He led forth his neighbors to the strife, and fought at their head, with his old rank of captain, at White Plains and at Bennington, and served valiantly through the war.  From that time to the end of his life, though much trusted and employed by his fellow-citizens as legislator, magistrate, and judge, he lived but for one object,—­the education and advancement of his children.  All men were poor then in New Hampshire, compared with the condition of their descendants.  Judge Webster was a poor, and even embarrassed man, to the day of his death.  The hardships he had endured as soldier and pioneer made him, as he said, an old man before his time.  Rheumatism bent his form, once so erect and vigorous.  Black care subdued his spirits, once so joyous and elastic.  Such were the fathers of fair New England.

This strong-minded, uncultured man was a Puritan and a Federalist,—­a catholic, tolerant, and genial Puritan, an intolerant and almost bigoted Federalist.  Washington, Adams, and Hamilton were the civilians highest in his esteem; the good Jefferson he dreaded and abhorred.  The French Revolution was mere blackness and horror to him; and when it assumed the form of Napoleon Bonaparte, his heart sided passionately with England in her struggle to extirpate it.  His boys were in the fullest sympathy with him in all his opinions and feelings.  They, too, were tolerant and untheological Puritans; they, too, were most strenuous Federalists; and neither of them ever recovered from their father’s influence, nor advanced much beyond him in their fundamental beliefs.  Readers have, doubtless, remarked, in Mr. Webster’s oration upon Adams and Jefferson, how the stress of the eulogy falls upon Adams, while cold and scant justice is meted out to the greatest and wisest of our statesmen.  It was Ebenezer Webster who spoke that day, with the more melodious voice of his son.  There is a tradition in New Hampshire that Judge Webster fell sick on a journey in a town of Republican politics, and besought the doctor to help him speedily on his way home, saying that he was born a Federalist, had lived a Federalist, and could not die in peace in any but a Federalist town.

Among the ten children of this sturdy patriot and partisan, eight were ordinary mortals, and two most extraordinary,—­Ezekiel, born in 1780, and Daniel, born in 1782,—­the youngest of his boys.  Some of the elder children were even less than ordinary.  Elderly residents of the neighborhood speak of one half-brother of Daniel and Ezekiel as penurious and narrow; and the letters of others of the family indicate very plain, good, commonplace people.  But these two, the sons of their father’s prime, inherited all his grandeur of form and beauty of countenance, his taste for high literature, along with a certain energy of mind that came to them, by some unknown law of nature, from their father’s mother.  From her Daniel derived his jet-black hair and eyes, and his complexion of burnt gunpowder;