a rare display of learning (furnished him by associate counsel, he tells us); but his argument is concentrated in two of his simplest sentences:—­1.  The endowment of a college is private property; 2.  The charter of a college is that which constitutes its endowment private property.  The Supreme Court accepted these two propositions, and thus secured to every college in the country its right to its endowment.  This seems too simple for argument, but it cost a prodigious and powerfully contested lawsuit to reduce the question to this simplicity; and it was Webster’s large, calm, and discriminating glance which detected these two fundamental truths in the mountain mass of testimony, argument, and judicial decision.  In arguing the great steamboat case, too, he displayed the same qualities of mind.  New York having granted to Livingston and Fulton the exclusive right to navigate her waters by steamboats, certain citizens of New Jersey objected, and, after a fierce struggle upon the waters themselves, transferred the contest to the Supreme Court.  Mr. Webster said:  “The commerce of the United States, under the Constitution of 1787, is a unit,” and “what we call the waters of the State of New York are, for the purposes of navigation and commerce, the waters of the United States”; therefore no State can grant exclusive privileges.  The Supreme Court affirmed this to be the true doctrine, and thenceforth Captain Cornelius Vanderbilt ran his steamboat without feeling it necessary, on approaching New York, to station a lady at the helm and to hide himself in the hold.  Along with this concentrating power, Mr. Webster possessed, as every school-boy knows, a fine talent for amplification and narrative.  His narration of the murder of Captain White was almost enough of itself to hang a man.

But it was not his substantial services to his country which drew upon him the eyes of all New England, and made him dear to every son of the Pilgrims.  In 1820, the Pilgrim Society of Plymouth celebrated the anniversary of the landing of their forefathers in America.  At the dinner of the Society, that day, every man found beside his plate five kernels of corn, to remind him of the time when that was the daily allowance of the settlers, and it devolved upon Daniel Webster to show how worthy they were of better fare.  His address on this anniversary is but an amplification of his Junior Fourth-of-July oration of 1800; but what an amplification!  It differed from that youthful essay as the first flights of a young eagle, from branch to branch upon its native tree, differ from the sweep of his wings when he takes a continent in his flight, and swings from mountain range to mountain range.  We are aware that eulogy is, of all the kinds of composition, the easiest to execute in a tolerable manner.  What Mr. Everett calls “patriotic eloquence” should usually be left to persons who are in the gushing time of life; for when men address men, they should say something, clear up something,