But to Webster’s eminence as a lawyer and a statesman, it is proper to add, that he has never been excelled as a writer of state papers among the public men of the United States.  Mr. Emerson has a phrase which is exactly applicable to these efforts of Webster’s mind.  That phrase is, “superb propriety.”  Throughout his despatches, he always seems to feel that he impersonates his country; and the gravity and weight of his style are as admirable as its simplicity and majestic ease.  “Daniel Webster, his mark,” is indelibly stamped on them all.  When the Treaty of Washington was criticised by the Whigs in the English Parliament, Macaulay specially noticed the difference in the style of the two negotiators.  Lord Ashburton, he said, had compromised the honor of his country by “the humble, caressing, wheedling tone” of his letters, a tone which contrasted strangely with “the firm, resolute, vigilant, and unyielding manner” of the American Secretary of State.  It is to be noticed that no other opponent of Sir Robert Peel’s administration, not even Lord Palmerston and Lord John Russell, struck at the essential weakness of Lord Ashburton’s despatches with the force and sagacity which characterized Macaulay’s assault on the treaty.  Indeed, a rhetorician and critic less skilful than Macaulay can easily detect that “America” is represented fully in Webster’s despatches, while “Britannia” has a very amiable, but not very forcible, representative in Lord Ashburton.  Had Palmerston been the British plenipotentiary, we can easily imagine how different would have been the task imposed on Webster.  As the American Secretary was generally in the right in every position he assumed, he would probably have triumphed even over Palmerston; but the letters of the “pluckiest” of English statesmen would, we may be sure, have never been criticised in the House of Commons as “humble, wheedling, and caressing.”

In addition, however, to his legal arguments, his senatorial speeches, and his state papers, Webster is to be considered as the greatest orator our country has produced in his addresses before miscellaneous assemblages of the people.  In saying this we do not confine the remark to such noble orations as those on the “First Settlement of New England,” “The Bunker Hill Monument,” and “Adams and Jefferson,” but extend it so as to include speeches before great masses of people who could be hardly distinguished from a mob, and who were under no restraint but that imposed by their own self-respect and their respect for the orator.  On these occasions he was uniformly successful.  It is impossible to detect, in any reports of these popular addresses, that he ever stooped to employ a style of speech or mode of argument commonly supposed appropriate to a speaker on the “stump”; and yet he was the greatest “stump” orator that our country has ever seen.  He seemed to delight in addressing five, or ten, or even twenty thousand people, in the open air, trusting that the penetrating tones of his