outh,--and in his deepest and most thrilling tones, thus concluded
his argument: "Sir, I know not how others may feel; but for myself, when
I see my Alma Mater surrounded, like Caesar in the senate-house, by
those who are reiterating stab after stab, I would not, for this right
hand, have her turn to me and say, _Et tu quoque, mi fili!_--And thou
too, my son." The effect was overwhelming; yet by what simple means was
it produced, and with what small expenditure of words! The eloquence was
plainly "in the man, in the subject, and in the occasion," but most
emphatically was it in the MAN.

Webster's extreme solicitude to make his style thoroughly
_Websterian_--a style unimitated because it is in itself inimitable--is
observable in the care he took in revising all his speeches and
addresses which were published under his own authority. His great
Plymouth oration of 1820 did not appear in a pamphlet form until a year
after its delivery. The chief reason of this delay was probably due to
his desire of stating the main political idea of the oration, that
government is founded on property, so clearly that it could not be
misconceived by any honest mind, and could only be perverted from its
plain democratic meaning by the ingenious malignity of such minds as are
deliberately dishonest, and consider lying as justifiable when lying
will serve a party purpose. It is probable that Webster would have been
President of the United States had it not been for one short sentence in
this oration,--"Government is founded on property." It was of no use for
his political friends to prove that he founded on this general
proposition the most democratic views as to the distribution of
property, and advised the enactment of laws calculated to frustrate the
accumulation of large fortunes in a few hands. There were the words,
words horrible to the democratic imagination, and Webster was proclaimed
an aristocrat, and an enemy to the common people. But the delay in the
publication of the oration may also be supposed to have been due to his
desire to prune all its grand passages of eloquence of every epithet and
image which should not be rigorously exact as expressions of his genuine
sentiments and principles. It is probable that the Plymouth oration, as
we possess it in print, is a better oration, in respect to composition,
than that which was heard by the applauding crowd before which it was
originally delivered. It is certain that the largeness, th