KOSSUTH

From a Speech delivered in Boston, on the 7th of November, 1849, at a
Festival of the Natives of New Hampshire established in Massachusetts.

THE CONSTITUTION AND THE UNION

A Speech delivered in the Senate of the United States, on the 7th of
March, 1850.

RECEPTION AT BUFFALO

A Speech delivered before a large Assembly of the Citizens of Buffalo
and the County of Erie, at a Public Reception, on the 22d of May, 1851.

THE ADDITION TO THE CAPITOL

An Address delivered at the Laying of the Corner-Stone of the Addition
to the Capitol, on the 4th of July, 1851.

APPENDIX.

IMPRESSMENT

THE RIGHT OF SEARCH

LETTERS TO GENERAL CASS ON THE TREATY OF WASHINGTON

THE HUeLSEMANN LETTER

DANIEL WEBSTER AS A MASTER OF ENGLISH STYLE.

From my own experience and observation I should say that every boy, who
is ready enough in spelling, grammar, geography, and arithmetic, is
appalled when he is commanded to write what is termed "a composition."
When he enters college the same fear follows him and the Professor of
Rhetoric is a more terrible personage to his imagination than the
Professors of Greek, Latin, Mathematics, and Moral and Intellectual
Philosophy. Both boys at school and young men in college show no lack of
power in speaking their native language with a vehemence and fluency
which almost stuns the ears of their seniors. Why, then, should they
find such difficulty in writing it? When you listen to the animated talk
of a bright school-boy or college student, full of a subject which
really interests him, you say at once that such command of racy and
idiomatic English words must of course be exhibited in his
"compositions" or his "themes"; but when the latter are examined, they
are commonly found to be feeble and lifeless, with hardly a thought or a
word which bears any stamp of freshness or originality, and which are so
inferior to his ordinary conversation, that we can hardly believe they
came from the same mind.

The first quality which strikes an examiner of these exercises in
English composition is their _falseness_. No boy or youth writes what he
personally thinks and feels, but writes what a good boy or youth is
expected to think or feel. This hypocrisy vitiates his writing from
first to last, and is not absent in his "Class Oration," or in his
"Speech at Commencement." I have a vivid memory of the first time the
boys of my class, in a public school, were called upon to write
"compo