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,