WEBSTER, DANIEL (1782-1852).—­Orator, s. of a farmer in New Hampshire, was a distinguished advocate in Boston, and afterwards a member of the United States Senate and Sec. of State 1841-43 and 1850-52.  He was the greatest orator whom America has produced, and has a place in literature by virtue of his pub. speeches.

WEBSTER, JOHN (1580?-1625?).—­Dramatist.  Though in some respects he came nearest to Shakespeare of any of his contemporaries, almost nothing has come down to us of the life of W. Even the dates of his birth and death are uncertain.  He appears to have been the s. of a London tailor, to have been a freeman of the Merchant Taylor’s Company, and clerk of the parish of St. Andrews, Holborn.  Four plays are known to be his, The White Devil, or the Life and Death of Vittoria Corombona (1612), Appius and Virginia (1654), The Devil’s Law Case (1623), and The Duchess of Malfi (1623), and he collaborated with Drayton, Middleton, Heywood, Dekker, etc., in the production of others.  He does not appear to have been much regarded in his own day, and it was only in the 19th century that his great powers began to be appreciated and expounded by such critics as Lamb and Hazlitt, and in later days Swinburne.  The first says, “To move a horror skilfully, to touch a soul to the quick, to lay upon fear as much as it can bear, to wean and weary a life till it is ready to drop, and then step in with mortal instruments to take its last forfeit, this only a Webster can do.”  W. revels in the horrible, but the touch of genius saves his work from mere brutality, and evokes pity and sorrow where, without it, there would be only horror and disgust.  His work is extremely unequal, and he had no power of construction, but his extraordinary insight into motives and feelings redeem all his failings and give him a place second only to Marlowe and Ben Jonson among the contemporaries of Shakespeare.

WEBSTER, NOAH (1758-1843).—­Lexicographer, etc., b. at Hartford, Conn., and ed. at Yale.  His long life was spent in unremitting diligence as teacher, lawyer, and man of letters.  His great work is his American Dictionary of the English Language (1828), for which he prepared himself by 10 years’ study of philology.  Many abridgments of it have appeared, and in 1866 a new and enlarged ed. was pub. His Elementary Spelling Book is believed to have attained a circulation of 70,000,000 copies.  He also pub. A Philosophical and Practical Grammar of the English Language (1807), and many other works.

WELLS, CHARLES JEREMIAH (1800?-1879).—­Poet, b. in London, where he practised as a solicitor, pub. in 1822 Stories after Nature, written in poetic prose, which attracted no attention, and a biblical drama, Joseph and his Brethren (1824), which had an almost similar fate until D.G.  Rossetti called attention to it in 1863, giving it a high meed of praise.  In 1874, stung by want of appreciation, he had burned his manuscripts of plays and poems; but on the new interest excited in his Joseph he added some new scenes.  In his later years he lived in France. Joseph and his Brethren ed. in the World’s Classics, 1909.