in distant
cities; nor did their daughters spend their time in reading French
novels, or sneering at rustic duties and labors. This age of progress
had not arisen when everybody looks forward to a millennium of idleness
and luxury, or to a fortune acquired by speculation and gambling rather
than by the sweat of the brow,--an age, in many important respects,
justly extolled, especially for scientific discoveries and mechanical
inventions, yet not remarkable for religious earnestness or moral
elevation.

The life of Daniel Webster is familiar to all intelligent people. His
early days were spent amid the toils and blessedness of a New England
farm-house, favored by the teachings of intelligent, God-fearing
parents, who had the means to send him to Phillips Academy in Exeter,
then recently founded, where he fitted for college, and shortly after
entered Dartmouth, at the age of fifteen. In connection with Webster, I
do not read of any remarkable precocity, at school or college, such as
marked Cicero, Macaulay, and Gladstone; but it seems that he won the
esteem of both teachers and students, and was regarded as a very
promising youth. After his graduation he taught an academy at Fryeburg,
for a time, and then began the study of the law,--first at Salisbury,
and subsequently in Boston, in the office of the celebrated Governor
Gore. He was admitted to the bar in 1805, and established himself in
Boscawen, but soon afterwards removed to Portsmouth, where he entered on
a large practice, encountering such able lawyers as Jeremiah Mason and
Jeremiah Smith, who both became his friends and admirers, for Webster's
legal powers were soon the talk of the State. At the early age of
thirty-one he entered Congress (1813), and took the whole House by
surprise with his remarkable speeches, during the war with Great
Britain,--on such topics as the enlargement of the navy, the repeal of
the embargo, and the complicated financial questions of the day. In 1815
he retired awhile from public life, and removed to Boston, where he
enjoyed a lucrative practice. In 1822 he re-entered Congress. So popular
was he at this time, that, on his re-election to Congress in 1824, he
received four thousand nine hundred and ninety votes out of five
thousand votes cast. In 1827 he entered the Senate, where he was to
reign as one of its greatest chiefs,--the idol of his party in New
England, practising his profession at the same time, a leader of the
American Bar,