As every one knows, this speech contains much more than the argument against nullification, which has just been discussed, and exhibits all its author’s intellectual gifts in the highest perfection.  Mr. Hayne had touched on every conceivable subject of political importance, including slavery, which, however covered up, was really at the bottom of every Southern movement, and was certain sooner or later to come to the surface.  All these various topics Mr. Webster took up, one after another, displaying a most remarkable strength of grasp and ease of treatment.  He dealt with them all effectively and yet in just proportion.  Throughout there are bursts of eloquence skilfully mingled with statement and argument, so that the listeners were never wearied by a strained and continuous rhetorical display; and yet, while the attention was closely held by the even flow of lucid reasoning, the emotions and passions were from time to time deeply aroused and strongly excited.  In many passages of direct retort Mr. Webster used an irony which he employed always in a perfectly characteristic way.  He had a strong natural sense of humor, but he never made fun or descended to trivial efforts to excite laughter against his opponent.  He was not a witty man or a maker of epigrams.  But he was a master in the use of a cold, dignified sarcasm, which at times, and in this instance particularly, he used freely and mercilessly.  Beneath the measured sentences there is a lurking smile which saves them from being merely savage and cutting attacks, and yet brings home a keen sense of the absurdity of the opponent’s position.  The weapon resembled more the sword of Richard than the scimetar of Saladin, but it was none the less a keen and trenchant blade.  There is probably no better instance of Mr. Webster’s power of sarcasm than the famous passage in which he replied to Hayne’s taunt about the “murdered coalition,” which was said to have existed between Adams and Calhoun.  In a totally different vein is the passage about Massachusetts, perhaps in its way as good an example as we have of Webster’s power of appealing to the higher and more tender feelings of human nature.  The thought is simple and even obvious, and the expression unadorned, and yet what he said had that subtle quality which stirred and still stirs the heart of every man born on the soil of the old Puritan Commonwealth.

The speech as a whole has all the qualities which made Mr. Webster a great orator, and the same traits run through his other speeches.  An analysis of the reply to Hayne, therefore, gives us all the conditions necessary to forming a correct idea of Mr. Webster’s eloquence, of its characteristics and its value.  The Attic school of oratory subordinated form to thought to avoid the misuse of ornament, and triumphed over the more florid practice of the so-called “Asiatics.”  Rome gave the palm to Atticism, and modern oratory has gone still farther in the same direction, until its predominant quality has become that of making