and with half-closed eyes.  The court and the jurymen were nearly asleep as Mr. Webster argued on, stating the law quite wrongly to his nodding listeners.  The counsel on the other side interrupted him and called the attention of the court to Mr. Webster’s presentation of the law.  The judge, thus awakened, explained to the jury that the law was not as Mr. Webster stated it.  While this colloquy was in progress Mr. Webster roused up, pushed back his thick hair, shook himself, and glanced about him with the look of a caged lion.  When the judge paused, he turned again to the jury, his eyes no longer half shut but wide open and glowing with excitement.  Raising his voice, he said, in tones which made every one start:  “If my client could recover under the law as I stated it, how much more is he entitled to recover under the law as laid down by the court;” and then, the jury now being thoroughly awake, he poured forth a flood of eloquent argument and won his case.  In his latter days Mr. Webster made many careless and dull speeches and carried them through by the power of his look and manner, but the time never came when, if fairly aroused, he failed to sway the hearts and understandings of men by a grand and splendid eloquence.  The lion slept very often, but it never became safe to rouse him from his slumber.

It was soon after the reply to Hayne that Mr. Webster made his great argument for the government in the White murder case.  One other address to a jury in the Goodridge case, and the defence of Judge Prescott before the Massachusetts Senate, which is of similar character, have been preserved to us.  The speech for Prescott is a strong, dignified appeal to the sober, and yet sympathetic, judgment of his hearers, but wholly free from any attempt to confuse or mislead, or to sway the decision by unwholesome pathos.  Under the circumstances, which were very adverse to his client, the argument was a model of its kind, and contains some very fine passages full of the solemn force so characteristic of its author.  The Goodridge speech is chiefly remarkable for the ease with which Mr. Webster unravelled a complicated set of facts, demonstrated that the accuser was in reality the guilty party, and carried irresistible conviction to the minds of the jurors.  It was connected with a remarkable exhibition of his power of cross-examination, which was not only acute and penetrating, but extremely terrifying to a recalcitrant witness.  The argument in the White case, as a specimen of eloquence, stands on far higher ground than either of the other two, and, apart from the nature of the subject, ranks with the very best of Mr. Webster’s oratorical triumphs.  The opening of the speech, comprising the account of the murder and the analysis of the workings of a mind seared with the remembrance of a horrid crime, must be placed among the very finest masterpieces of modern oratory.  The description of the feelings of the murderer has a touch of the creative power,