Sheridan, when Tierney, the prosaic Whig leader of the English House of Commons, ventured to bring in, as an illustration of his argument, the fabulous but favorite bird of untrained orators, the phoenix, which is supposed always to spring up alive out of its own ashes. "It was," said Sheridan, "a poulterer's description of a phoenix." That is, Tierney, from defect of imagination, could not lift his poetic bird above the rank of a common hen or chicken.

The test that may be most easily applied to all efforts of the imagination is sincerity; for, like other qualities of the mind, it acts strictly within the limits of a man's character and experience. The meaning of the word "experience," however, must not be confined to what he has personally seen and felt, but is also to be extended to every thing he has seen and felt through vital sympathy with facts, scenes, events, and characters, which he has learned by conversation with other men and through books. Webster laid great emphasis on conversation as one of the most important sources of imagery as well as of positive knowledge "In my education," he once remarked to Charles Sumner, "I have found that conversation with the intelligent men I have had the good fortune to meet has done more for me than books ever did; for I learn more from them in a talk of half an hour than I could possibly learn from their books. Their minds, in conversation, come into intimate contact with my own mind; and I absorb certain secrets of their power, whatever may be its quality, which I could not have detected in their works. Converse, converse, CONVERSE with living men, face to face, and mind to mind,that is one of the best sources of knowledge."

But my present object is simply to give what may be called the natural history of metaphor, comparison, image, trope, and the like,