I fear he will breakfast upon
Institutes, dine upon Dissertations, and go to bed supperless." The
breakfast was indeed likely to prove the only substantial meal; how
substantial it proved we have already noticed. No doubt Webster appeared
to his friends, as half to himself, a restless, uneasy man, incapable of
steady application to law, and making hazardous ventures in literature
in that combined character of author and publisher which the
circumstances of the time rendered almost necessary to any one who
undertook to make a profession of letters.

It is a little significant of Webster's relation to literature that he
moved outside of the knot of men known in our literary history as the
Hartford wits. So many recent claimants for the position of democratic
jester have engaged the public attention that the Hartford wits who
amused our grandfathers rest their fame now rather upon tradition than
upon any perennial liveliness. By their solitude in the pages of
American literature their very title has acquired a certain gravity, and
we are apt to regard them with respect rather than to read them for
amusement. Fossil wits seem properly to be classed with the formation
from which they are dug, and not with living types of the same order.
Yet no picture of the times in which Webster lived would be complete
without a slight reminiscence of this coterie, and the fact that Webster
was the neighbor of these men and himself living by letters suggests a
fresh illustration of the truth that kinship in literature is something
finer and closer than mere circumstantial neighborliness. Trumbull,
Hopkins, Alsop, Dwight, and the minor stars in this twinkling galaxy,
were staunch Federalists, and the occasion of their joint efforts was
chiefly political, but Webster's Federalism did not give him a place in
the set.

The "Echo" was the title which the wits gave to a series of satires that
mocked the prose of the day. If an editor published a piece of bloated
writing, the bubble was pricked by the poetical version; if a
politician disclosed his weakness, his words were caught up and made to
turn him into ridicule. The wits were on the lookout for humbug in any
quarter, but they had their pet aversions, Sam Adams and the Jacobins
being oftenest pilloried. A bombastic account of a thunder-storm in
Boston appears to have given occasion for the first skit, and it was
scarcely necessary to do more than parody the grandiloquent newspaper
language