Fox, who preached to the deaf ears of one generation great principles which became accepted truisms in the next.  Mr. Webster stands between the two classes.  He viewed the present with a strong perception of the future, and shaped his policy not merely for the daily exigency, but with a keen eye to subsequent effects.  At the same time he never put forward and defended single-handed a great principle or idea which, neglected then, was gradually to win its way and reign supreme among a succeeding generation.

His speeches have a heat and glow which we can still feel, and a depth and reality of thought which have secured them a place in literature.  He had not a fiery nature, although there is often so much warmth in what he said.  He was neither high tempered nor quick to anger, but he could be fierce, and, when adulation had warped him in those later years, he was capable of striking ugly blows which sometimes wounded friends as well as enemies.

There remains one marked quality to be noticed in Mr. Webster, which was of immense negative service to him.  This was his sense of humor.  Mr. Nichol, in his recent history of American literature, speaks of Mr. Webster as deficient in this respect.  Either the critic himself is deficient in humor or he has studied only Webster’s collected works, which give no indication of the real humor in the man.  That Mr. Webster was not a humorist is unquestionably true, and although he used a sarcasm which made his opponents seem absurd and even ridiculous at times, and in his more unstudied efforts would provoke mirth by some happy and playful allusion, some felicitous quotation or ingenious antithesis, he was too stately in every essential respect ever to seek to make mere fun or to excite the laughter of his hearers by deliberate exertions and with malice aforethought.  He had, nevertheless, a real and genuine sense of humor.  We can see it in his letters, and it comes out in a thousand ways in the details and incidents of his private life.  When he had thrown aside the cares of professional or public business, he revelled in hearty, boisterous fun, and he had that sanest of qualities, an honest, boyish love of pure nonsense.  He delighted in a good story and dearly loved a joke, although no jester himself.  This sense of humor and appreciation of the ridiculous, although they give no color to his published works, where, indeed, they would have been out of place, improved his judgment, smoothed his path through the world, and saved him from those blunders in taste and those follies in action which are ever the pitfalls for men with the fervid, oratorical temperament.