and the printers who had the misfortune to be engaged in putting one of his performances into type, not because this or that word was or was not Saxon or Latin, but because it was inadequate to convey perfectly his meaning.  Mr. Kemble, a great Anglo-Saxon scholar, once, in a company of educated gentlemen, defied anybody present to mention a single Latin phrase in our language for which he could not furnish a more forcible Saxon equivalent.  “The impenetrability of matter” was suggested; and Kemble, after half a minute’s reflection, answered, “The un-thorough-fareableness of stuff.”  Still, no English writer would think of discarding such an abstract, but convenient and accurate, term as “impenetrability,” for the coarsely concrete and terribly ponderous word which declares that there is no possible thoroughfare, no road, by which we can penetrate that substance which we call “matter,” and which our Saxon forefathers called “stuff.”  Wherever the Latin element in our language comes in to express ideas and sentiments which were absent from the Anglo-Saxon mind, Webster uses it without stint; and some of the most resounding passages of his eloquence owe to it their strange power to suggest a certain vastness in his intellect and sensibility, which the quaint, idiomatic, homely prose of his friend, Mason, would have been utterly incompetent to convey.  Still, he preferred a plain, plump, simple verb or noun to any learned phrase, whenever he could employ it without limiting his opulent nature to a meagre vocabulary, incompetent fully to express it.

Yet he never departed from simplicity; that is, he rigidly confined himself to the use of such words as he had earned the right to use.  Whenever the report of one of his extemporaneous speeches came before him for revision, he had an instinctive sagacity in detecting every word that had slipped unguardedly from his tongue, which he felt, on reflection, did not belong to him.  Among the reporters of his speeches, he had a particular esteem for Henry J. Raymond, afterwards so well known as the editor of the New York Times.  Mr. Raymond told me that, after he had made a report of one of Webster’s speeches, and had presented it to him for revision, his conversation with him was always a lesson in rhetoric.  “Did I use that phrase?  I hope not.  At any rate, substitute for it this more accurate definition.”  And then again:  “That word does not express my meaning.  Wait a moment, and I will give you a better one.  That sentence is slovenly,—­that image is imperfect and confused.  I believe, my young friend, that you have a remarkable power of reporting what I say; but, if I said that, and that, and that, it must have been owing to the fact that I caught, in the hurry of the moment, such expressions as I could command at the moment; and you see they do not accurately represent the idea that was in my mind.”  And thus, Mr. Raymond said, the orator’s criticism upon his own speech would go on,—­correction following correction,—­until the reporter feared he would not have it ready for the morning edition of his journal.