usetts. At last his opponents
voted for him from admiration of his pluck, and he was elected by a
majority of one! Such persistence always triumphs.

Webster declared that when a pupil at Phillips Exeter Academy he never
could declaim before the school. He said he committed piece after
piece and rehearsed them in his room, but when he heard his name called
in the academy and all eyes turned towards him the room became dark and
everything he ever knew fled from his brain; but he became the great
orator of America. Indeed, it is doubtful whether Demosthenes himself
surpassed his great reply to Hayne in the United States Senate.
Webster's tenacity was illustrated by a circumstance which occurred in
the academy. The principal punished him for shooting pigeons by
compelling him to commit one hundred lines of Vergil. He knew the
principal was to take a certain train that afternoon, so he went to his
room and learned seven hundred lines. He went to recite them to the
principal just before train time. After repeating the hundred lines he
continued until he had recited two hundred. The principal anxiously
looked at his watch and grew nervous, but Webster kept right on. The
principal finally stopped him and asked him how many more he had
learned. "About five hundred more," said Webster, continuing to recite.

"You can have the rest of the day for pigeon-shooting," said the
principal.

Great writers have ever been noted for their tenacity of purpose.
Their works have not been flung off from minds aglow with genius, but
have been elaborated and elaborated into grace and beauty, until every
trace of their efforts has been obliterated.

Bishop Butler worked twenty years incessantly on his "Analogy," and
even then was so dissatisfied that he wanted to burn it. Rousseau says
he obtained the ease and grace of his style only by ceaseless
inquietude, by endless blotches and erasures. Vergil worked eleven
years on the Aeneid. The note-books of great men like Hawthorne and
Emerson are tell-tales of the enormous drudgery, of the years put into
a book which may be read in an hour. Montesquieu was twenty-five years
writing his "Esprit des Lois," yet you can read it in sixty minutes.
Adam Smith spent ten years on his "Wealth of Nations." A rival
playwright once laughed at Euripides for spending three days on three
lines, when he had written five hundred lines. "But your five hundred
lines in three days will be dead and forg