which he could not furnish a more forcible
Saxon equivalent. "The impenetrability of matter" was suggested;
and Kemble, after half a minute's reflection, answered, "The
un-thorough-fareableness of stuff." Still, no English writer would think
of discarding such an abstract, but convenient and accurate, term as
"impenetrability," for the coarsely concrete and terribly ponderous word
which declares that there is no possible thoroughfare, no road, by which
we can penetrate that substance which we call "matter," and which our
Saxon forefathers called "stuff." Wherever the Latin element in our
language comes in to express ideas and sentiments which were absent from
the Anglo-Saxon mind, Webster uses it without stint; and some of the
most resounding passages of his eloquence owe to it their strange power
to suggest a certain vastness in his intellect and sensibility, which
the quaint, idiomatic, homely prose of his friend, Mason, would have
been utterly incompetent to convey. Still, he preferred a plain, plump,
simple verb or noun to any learned phrase, whenever he could employ it
without limiting his opulent nature to a meagre vocabulary, incompetent
fully to express it.

Yet he never departed from simplicity; that is, he rigidly confined
himself to the use of such words as he had earned the right to use.
Whenever the report of one of his extemporaneous speeches came before
him for revision, he had an instinctive sagacity in detecting every word
that had slipped unguardedly from his tongue, which he felt, on
reflection, did not belong to _him_. Among the reporters of his
speeches, he had a particular esteem for Henry J. Raymond, afterwards so
well known as the editor of the New York Times. Mr. Raymond told me
that, after he had made a report of one of Webster's speeches, and had
presented it to him for revision, his conversation with him was always a
lesson in rhetoric. "Did I use that phrase? I hope not. At any rate,
substitute for it this more accurate definition." And then again: "That
word does not express my meaning. Wait a moment, and I will give you a
better one. That sentence is slovenly,--that image is imperfect and
confused. I believe, my young friend, that you have a remarkable power
of reporting what I say; but, if I said that, and that, and that, it
must have been owing to the fact that I caught, in the hurry of the
moment, such expressions as I could command at the moment; and you see
they do not accurately repr