In the days of my boyhood the most colossal figure, physically and intellectually, in American politics, was Daniel Webster.  I well remember when I first put eye upon him.  It was when I was pursuing my studies in the New York University Grammar School in preparation for Princeton College.  I was strolling one day on the Battery, and met a friend who said to me:  “Yonder goes Daniel Webster; he has just landed from that man-of-war; go and get a good look at him.”  I hastened my steps and, as I came near him, I was as much awe-stricken as if I had been gazing on Bunker Hill Monument, He was unquestionably the most majestic specimen of manhood that ever trod this continent.  Carlyle called him “The Great Norseman,” and said that his eyes were like great anthracite furnaces that needed blowing up.  Coal heavers in London stopped to stare at him as he stalked by, and it is well authenticated that Sydney Smith said of him, “That man is a fraud; for it is impossible for any one to be as great as he looks.”

Mr. Webster, as I saw him that day, was in the vigor of his splendid prime.  When he spoke in the Senate chamber it was his custom to wear the Whig uniform, a blue coat with metal buttons and a buff waistcoat; but that day he was dressed in a claret colored coat and black trousers.  His complexion was a swarthy brown.  He used to say that while his handsome brother Ezekiel was very fair, he “had all the soot of the family in his face.”  Such a mountain of a brow I have never seen before or since.  I followed behind him until he entered the carriage of Mr. Robert Minturn that was waiting for him, and as he rode away he looked like Jupiter Olympus.  Although I saw Mr. Webster several times afterwards, I never heard him speak until the closing year of his life.  The Honorable Lewis Condit, of Morristown, N.J., was in Congress at the time when Webster had his historic combat with Senator Hayne, of South Carolina, and was present during the delivery of the most magnificent speech ever delivered in our Senate.  He described the historic scene to me minutely.

Before twelve o’clock on the 26th day of January, 1830, the Senate chamber was overflowing into the rotunda, and people were offering prices for a few inches of breathing room in the charmed enclosure.  Senator Dixon H. Lewis, from Alabama, who weighed nearly four hundred, became wedged in behind the Vice President’s chair, unable to move, and became imbedded in the crowd like a broad-bottomed schooner settled at low tide into the mud.  Being unable to see, he drew out his knife and cut a hole through the stained glass screens that flanked the presiding officer’s chair.  That aperture long remained as a memorial of Lewis’s curiosity to witness the greatest of American orators deliver the greatest of American orations.  The place was worthy of the hour and of the combatants.  It was the old Senate chamber, now occupied by the United States Supreme Court, the same hall which had once resounded to the eloquence