sought to be protected by it.  Far was any one from foreseeing that so poor and slight a thing as the Exposition was the beginning of forty years of strife.  It is evident from the Banquo passage of Mr. Webster’s principal speech, when, looking at Vice-President Calhoun, he reminded that ambitious man that, in joining the coalition which made Jackson President, he had only given Van Buren a push toward the Presidency,—­“No son of theirs succeeding,”—­it is evident, we say, from this passage, and from other covert allusions, that he understood the game of Nullification from the beginning, so far as its objects were personal.  But there is no reason for supposing that he attached importance to it before that memorable afternoon in December, 1830, when he strolled from the Supreme Court into the Senate-chamber, and chanced to hear Colonel Hayne reviling New England, and repeating the doctrines of the South Carolina Exposition.

Every one knows the story of this first triumph of the United States over its enemies.  Daniel Webster, as Mr. Everett records, appeared to be the only person in Washington who was entirely at his ease; and he was so remarkably unconcerned, that Mr. Everett feared he was not aware of the expectations of the public, and the urgent necessity of his exerting all his powers.  Another friend mentions, that on the day before the delivery of the principal speech the orator lay down as usual, after dinner, upon a sofa, and soon was heard laughing to himself.  Being asked what he was laughing at, he said he had just thought of a way to turn Colonel Hayne’s quotation about Banquo’s ghost against himself, and he was going to get up and make a note of it.  This he did, and then resumed his nap.

Notwithstanding these appearances of indifference, he was fully roused to the importance of the occasion; and, indeed, we have the impression that only on this occasion, in his whole life, were all his powers in full activity and his entire mass of being in full glow.  But even then the artist was apparent in all that he did, and particularly in the dress which he wore.  At that time, in his forty-eighth year, his hair was still as black as an Indian’s, and it lay in considerable masses about the spacious dome of his forehead.  His form had neither the slenderness of his youth nor the elephantine magnitude of his later years; it was fully, but finely, developed, imposing and stately, yet not wanting in alertness and grace.  No costume could have been better suited to it than his blue coat and glittering gilt buttons, his ample yellow waistcoat, his black trousers, and snowy cravat.  It was in some degree, perhaps, owing to the elegance and daintiness of his dress that, while the New England men among his hearers were moved to tears, many Southern members, like Colonel Benton, regarded the speech merely as a Fourth-of-July oration delivered on the 6th of January.  Benton assures us, however, that he soon discovered his error, for the Nullifiers were not to be put down by a speech, and soon revealed themselves in their true character, as “irreconcilable” foes of the Union.  This was Daniel Webster’s own word in speaking of that faction in 1830,—­“irreconcilable.”