He was, too, something more than a charming companion in private life.  He was generous, liberal, hospitable, and deeply affectionate.  He was adored in his home, and deeply loved his children, who were torn from him, one after another.  His sorrow, like his joy, was intense and full of force.  He had many devoted friends, and a still greater body of unhesitating followers.  To the former he showed, through nearly all his life, the warm affection which was natural to him.  It was not until adulation and flattery had deeply injured him, and the frustrated ambition for the presidency had poisoned both heart and mind, that he became dictatorial and overbearing.  Not till then did he quarrel with those who had served and followed him, as when he slighted Mr. Lawrence for expressing independent opinions, and refused to do justice to the memory of Story because it might impair his own glories.  They do not present a pleasant picture, these quarrels with friends, but they were part of the deterioration of the last years, and they furnish in a certain way the key to his failure to attain the presidency.  The country was proud of Mr. Webster; proud of his intellect, his eloquence, his fame.  He was the idol of the capitalists, the merchants, the lawyers, the clergy, the educated men of all classes in the East.  The politicians dreaded and feared him because he was so great, and so little in sympathy with them, but his real weakness was with the masses of the people.  He was not popular in the true sense of the word.  For years the Whig party and Henry Clay were almost synonymous terms, but this could never be said of Mr. Webster.  His following was strong in quality, but weak numerically.  Clay touched the popular heart.  Webster never did.  The people were proud of him, wondered at him, were awed by him, but they did not love him, and that was the reason he was never President, for he was too great to succeed to the high office, as many men have, by happy or unhappy accident.  There was also another feeling which is suggested by the differences with some of his closest friends.  There was a lurking distrust of Mr. Webster’s sincerity.  We can see it plainly in the correspondence of the Western Whigs, who were not, perhaps, wholly impartial.  But it existed, nevertheless.  There was a vague, ill-defined feeling of doubt in the public mind; a suspicion that the spirit of the advocate was the ruling spirit in Mr. Webster, and that he did not believe with absolute and fervent faith in one side of any question.  There was just enough correctness, just a sufficient grain of truth in this idea, when united with the coldness and dignity of his manner and with his greatness itself, to render impossible that popularity which, to be real and lasting in a democracy, must come from the heart and not from the head of the people, which must be instinctive and emotional, and not the offspring of reason.