death! It is the assassin's purpose to make sure work; and he yet plies the dagger, though it was obvious that life had been destroyed by the blow of the bludgeon.-He even raises the aged arm, that he may not fail in his aim at the heart, and replaces it again over the wounds of the poniard! To finish the picture, he explores the wrist for the pulse! He feels for it, and ascertains that it beats no longer! It is accomplished. The deed is done. He retreats, retraces his steps to the window, passes out through it as he came in, and escapes. He has done the murder-no eye has seen him, no ear has heard him. The secret is his own, and it is safe!

Such a secret can be

'Ah! gentlemen, that was a dreadful mistake. safe nowhere. The whole creation of God has neither nook nor corner, where the guilty can bestow it, and say it is safe. Not to speak of that eye which glances through all disguises, and beholds everything, as in the splendour of noon,-such secrets of guilt are never safe from detection, even by men. True it is, generally speaking, that "murder will True it is, that Providence hath so ordained, and doth so govern things, that those who break the great law of heaven, by shedding man's blood, seldom succeed in avoiding discovery. Especially, in a case exciting so much attention as this, discovery must come, and will come, sooner or later.'

out."

Miss Martineau informs us that, on the eve of the trial, Mr. Webster asked whether there was anything remarkable about any of the jury. The answer was, that the foreman was a man of remarkably tender conscience, and Miss Martineau entertains no doubt that the concluding passage was intended for his especial benefit:

'A sense of duty pursues us ever. It is omnipresent like the Deity. If we take to ourselves the wings of the morning, and dwell in the utmost parts of the seas, duty performed, or duty violated, is still with. us, for our happiness or our misery. If we say the darkness shall cover us, in the darkness as in the light our obligations are yet with us. We cannot escape their power, nor fly from their presence. They are with us in this life, will be with us at its close; and in that scene of inconceivable solemnity which lies yet further onward, we shall still find ourselves surrounded by the consciousness of duty to pain us wherever it has been violated, and to console us so far as God may have given us grace to perform it.'

We suspect that in general such considerations are as well suppressed in an address to a jury. If there be a delicate conscience it needs no stimulus to act-and a dull one will be more sensible to arguments of a more mundane sort. The late Rowland Hill understood human nature well. His chapel having been infested by pickpockets, he took occasion to remind the congregation that there was an all-seeing Providence, to whom all hearts were open and from whom no secrets were hid; but lest,' he added, there may be any present who are insensible to such reflections,

I beg leave to state that there are also two Bow-street officers on the look-out.'

During the period of his retirement Mr. Webster found time to write for the North American Review an answer to an article of ours on the American law of debtor and creditor. (Q. R., May, 1819. We have no wish to revive the controversy, and shall therefore content ourselves with bearing willing testimony to the tone and taste of Mr. Webster's observations. Some of them may surprise such of our readers as are not aware that the most enlightened of the American statesmen are fully alive to the importance of the grand principle on which alone good government can be based in any country:

6 If the property cannot retain the political power, the political power will draw after it the property. If orator Hunt and his fellow-labourers should, by any means, obtain more political influence in the counties, towns, and boroughs of England, than the Marquis of Buckingham, Lord Stafford, Lord Fitzwilliam, and the other noblemen and gentlemen of great landed estates, these estates would inevitably change hands. At least so it seems to us; and therefore, when Sir Francis Burdett, the Marquis of Tavistock, and other individuals of rank and fortune, propose to introduce into the government annual parliaments and universal suffrage, we can hardly forbear inquiring whether they are ready to agree that property should be as equally divided as political power; and if not, how they expect to sever things which to us appear to be intimately connected.'

Sir Francis Burdett has come to a different conclusion since the Reform Bill experiment, and so, we believe, have most of the other individuals of rank and fortune alluded to; but, unluckily, he is the only one amongst them who has had the manliness to act upon his convictions.

supposing all this to

At the end of seven years Mr. Webster had gained enough to justify his return to public life; and in January, 1823, he delivered one of the speeches which have done most towards the diffusion of his fame,-a speech in favour of the Greeks. The following passage is much and justly admired :— 'It may, in the next place, be asked, perhaps, be true, what can we do? Are we to go to war? Are we to interfere in the Greek cause, or any other European cause? Are we to endanger our pacific relations ?-No, certainly not. What, then, the question recurs, remains for us? If we will not endanger our own peace; if we will neither furnish armies nor navies to the cause which we think the just one, what is there within our power?

