though all the rest of the children except one were remarkable for fairness of complexion, and had sandy hair.  Ezekiel, who was considered the handsomest man in the United States, had a skin of singular fairness, and light hair.  He is vividly remembered in New Hampshire for his marvellous beauty of form and face, his courtly and winning manners, the weight and majesty of his presence.  He was a signal refutation of Dr. Holmes’s theory, that grand manners and high breeding are the result of several generations of culture.  Until he was nineteen, this peerless gentleman worked on a rough mountain farm on the outskirts of civilization, as his ancestors had for a hundred and fifty years before him; but he was refined to the tips of his finger-nails and to the buttons of his coat.  Like his more famous brother, he had an artist’s eye for the becoming in costume, and a keen sense for all the proprieties and decorums both of public and private life.  Limited in his view by the narrowness of his provincial sphere, as well as by inherited prejudices, he was a better man and citizen than his brother, without a touch of his genius.  Nor was that half-brother of Daniel, who had the black hair and eyes and gunpowder skin, at all like Daniel, or equal to him in mental power.

There is nothing in our literature more pleasing than the glimpses it affords of the early life of these two brothers;—­Ezekiel, robust, steady-going, persevering, self-denying; Daniel, careless of work, eager for play, often sick, always slender and weakly, and regarded rather as a burden upon the family than a help to it.  His feebleness early habituated him to being a recipient of aid and favor, and it decided his destiny.  It has been the custom in New England, from the earliest time, to bring up one son of a prosperous family to a profession, and the one selected was usually the boy who seemed least capable of earning a livelihood by manual labor.  Ebenezer Webster, heavily burdened with responsibility all his life long, had most ardently desired to give his elder sons a better education than he had himself enjoyed, but could not.  When Daniel was a boy, his large family was beginning to lift his load a little; the country was filling up; his farm was more productive, and he felt somewhat more at his ease.  His sickly youngest son, because he was sickly, and only for that reason, he chose from his numerous brood to send to an academy, designing to make a schoolmaster of him.  We have no reason to believe that any of the family saw anything extraordinary in the boy.  Except that he read aloud unusually well, he had given no sign of particular talent, unless it might be that he excelled in catching trout, shooting squirrels, and fighting cocks.  His mother, observing his love of play and his equal love of books, said he “would come to something or nothing, she could not tell which”; but his father, noticing his power over the sympathies of others, and comparing him with his bashful brother, used to remark, that