The adulation of which he was the victim at almost every hour of his existence injured and deceived him.  He was continually informed that he was the greatest of living men,—­the “godlike Daniel”; and when he escaped even into the interior of his home, he found there persons who sincerely believed that making such speeches as his was the greatest of all possible human achievements.  All men whose talents are of the kind which enable their possessor to give intense pleasure to great multitudes are liable to this misfortune; and especially in a new and busy country, little removed from the colonial state, where intellectual eminence is rare, and the number of persons who can enjoy it is exceedingly great.  We are growing out of this provincial propensity to abandon ourselves to admiration of the pleasure-giving talents.  The time is at hand, we trust, when we shall not be struck with wonder because a man can make a vigorous speech, or write a good novel, or play Hamlet decently, and when we shall be able to enjoy the talent without adoring the man.  The talent is one thing, and the man another; the talent may be immense, and the man little; the speech powerful and wise, the speaker weak and foolish.  Daniel Webster came at last to loathe this ceaseless incense, but it was when his heart was set upon homage of another kind, which he was destined never to enjoy.

Another powerful cause of his deterioration was the strange, strong, always increasing desire he had to be President.  Any intelligent politician, outside of the circle of his own “friends,” could have told him, and proved to him, that he had little more chance of being elected President than the most insignificant man in the Whig party.  And the marvel is, that he himself should not have known it,—­he who knew why, precisely why, every candidate had been nominated, from Madison to General Taylor.  In the teeth of all the facts, he still cherished the amazing delusion that the Presidency of the United States, like the Premiership of England, is the natural and just reward of long and able public service.  The Presidency, on the contrary, is not merely an accident, but it is an accident of the last moment.  It is a game too difficult for mortal faculties to play, because some of the conditions of success are as uncertain as the winds, and as ungovernable.  If dexterous playing could have availed, Douglas would have carried off the stakes, for he had an audacious and a mathematical mind; while the winning man in 1856 was a heavy player, devoid of skill, whose decisive advantage was that he had been out of the game for four years.  Mr. Seward, too, was within an ace of winning, when an old quarrel between two New York editors swept his cards from the table.