“is the effort of a great mind, richly stored with every species of information.  If there be an American who can read it without tears, I am not that American.  It enters more perfectly into the genuine spirit of New England than any production I ever read.  The observations on the Greeks and Romans; on colonization in general; on the West India islands; on the past, present, and future of America, and on the slave-trade, are sagacious, profound, and affecting in a high degree.”

     “Mr. Burke is no longer entitled to the praise—­the most consummate
     orator of modern times.”

     “What can I say of what regards myself?  To my humble name,
     Exegisti monumentum aere perennius.”

Many persons consider the Plymouth oration to be the finest of all Mr. Webster’s efforts in this field.  It is certainly one of the very best of his productions, but he showed on the next great occasion a distinct improvement, which he long maintained.  Five years after the oration at Plymouth, he delivered the address on the laying of the corner-stone of Bunker Hill monument.  The superiority to the first oration was not in essentials, but in details, the fruit of a ripening and expanding mind.  At Bunker Hill, as at Plymouth, he displayed the massiveness of thought, the dignity and grandeur of expression, and the range of vision which are all so characteristic of his intellect and which were so much enhanced by his wonderful physical attributes.  But in the later oration there is a greater finish and smoothness.  We appreciate the fact that the Plymouth oration is a succession of eloquent fragments; the same is true of the Bunker Hill address, but we no longer realize it.  The continuity is, in appearance, unbroken, and the whole work is rounded and polished.  The style, too, is now perfected.  It is at once plain, direct, massive, and vivid.  The sentences are generally short and always clear, but never monotonous.  The preference for Anglo-Saxon words and the exclusion of Latin derivatives are extremely marked, and we find here in rare perfection that highest attribute of style, the union of simplicity, picturesqueness, and force.

In the first Bunker Hill oration Mr. Webster touched his highest point in the difficult task of commemorative oratory.  In that field he not only stands unrivalled, but no one has approached him.  The innumerable productions of this class by other men, many of a high degree of excellence, are forgotten, while those of Webster form part of the education of every American school-boy, are widely read, and have entered into the literature and thought of the country.  The orations of Plymouth and Bunker Hill are grouped in Webster’s works with a number of other speeches professedly of the same kind.  But only a very few of these are strictly occasional; the great majority are chiefly, if not wholly, political speeches, containing merely passages here and there in the same vein as his great commemorative addresses.  Before finally leaving the subject, however, it will be well to glance for a moment at the few orations which properly belong to the same class as the first two which we have been considering.