black velvet dress, and looking, as he said, “like an angel.”  She was certainly a very lovely and charming woman, of delicate and refined sensibilities and bright and sympathetic mind.  She was a devoted wife, the object of her husband’s first and strongest love, and the mother of his children.  It is very pleasant to look at Mr. Webster in his home during these early years of his married life.  It was a happy, innocent, untroubled time.  He was advancing in his profession, winning fame and respect, earning a sufficient income, blessed in his domestic relations, and with his children growing up about him.  He was social by nature, and very popular everywhere.  Genial and affectionate in disposition, he attached everybody to him, and his hearty humor, love of mimicry, and fund of anecdote made him a delightful companion, and led Mr. Mason to say that the stage had lost a great actor in Webster.

But while he was thus enjoying professional success and the contented happiness of his fireside, he was slowly but surely drifting into the current of politics, whither his genius led him, and which had for him an irresistible attraction.  Mr. Webster took both his politics and his religion from his father, and does not appear to have questioned either.  He had a peculiarly conservative cast of mind.  In an age of revolution and scepticism he showed no trace of the questioning spirit which then prevailed.  Even in his earliest years he was a firm believer in existing institutions, in what was fixed and established.  He had a little of the disposition of Lord Thurlow, who, when asked by a dissenter why, being a notorious free-thinker, he so ardently supported the Established Church, replied:  “I support the Church of England because it is established.  Establish your religion, and I’ll support that.”  But if Mr. Webster took his religion and politics from his father in an unquestioning spirit, he accepted them in a mild form.  He was a liberal Federalist because he had a wide mental vision, and by nature took broad views of everything.  His father, on the other hand, was a rigid, intolerant Federalist of a thorough-going Puritan type.  Being taken ill once in a town of Democratic proclivities, he begged to be carried home.  “I was born a Federalist,” he said, “I have lived a Federalist, and I won’t die in a Democratic town.”  In the same way Ezekiel Webster’s uncompromising Federalism shut him out from political preferment, and he would never modify his principles one jot in order to gain the seat in Congress which he might easily have obtained by slight concessions.  The broad and liberal spirit of Daniel Webster rose superior to the rigid and even narrow opinions of his father and brother, but perhaps it would have been better for him if he had had in addition to his splendid mind the stern, unbending force of character which made his father and brother stand by their principles with immovable Puritan determination.  Liberal as he was, however, in his political opinions, the same conservative spirit which led him to adopt his creed made him sustain it faithfully and constantly when he had once accepted it.  He was a steady and trusted party man, although neither then nor at any time a blind, unreasoning partisan.