The detected scoundrel fled from the place where his rascality had been exposed, to seek some other locality, where the mingled jeers and curses of his dupes would be unheard.  Some twenty years after the trial, Mr. Webster, while travelling in Western New York, stopped at an obscure village tavern to get a glass of water.  The hand of the man behind the bar, who gave it to him, trembled violently; and Webster, wondering at the cause, looked the fellow steadily in the eye.  He recognized Goodridge, and understood at once that Goodridge had just before recognized him.  Not a word passed between the felon and the intrepid advocate who had stripped his villany of all its plausible disguises; but what immense meaning must there have been in the swift interchange of feeling as their eyes met!  Mr. Webster entered his carriage and proceeded on his journey; but Goodridge,—­who has since ever heard of him?

This story is a slight digression, but it illustrates that hold on reality, that truth to fact, which was one of the sources of the force and simplicity of Mr. Webster’s mature style.  He, however, only obtained these good qualities of rhetoric by long struggles with constant temptations, in his early life, to use resounding expressions and flaring images which he had not earned the right to use.  His Fourth of July oration at Hanover, when he was only eighteen, and his college addresses, must have been very bad in their diction if we can judge of them by the style of his private correspondence at the time.  The verses he incorporates in his letters are deformed by all the faults of false thinking and borrowed expression which characterized contemporary American imitators of English imitators of Pope and Gray.  Think of the future orator, lawyer, and senator writing, even at the age of twenty, such balderdash as this!

    “And Heaven grant me, whatever luck betide,
    Be fame or fortune given or denied,
    Some cordial friend to meet my warm desire,
    Honest as John and good as Nehemiah.”

In reading such couplets we are reminded of the noted local poet of New Hampshire (or was it Maine?) who wrote “The Shepherd’s Songs,” and some of whose rustic lines still linger in the memory to be laughed at, such, for instance, as these:—­

    “This child who perished in the fire,—­
    His father’s name was Nehemiah.”

Or these:—­

    “Napoleon, that great ex_ile_,
    Who scoured all Europe like a file.”

And Webster’s prose was then almost as bad as his verse, though it was modelled on what was considered fine writing at the opening of the present century.  He writes to his dearest student friends in a style which is profoundly insincere, though the thoughts are often good, and the fact of his love for his friends cannot be doubted.  He had committed to memory Fisher Ames’s noble speech on the British Treaty, and had probably read some of Burke’s great