pamphlets on the French Revolution.  The stripling statesman aimed to talk in their high tone and in their richly ornamented language, before he had earned the right even to mimic their style of expression.  There is a certain swell in some of his long sentences, and a kind of good sense in some of his short ones, which suggest that the writer is a youth endowed with elevation as well as strength of nature, and is only making a fool of himself because he thinks he must make a fool of himself in order that he may impress his correspondents with the idea that he is a master of the horrible jargon which all bright young fellows at that time innocently supposed to constitute eloquence.  Thus, in February, 1800, he writes thus to his friend Bingham:  “In my melancholy moments I presage the most dire calamities.  I already see in my imagination the time when the banner of civil war shall be unfurled; when Discord’s hydra form shall set up her hideous yell, and from her hundred mouths shall howl destruction through our empire; and when American blood shall be made to flow in rivers by American swords!  But propitious Heaven prevent such dreadful calamities!  Internally secure, we have nothing to fear.  Let Europe pour her embattled millions around us, let her thronged cohorts cover our shores, from St. Lawrence to St. Marie’s, yet United Columbia shall stand unmoved; the manes of her deceased Washington shall guard the liberties of his country, and direct the sword of freedom in the day of battle.”  And think of this, not in a Fourth of July oration, but in a private letter to an intimate acquaintance!  The bones of Daniel Webster might be supposed to have moved in their coffin at the thought that this miserable trash—­so regretted and so amply atoned for—­should have ever seen the light; but it is from such youthful follies that we measure the vigor of the man who outgrows them.

It was fortunate that Webster, after he was admitted to the bar, came into constant collision, in the courts of New Hampshire, with one of the greatest masters of the common law that the country has ever produced, Jeremiah Mason.  It has been said that Mr. Mason educated Webster into a lawyer by opposing him.  He did more than this; he cured Webster of all the florid foolery of his early rhetorical style.  Of all men that ever appeared before a jury, Mason was the most pitiless realist, the most terrible enemy of what is—­in a slang term as vile almost as itself—­called “Hifalutin”; and woe to the opposing lawyer who indulged in it!  He relentlessly pricked all rhetorical bubbles, reducing them at once to the small amount of ignominious suds, which the orator’s breath had converted into colored globes, having some appearance of stability as well as splendor.  Six feet and seven inches high, and corpulent in proportion, this inexorable representative of good sense and sound law stood, while he was arguing a case, “quite near to the jury,” says Webster,—­“so near that he might have laid his finger on the foreman’s nose; and then he talked to them in a plain conversational way, in short sentences, and using no word that was not level to the comprehension of the least educated man on the panel.  This led me,” he adds, “to examine my own style, and I set about reforming it altogether.”