strong in Mr. Webster.  But in that bright period of early manhood it was accompanied by a frank and generous acknowledgment of all and more than all the intellectual aid he received from others.  He truly and properly awarded to Mason and Smith all the credit for the law and for the legal points and theories set forth on their side, and modestly says that he was merely the arranger and reciter of other men’s thoughts.  But how much that arrangement and recitation meant!  There were, perhaps, no lawyers better fitted than Mason and Smith to examine a case and prepare an argument enriched with everything that learning and sagacity could suggest.  But when Mr. Webster burst upon the court and the nation with this great appeal, it was certain that there was no man in the land who could so arrange arguments and facts, who could state them so powerfully and with such a grand and fitting eloquence.

The legal part of the argument was printed in Farrar’s report and also in Wheaton’s, after it had been carefully revised by Mr. Webster with the arguments of his colleagues before him.  This legal and constitutional discussion shows plainly enough Mr. Webster’s easy and firm grasp of facts and principles, and his power of strong, effective, and lucid statement; but it is in its very nature dry, cold, and lawyer-like.  It gives no conception of the glowing vehemence of the delivery, or of those omitted portions of the speech which dealt with matters outside the domain of law, and which were introduced by Mr. Webster with such telling and important results.  He spoke for five hours, but in the printed report his speech occupies only three pages more than that of Mr. Mason in the court below.  Both were slow speakers, and thus there is a great difference in time to be accounted for, even after making every allowance for the peroration which we have from another source, and for the wealth of legal and historical illustration with which Mr. Webster amplified his presentation of the question.  “Something was left out,” Mr. Webster says, and that something which must have occupied in its delivery nearly an hour was the most conspicuous example of the generalship by which Mr. Webster achieved victory, and which was wholly apart from his law.  This art of management had already been displayed in the treatment of the cases made up for the Circuit Courts, and in the elaborate and irrelevant legal discussion which Mr. Webster introduced before the Supreme Court.  But this management now entered on a much higher stage, where it was destined to win victory, and exhibited in a high degree tact and knowledge of men.  Mr. Webster was fully aware that he could rely, in any aspect of the case, upon the sympathy of Marshall and Washington.  He was equally certain of the unyielding opposition of Duvall and Todd; the other three judges, Johnson, Livingston, and Story, were known to be adverse to the college, but were possible converts.  The first point was to increase the