e furnaces needing only to be _blown_; the mastiff mouth
accurately closed; I have not traced so much of _silent Berserkir
rage_ that I remember of in any man. 'I guess I should not like to
be your nigger!' Webster is not loquacious, but he is pertinent,
conclusive; a dignified, perfectly bred man, though not English in
breeding; a man worthy of the best reception among us, and meeting
such I understand."

Such was the effect produced by Mr. Webster when in England, and it was a
universal impression. Wherever he went men felt in the depths of their
being the amazing force of his personal presence. He could control an
audience by a look, and could extort applause from hostile listeners by a
mere glance. On one occasion, after the 7th of March speech, there is a
story that a noted abolitionist leader was present in the crowd gathered to
hear Mr. Webster, and this bitter opponent is reported to have said
afterwards, "When Webster, speaking of secession, asked 'what is to become
of me,' I was thrilled with a sense of some awful impending calamity." The
story may be apocryphal, but there can be no doubt of its essential truth
so far as the effect of Mr. Webster's personal presence goes. People looked
at him, and that was enough. Mr. Parton in his essay speaks of seeing
Webster at a public dinner, sitting at the head of the table with a bottle
of Madeira under his yellow waistcoat, and looking like Jove. When he
presided at the Cooper memorial meeting in New York he uttered only a few
stately platitudes, and yet every one went away with the firm conviction
that they had heard him speak words of the profoundest wisdom and grandest
eloquence.

The temptation to rely on his marvellous physical gifts grew on him as he
became older, which was to be expected with a man of his temperament. Even
in his early days, when he was not in action, he had an impassible and
slumberous look; and when he sat listening to the invective of Hayne, no
emotion could be traced on his cold, dark, melancholy face, or in the
cavernous eyes shining with a dull light. This all vanished when he began
to speak, and, as he poured forth his strong, weighty sentences, there was
no lack of expression or of movement. But Mr. Webster, despite his capacity
for work, and his protracted and often intense labor, was constitutionally
indolent, and this sluggishness of temperament increased very much as he
grew older. It extended from the