Sir, this reasoning mistakes the age. The time has been, indeed, when fleets, and armies, and subsidies, were the principal reliances even in the best cause. But, happily for mankind, there has arrived a great change in this respect. Moral causes come into consideration, in proportion as the progress of knowledge is advanced; and the public

opinion

opinion of the civilised world is rapidly gaining an ascendancy over mere brutal force. It is already able to oppose the most formidable obstruction to the progress of injustice and oppression; and, as it grows more intelligent and more intense, it will be more and more formidable. It may be silenced by military power, but it cannot be conquered. It is elastic, irrepressible, and invulnerable to the weapons of ordinary It is that impassable, unextinguishable enemy of mere violence and arbitrary rule, which, like Milton's angels,

warfare.

"Vital in every part,

Cannot, but by annihilating, die."

Until this be propitiated or satisfied, it is vain for power to talk either of triumphs or of repose. No matter what fields are desolated, what fortresses surrendered, what armies subdued, or what provinces overrun. In the history of the year that has passed by us, and in the instance of unhappy Spain, we have seen the vanity of all triumphs, in a cause which violates the general sense of justice of the civilised world. It is nothing that the troops of France have passed from the Pyrenees to Cadiz; it is nothing that an unhappy and prostrate nation has fallen before them; it is nothing that arrests, and confiscation, and execution, sweep away the little remnant of national resistance. There is an enemy that still exists to check the glory of these triumphs. It follows the conqueror back to the very scene of his ovations, it calls upon him to take notice that Europe, though silent, is yet indignant; it shows him that the sceptre of his victory is a barren sceptre; that it shall confer neither joy nor honour, but shall moulder to dry ashes in his grasp. In the midst of his exultation it pierces his ear with the cry injured justice, it denounces against him the indignation of an enlightened and civilised age; it turns to bitterness the cup of his rejoicing, and wounds him with the sting which belongs to the consciousness of having outraged the opinion of mankind.'

of

Strange inconsistency! this passage is applauded, learnt by heart, and recited by the whole rising generation, in a land which doggedly retains millions of human beings in the most degrading state of slavery, in direct defiance of the opinion of the world!

The people of the United States are proud of having fulfilled one poetic promise; when will they fulfil another, made for them by a poet who never let slip an opportunity of showing kindness

to an American?

'Assembling here, all nations shall be blest,

The sad be comforted, the weary rest;

Untouch'd shall drop the fetters from the slave,

And He shall rule the world he died to save.'*

Or when will an American orator be permitted to rise to the height of the magnificent piece of declamation which gave Mr. Webster the framework of his best passage? †

Rogers, The Voyage of Columbus.

Curran's Speech for Archibald Hamilton Rowan.— No matter in what language his doom may be pronounced,' &c. &c.

In

In 1826 Mr. Webster was elected a member of the Senate, and in 1833 the same honour was conferred upon him. This is the field in which he has gathered most of his laurels; his resistance to the nullifying doctrines of the South Carolina delegates having been the principal means of preserving the entirety of the Union, which was seriously endangered by the threatened resistance of that state. Mr. Webster's profound knowledge of the constitution gave him a decided advantage in the resulting contest with Mr. Calhoun and Mr. Hayne, who were both antagonists of a calibre to call forth all his energies. His chief speech, in answer to Mr. Hayne, occupied three days in the delivery, and abounds in fine passages, besides giving ample evidence of his power as a debater in the English sense. For example:

