his statements and arguments, the more truculently was he assailed by the personalities of the political gossip and scandal-monger.  Indeed, from the time he first came to the front as a great lawyer, statesman, and patriot, he was fixed upon by the whole crew of party libellers as a man whose arguments could be answered most efficiently by staining his character.  He passed through life with his head enveloped “in a cloud of poisonous flies”; and the head was the grandest-looking head that had ever been seen on the American continent.  It was so pre-eminently noble and impressive, and promised so much more than it could possibly perform, that only one felicitous sarcasm of party malice, among many thousands of bad jokes, has escaped oblivion; and that was stolen from Charles Fox’s remark on Lord Chancellor Thurlow, as Fox once viewed him sitting on the wool-sack, frowning on the English House of Lords, which he dominated by the terror of his countenance, and by the fear that he might, at any moment, burst forth in one of his short bullying, thundering retorts, should any comparatively weak baron, earl, marquis, or duke dare to oppose him.  “Thurlow,” said Fox, “must be an impostor, for nobody can be as wise as he looks.”  The American version of this was, “Webster must be a charlatan, for no one can be as great as he looks.”

But during all the time that his antagonists attempted to elude the force of his arguments by hunting up the evidences of his debts, and by trying to show that the most considerate, the most accurate, and the most temperate of his lucid statements were the products of physical stimulants, Webster steadily kept in haughty reserve his power of retaliation.  In his speech in reply to Hayne he hinted that, if he were imperatively called upon to meet blows with blows, he might be found fully equal to his antagonists in that ignoble province of intellectual pugilism; but that he preferred the more civilized struggle of brain with brain, in a contest which was to decide questions of principle.  In the Senate, where he could meet his political opponents face to face, few dared to venture to degrade the subject in debate from the discussion of principles to the miserable subterfuge of imputing bad motives as a sufficient answer to good arguments; but still many of these dignified gentlemen smiled approval on the efforts of the low-minded, small-minded caucus-speakers of their party, when they declared that Webster’s logic was unworthy of consideration, because he was bought by the Bank, or bought by the manufacturers of Massachusetts, or bought by some other combination of persons who were supposed to be the deadly enemies of the laboring men of the country.  On some rare occasions Webster’s wrath broke out in such smiting words that his adversaries were cowed into silence, and cursed the infatuation which had led them to overlook the fact that the “logic-machine” had in it invectives more terrible than its reasonings.  But generally he refrained from using the giant’s