ify 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