inning manners, the weight and majesty
of his presence. He was a signal refutation of Dr. Holmes's theory,
that grand manners and high breeding are the result of several
generations of culture. Until he was nineteen, this peerless gentleman
worked on a rough mountain farm on the outskirts of civilization, as
his ancestors had for a hundred and fifty years before him; but he was
refined to the tips of his finger-nails and to the buttons of his
coat. Like his more famous brother, he had an artist's eye for the
becoming in costume, and a keen sense for all the proprieties and
decorums both of public and private life. Limited in his view by the
narrowness of his provincial sphere, as well as by inherited
prejudices, he was a better man and citizen than his brother, without
a touch of his genius. Nor was that half-brother of Daniel, who had
the black hair and eyes and gunpowder skin, at all like Daniel, or
equal to him in mental power.

There is nothing in our literature more pleasing than the glimpses it
affords of the early life of these two brothers;--Ezekiel, robust,
steady-going, persevering, self-denying; Daniel, careless of work,
eager for play, often sick, always slender and weakly, and regarded
rather as a burden upon the family than a help to it. His feebleness
early habituated him to being a recipient of aid and favor, and it
decided his destiny. It has been the custom in New England, from the
earliest time, to bring up one son of a prosperous family to a
profession, and the one selected was usually the boy who seemed least
capable of earning a livelihood by manual labor. Ebenezer Webster,
heavily burdened with responsibility all his life long, had most
ardently desired to give his elder sons a better education than he had
himself enjoyed, but could not. When Daniel was a boy, his large
family was beginning to lift his load a little; the country was
filling up; his farm was more productive, and he felt somewhat more at
his ease. His sickly youngest son, because he was sickly, and only for
that reason, he chose from his numerous brood to send to an academy,
designing to make a schoolmaster of him. We have no reason to believe
that any of the family saw anything extraordinary in the boy. Except
that he read aloud unusually well, he had given no sign of particular
talent, unless it might be that he excelled in catching trout,
shooting squirrels, and fighting cocks. His mother, observing his love
of play and his equa