'I shall not acknowledge that the honourable member goes before me in regard for whatever of distinguished talent, or distinguished character, South Carolina has produced. I claim part of the honour, I partake in the pride, of her great names. I claim them for countrymen, one and all. The Laurences, the Rutledges, the Pinckneys, the Sumpters, the Marions-Americans, all-whose fame is no more to be hemmed in by state lines, than their talents and patriotism were capable of being circumscribed within the same narrow limits. In their day and generation they served and honoured the country, and the whole country; and their renown is of the treasures of the whole country. Him, whose honoured name the gentleman himself bears-does he esteem me less capable of gratitude for his patriotism, or sympathy for his sufferings, than if his eyes had first opened upon the light of Massachusetts, instead of South Carolina? Sir, does he suppose it in his power to exhibit a Carolina name so bright as to produce envy in my bosom? No, sir, increased gratification and delight, rather. I thank God, that, if I am gifted with little of the spirit which is able to raise mortals to the skies, I have yet none, as I trust, of that other spirit, which would drag angels down. When I shall be found, sir, in my place here, in the Senate, or elsewhere, to sneer at public merit, because it happens to spring up beyond the little limits of my own state, or neighbourhood; when I refuse, for any such cause, or for any cause, the homage due to American talent, to elevated patriotism, to sincere devotion to liberty and the country; or, if I see an uncommon endowment of Heaven-if I see extraordinary capacity and virtue in any son of the South-and if, moved by local prejudice, or gangrened by state jealousy, I get up here to abate the tithe of a hair from his just character and just fame, may my tongue cleave to the roof of my mouth!

.

Sir, let me recur to pleasing recollections-let me indulge in refreshing remembrance of the past-let me remind you that in early times no states cherished greater harmony, both of principle and feeling, than Massachusetts and South Carolina. Would to God that harmony might again return! Shoulder to shoulder they went through the revolution -hand in hand they stood round the administration of Washington, and felt his own great arm lean on them for support. Unkind feeling, if it

exist, alienation and distrust, are the growth, unnatural to such soils, of false principles since sown. They are weeds, the seeds of which that same great arm never scattered.

is secure.

'Mr. President, I shall enter on no encomium upon Massachusettsshe needs none. There she is-behold her, and judge for yourselves. There is her history: the world knows it by heart. The past, at least, There is Boston, and Concord, and Lexington, and Bunker Hill-and there they will remain for ever. The bones of her sons, falling in the great struggle for Independence, now lie mingled with the soil of every state, from New England to Georgia; and there they will lie for ever. And, sir, where American Liberty raised its first voice, and where its youth was nurtured and sustained, there it still lives, in the strength of its manhood and full of its original spirit. If discord and disunion shall wound it—if party strife and blind ambition shall hawk at and tear it—if folly and madness-if uneasiness, under salutary and necessary restraint-shall succeed to separate it from that union, by which alone its existence is made sure, it will stand, in the end, by the side of that cradle (Boston) in which its infancy was rocked: it will stretch forth its arm with whatever of vigour it may still retain, over the friends who gather round it; and it will fall at last, if fall it must, amidst the proudest monuments of its own glory, and on the very spot of its origin.'

The extract relating to Greece contains a quotation from Milton, and the last a paraphrase of Dryden. These, with Shakspeare, form the bulk of Mr. Webster's poetical reading; and we are by no means sure that it is useful for an orator to be familiar with any poets but those which are in the mouths and memories of the people; for what avail allusions which it requires notes or an appendix to explain?

It is obvious, however, that he has made a careful study of the best English orators, particularly Burke. The following instances of resemblance, in the hands of a sharp critic, might be converted into plausible proofs of plagiarism.

Mr. Webster speaks of affections which, running backwards, and warming with gratitude for what our ancestors have done for our happiness, run forward also to our posterity;' and Burke says, 'they seldom look forward to posterity who never look backward to their ancestors.' The appeal to Lafayette, in the speech on laying the corner-stone of the Bunker's Hill monument, Fortunate, fortunate man! with what increase of devotion will you not thank God for the circumstances of your extraordinary life! you are connected with two hemispheres and with two generations,—is only a fresh application of the allusion to Lord Bathurst. In the same speech (p. 72) we find,— Like the mariner, whom the ocean and the winds carry along, till he sees the stars which have directed his course, and lighted his pathless

way,