open any proposition so as to identify its separate elements with the very consciousness of the reader’s or hearer’s mind; this, which is the lawyer’s peculiar power, had not been particularly developed in Burke, but exists in Webster in greater expansion and force than in any one since Doctor Johnson, who, it always appeared to us, had he been educated for the bar, would have made the greatest lawyer that ever led the decisions of Westminster-Hall.  We should hardly be justified in saying that Burke would have made a great First Lord of the Treasury.  Mr. Webster, as Secretary of State, proved himself to be a practical statesman of the highest; finest, promptest sagacity and foresight that this or any nation ever witnessed.  Who now doubts the surpassing wisdom, who now but reverences the exalted patriotism, of the advice and the example which he gave, but gave in vain, to the Whig party at the beginning of Mr. Tyler’s administration?  His official correspondence would be lowered by a comparison with any state papers since the secretaryship of John Marshall.  Does the public generally know what has become of that portentous difficulty about the Right of Search, upon which England and America, five years ago, were on the point of being “lento collisae duello.”  Mr. Webster settled it by mere force of mind:  he dissipated the Question, by seeing through it, and by compelling others to see a fallacy in its terms which before had imposed upon the understanding of two nations.  In the essential and universal philosophy of politics, Webster is second only to Burke.  After Burke, there is no statesman whose writings might be read with greater advantage by foreign nations, or would have been studied with so much respect by antiquity, as Webster’s.

In a merely literary point of view, this perhaps may be said of Mr. Webster, that he is the only powerful and fervid orator, since the glorious days of Greece, whose style is so disciplined that any of his great public harangues might be used as models of composition.  His language is beautifully pure, and his combinations of it exhibit more knowledge of the genius, spirit, and classic vigor of the English tongue, than it has entered the mind of any professor of rhetoric to apprehend.  As the most impetuous sweeps of passion in him are pervaded and informed and guided by intellect, so the most earnest struggles of intellect seem to be calmed and made gentle in their vehemence, by a more essential rationality of taste.  That imperious mind, which seems fit to defy the universe, is ever subordinate, by a kind of fascination, to the perfect law of grace.  In the highest of his intellectual flights—­and who can follow the winged rush of that eagle mind?—­in the widest of his mental ranges-and who shall measure their extent?—­he is ever moving within the severest line of beauty.  No one would think of saying that Mr. Webster’s speeches are thrown off with ease, and cost him but little effort; they are clearly the result of the