Let Europe pour her
embattled millions around us, let her thronged cohorts cover our shores,
from St. Lawrence to St. Marie's, yet United Columbia shall stand
unmoved; the manes of her deceased Washington shall guard the liberties
of his country, and direct the sword of freedom in the day of battle."
And think of this, not in a Fourth of July oration, but in a private
letter to an intimate acquaintance! The bones of Daniel Webster might be
supposed to have moved in their coffin at the thought that this
miserable trash--so regretted and so amply atoned for--should have ever
seen the light; but it is from such youthful follies that we measure the
vigor of the man who outgrows them.
It was fortunate that Webster, after he was admitted to the bar, came
into constant collision, in the courts of New Hampshire, with one of the
greatest masters of the common law that the country has ever produced,
Jeremiah Mason. It has been said that Mr. Mason educated Webster into a
lawyer by opposing him. He did more than this; he cured Webster of all
the florid foolery of his early rhetorical style. Of all men that ever
appeared before a jury, Mason was the most pitiless realist, the most
terrible enemy of what is--in a slang term as vile almost as
itself--called "Hifalutin"; and woe to the opposing lawyer who indulged
in it! He relentlessly pricked all rhetorical bubbles, reducing them at
once to the small amount of ignominious suds, which the orator's breath
had converted into colored globes, having some appearance of stability
as well as splendor.
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