of Rufus King, as it afterwards did to the eloquence of Rufus Choate, and which had echoed the bursts of applause that once greeted Henry Clay of Kentucky.  On that memorable morning the Vice-President’s chair was occupied by that intellectual giant of the South, John C. Calhoun.  Before him were Van Buren, Forsyth, Hayne, Clayton, the omniverous Benton, the sturdy John Quincy Adams, and, in the seething crowd, was the gaunt skeleton form of John Randolph of Roanoke.  Mr. Condit told me that when Webster exclaimed:  “The world knows the history of Massachusetts by heart.  There is Lexington, and there is Bunker Hill and there they will remain forever,”—­the group of Bostonians seated in the gallery before him, broke down, and wept like little children.  Quite as effective as his eulogy of the “Old Bay State,” was his sudden and awful assault upon Senator Levi Woodbury, of New Hampshire.  This representative of Webster’s native State had supplied Colonel Hayne with a quantity of party pamphlets and documents to be used as ammunition.  Webster knew this fact and determined to punish him.  Turning suddenly towards Woodbury, he thundered out in a tone of indignant scorn, as he shook his fist over his head:  “I employ no scavengers;” and the poor New Hampshire Senator ducked his bald head as if struck by a bombshell.  The closing passage of that memorable speech could not have been extemporized.  No mortal man could have thrown off that magnificent piece of Miltonic prose at the heat, without some deep premeditation.  It is well known now that Mr. Webster afterwards pruned, amended and decorated it until it is recognized as one of the grandest passages in the English language.  I take down my Webster and read it occasionally, and it has in it the majestic “sound of many waters.”  That great passage is the prelude of the mighty conflict which thirty years afterwards was to be waged on the soil of Gettysburg and Chickamauga.  It became the condensed creed, and the battle-cry of the long warfare for the nation’s life.  Well have there been placed in golden letters on the pedestal of Webster’s monument in Central Park the last sublime line of that sentence:  “Liberty and Union, now and forever:  one and inseparable.”  Mr. Webster’s power in sarcastic invective was terrific.  After he had made his angry and ferocious rejoinder to the charges of Mr. Charles J. Ingersoll, of Pennsylvania, the witty Dr. Elder was asked, when he came out of the Senate chamber:  “What did you think of that speech?” Elder’s reply was:  “Thunder and lightning are peaches and cream to such a speech as that.”  Mighty as Webster was in intellectual power he had some lamentable weaknesses.  He was indeed a wonderful mixture of clay and iron.  The iron was extraordinarily massive, but the clay was loose and brittle.  He had the temptations of very strong animal passions, and sometimes to his intimate friends he attempted to excuse some of his excesses of that kind.  There has been much controversy about Mr. Webster’s