political powers,—­Henry Clay and his friends, General Jackson and his friends, Calhoun and his friends; and though he soon lapsed again under the leadership of Mr. Clay, there was never again a cordial union between him and any interior circle of politicians who could have gratified his ambition.  Deceived by the thunders of applause which greeted him wherever he went, and the intense adulation of his own immediate circle, he thought that he too could be an independent power in politics.  Two wild vagaries seemed to have haunted him ever after:  first, that a man could merit the Presidency; secondly, that a man could get the Presidency by meriting it.

From 1832 to the end of his life it appears to us that Daniel Webster was undergoing a process of deterioration, moral and mental.  His material part gained upon his spiritual.  Naturally inclined to indolence, and having an enormous capacity for physical enjoyment, a great hunter, fisherman, and farmer, a lover of good wine and good dinners, a most jovial companion, his physical desires and tastes were constantly strengthened by being keenly gratified, while his mind was fed chiefly upon past acquisitions.  There is nothing in his later efforts which shows any intellectual advance, nothing from which we can infer that he had been browsing in forests before untrodden, or feeding in pastures new.  He once said, at Marshfield, that, if he could live three lives in one, he would like to devote them all to study,—­one to geology, one to astronomy, and one to classical literature.  But it does not appear that he invigorated and refreshed the old age of his mind, by doing more than glance over the great works which treat of these subjects.  A new language every ten years, or a new science vigorously pursued, seems necessary to preserve the freshness of the understanding, especially when the physical tastes are superabundantly nourished.  He could praise Rufus Choate for reading a little Latin and Greek every day,—­and this was better than nothing,—­but he did not follow his example.  There is an aged merchant in New York, who has kept his mind from growing old by devoting exactly twenty minutes every day to the reading of some abstruse book, as far removed from his necessary routine of thought as he could find.  Goethe’s advice to every one to read every day a short poem, recognizes the danger we all incur in taking systematic care of the body and letting the soul take care of itself.  During the last ten years of Daniel Webster’s life, he spent many a thousand dollars upon his library, and almost ceased to be an intellectual being.

His pecuniary habits demoralized him.  It was wrong and mean in him to accept gifts of money from the people of Boston; it was wrong in them to submit to his merciless exactions.  What need was there that their Senator should sometimes be a mendicant and sometimes a pauper?  If he chose to maintain baronial state without a baron’s income; if he chose to have two fancy farms of more than a thousand