furnaces needing only to be blown; the mastiff mouth accurately closed; I have not traced so much of silent Berserkir rage that I remember of in any man.  ’I guess I should not like to be your nigger!’ Webster is not loquacious, but he is pertinent, conclusive; a dignified, perfectly bred man, though not English in breeding; a man worthy of the best reception among us, and meeting such I understand.”

Such was the effect produced by Mr. Webster when in England, and it was a universal impression.  Wherever he went men felt in the depths of their being the amazing force of his personal presence.  He could control an audience by a look, and could extort applause from hostile listeners by a mere glance.  On one occasion, after the 7th of March speech, there is a story that a noted abolitionist leader was present in the crowd gathered to hear Mr. Webster, and this bitter opponent is reported to have said afterwards, “When Webster, speaking of secession, asked ’what is to become of me,’ I was thrilled with a sense of some awful impending calamity.”  The story may be apocryphal, but there can be no doubt of its essential truth so far as the effect of Mr. Webster’s personal presence goes.  People looked at him, and that was enough.  Mr. Parton in his essay speaks of seeing Webster at a public dinner, sitting at the head of the table with a bottle of Madeira under his yellow waistcoat, and looking like Jove.  When he presided at the Cooper memorial meeting in New York he uttered only a few stately platitudes, and yet every one went away with the firm conviction that they had heard him speak words of the profoundest wisdom and grandest eloquence.

The temptation to rely on his marvellous physical gifts grew on him as he became older, which was to be expected with a man of his temperament.  Even in his early days, when he was not in action, he had an impassible and slumberous look; and when he sat listening to the invective of Hayne, no emotion could be traced on his cold, dark, melancholy face, or in the cavernous eyes shining with a dull light.  This all vanished when he began to speak, and, as he poured forth his strong, weighty sentences, there was no lack of expression or of movement.  But Mr. Webster, despite his capacity for work, and his protracted and often intense labor, was constitutionally indolent, and this sluggishness of temperament increased very much as he grew older.  It extended from the periods of repose to those of action until, in his later years, a direct stimulus was needed to make him exert himself.  Even to the last the mighty power was still there in undiminished strength, but it was not willingly put forth.  Sometimes the outside impulse would not come; sometimes the most trivial incident would suffice, and like a spark on the train of gunpowder would bring a sudden burst of eloquence, electrifying all who listened.  On one occasion he was arguing a case to the jury.  He was talking in his heaviest and most ponderous fashion,