ainte-Beuve gives me the same impression.
Indeed his literary fecundity, the necessity of having the Causerie
ready for each Monday's issue of the _Constitutionnel_ or the
_Moniteur_, precluded a study of words while composing, and his rapid
and correct writing was undoubtedly due to the training obtained by the
process of reasoning. Charles Sumner seems to be an exception to my
general rule. Although presumably he knew Latin well, he was a slave to
dictionaries. He generally had five at his elbow (Johnson, Webster,
Worcester, Walker, and Pickering) and when in doubt as to the use of a
word he consulted all five and let the matter be decided on the American
democratic principle of majority rule.[8] Perhaps this is one cause of
the stilted and artificial character of Sumner's speeches which, unlike
Daniel Webster's, are not to be thought of as literature. One does not
associate dictionaries with Webster. Thus had I written the sentence
without thinking of a not infrequent confusion between Noah and Daniel
Webster, and this confusion reminded me of a story which John Fiske
used to tell with gusto and which some of you may not have heard. An
English gentleman remarked to an American: "What a giant intellect that
Webster of yours had! To think of so great an orator and statesman
writing that dictionary! But I felt sure that one who towered so much
above his fellows would come to a bad end and I was not a bit surprised
to learn that he had been hanged for the murder of Dr. Parkman."

To return to my theme: One does not associate dictionaries with Daniel
Webster. He was given to preparing his speeches in the solitudes of
nature, and his first Bunker Hill oration, delivered in 1825, was mainly
composed while wading in a trout stream and desultorily fishing for
trout.[9] Joe Jefferson, who loved fishing as well as Webster, used to
say, "The trout is a gentleman and must be treated as such." Webster's
companion might have believed that some such thought as this was passing
through the mind of the great Daniel as, standing middle deep in the
stream, he uttered these sonorous words: "Venerable men! You have come
down to us from a former generation. Heaven has bounteously lengthened
out your lives that you might behold this joyous day." I think Daniel
Webster for the most part reasoned out his choice of words; he left the
dictionary work to others. After delivery, he threw down the manuscript
of his eulogy on Adams and Jefferson and