New Hampshire for his credentials.  The position thus obtained was one of fortune’s best gifts to Mr. Webster.  It not only gave him an opportunity for a wide study of the law under wise supervision, but it brought him into daily contact with a trained barrister and an experienced public man.  Christopher Gore, one of the most eminent members of the Boston bar and a distinguished statesman, had just returned from England, whither he had been sent as one of the commissioners appointed under the Jay treaty.  He was a fine type of the aristocratic Federalist leader, one of the most prominent of that little group which from the “headquarters of good principles” in Boston so long controlled the politics of Massachusetts.  He was a scholar, gentleman, and man of the world, and his portrait shows us a refined, high-bred face, suggesting a French marquis of the eighteenth century rather than the son of a New England sea-captain.  A few years later, Mr. Gore was chosen governor of Massachusetts, and defeated when a candidate for reelection, largely, it is supposed, because he rode in a coach and four (to which rumor added outriders) whenever he went to his estate at Waltham.  This mode of travel offended the sensibilities of his democratic constituents, but did not prevent his being subsequently chosen to the Senate of the United States, where he served a term with much distinction.  The society of such a man was invaluable to Mr. Webster at this time.  It taught him many things which he could have learned in no other way, and appealed to that strong taste for everything dignified and refined which was so marked a trait of his disposition and habits.  He saw now the real possibilities which he had dreamed of in his native village; and while he studied law deeply and helped his brother with his school, he also studied men still more thoroughly and curiously.  The professional associates and friends of Mr. Gore were the leaders of the Boston bar when it had many distinguished men whose names hold high places in the history of American law.  Among them were Theophilus Parsons, Chief Justice of Massachusetts; Samuel Dexter, the ablest of them all, fresh from service in Congress and the Senate and as Secretary of the Treasury; Harrison Gray Otis, fluent and graceful as an orator; James Sullivan, and Daniel Davis, the Solicitor-General.  All these and many more Mr. Webster saw and watched, and he has left in his diary discriminating sketches of Parsons and Dexter, whom he greatly admired, and of Sullivan, of whom he had a poor opinion professionally.

Towards the end of the year 1804, while Mr. Webster was thus pleasantly engaged in studying his profession, getting a glimpse of the world, and now and then earning a little money, an opening came to him which seemed to promise immediate and assured prosperity.  The judges of his father’s court of common pleas offered him the vacant clerkship, worth about fifteen hundred dollars annually.  This was wealth to Mr.