junior member of the law firm, and when Webster looked the papers over he said: "And is this all?" The younger man said timidly: "There is another point which I have presented to the firm, but which they thought not material," and then he stated the case. Webster's eyes glowed and he said: "My dear sir, that is the point;" and on this he won the case. The Dartmouth College case was one in which the Legislature of the

State of New Hampshire had interfered with the interior government of the college and had attempted to change its course of direction. Webster's contention was that "the principle in our constitutional jurisprudence which regards a charter of a private corporation as a contract and places it under the protection of the Constitution of the United States debarred the Legislature from interfering." The decision in the case, which was made February, 1819, affirmed the ground taken by Webster and established a precedent in law which was of the highest importance.

It cannot be said that as a jury lawyer Webster always relied upon the law in the case. In a celebrated murder trial in which he appeared for the prosecution in Salem, Mass., in 1830, he was said to have fairly terrified the jury into conviction. Captain White, a retired and wealthy sea-captain of Salem, had been murdered in his bed. J. F. Knapp and others as accessories were accused of the crime. It was in this trial that he made a wonderful argument in which he described the circumstances of a murder, the inmost feelings of the slayer and his stealthy escape. In his address to the jury occurs the celebrated passage, when, speaking of the crime of murder, he said: "It betrays his discretion, it breaks down his courage, it conquers his prudence. When suspicions from without begin to embarrass him and the net of circumstance to entangle him the fatal secret struggles with still greater violence to burst forth. must be confessed, it will be confessed; there is no refuge from confession but suicide, and suicide is confession."

It

So, in the Dartmouth College case, although that was not, as one might well suppose, a cause with which to move an audience profoundly, it is true of Webster that those who heard his closing sentences listened with faces wet with tears. Professor Chauncey Goodrich, of Yale College, who heard this remarkable speech and wrote an account of it, says that Webster closed with these words: "Sir, you may destroy this little institution; it is weak; it is in your hands. I know

it is one of the lesser lights in the literary horizon of our country. You may put it out. But if you do so, you must carry through your work. You must extinguish, one after another, all those greater lights of science which for more than a century have thrown their radiance over our land. It is, sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it." "Here," says Professor Goodrich, “the feelings he had thus far succeeded in keeping down broke forth. His lips quivered; his firm cheeks trembled with emotion; his eyes were filled with tears; his voice choked, and he seemed struggling to the utmost to gain that mastery over himself which might save him. from an unmanly burst of feeling.

The whole seemed mingled throughout with the recollection of father, mother, brother, and all the privations and trials through which he had made his way into life. Everyone saw that it was wholly unpremeditated, a pressure on his heart, which sought relief in words and tears." It was then that the great loving heart of Webster spoke in most moving eloquence.

It was as an occasional orator that Webster achieved his greatest fame, possibly with the single exception of his celebrated reply to Hayne. The oration at Plymouth, Mass., delivered on the two hundreth anniversary of its settlement, December 22, 1820, was perhaps the first of his greatest oratorical discourses. The first Bunker Hill oration, delivered in June, 1825, was a work of the greatest splendor. Mag

nificent in conception, luminous with the grandest imagery, flowing like the full volume of a river, it at once commanded the attention of the entire nation. It was spoken, it would appear, not so much to the few thousands that clustered around the foundations of Bunker Hill monument as to the republic, to posterity. This was one of the first, if not the first, of the great orations of Webster that took their place in the literature of the country and were embodied in the text-books of the schools for the inspiration of the youth of the republic. The passage beginning "Venerable men, you have come down to us from a former generation," it is said, so thrilled the audience that one could see the play of light and shade as it swept over the sea of upturned faces before the speaker. The impression which this speech made upon those who heard it was probably more vivid than that left by any other of his later occasional orations.

Another splendid display of his eloquence was the eulogy on Adams and Jefferson, delivered in Faneuil Hall, Boston, 1826. Of that speech, the passage which purports to be a speech delivered by John Adams when the signing of the Declaration of Independence was under discussion, it is explained that Webster deliberately invented the whole. Many school-boys have declaimed the immortal words beginning "Sink or swim, live or die, survive or perish," under the impression that these were the real words of John Adams; but Webster never pretended that they were. In a letter to an inquiring

friend, written in 1846, Webster said: "The Congress of the Revolution sat with closed doors; its proceedings were made known to the public from time to time by printing its journal, but the debates were not published. So far as I know, there is not existing in print or manuscript the speech or any part or fragment of the speech delivered by Mr. Adams on the question of the Declaration of Independence." Webster goes on to say: "The speech was written by me in my house in Boston the day before the delivery of the discourse in Faneuil Hall. A poor substitute I am sure it would appear to be if we could now see the speech actually made by Mr. Adams on that transcendentally important occasion."

It has been said by some of the indiscreet and intemperate admirers of Webster's genius that many if not all of his greatest orations were composed upon the spur of the moment and that his greatest efforts were purely extemporaneous and suggested by the circumstances immediately about him. I have somewhere seen an anecdote to this effect: His oration on Alexander Hamilton was delivered at a public dinner in New York, and when he approached that passage in which he used the memorable words applied to Hamilton, "He smote the rock of the national resources and abundant streams of revenue gushed forth," etc., in making a gesture, the orator broke a drinking-glass and cut his finger, and as he slowly wrapped a napkin about the bleeding wound, the figure of the gushing stream