to "feel the cold
which benumbed, and listen to the winds which pierced" this
"interesting" group; and immediately after, the picture is flashed upon
the imagination of "chilled and shivering childhood, houseless, but for
a mother's arms, couchless, but for a mother's breast,"--an image which
shows that the orator had not only transported himself into a spectator
of the scene, but had felt his own blood "almost freeze" in intense
sympathy with the physical sufferings of the shelterless mothers and
children.

There is no word which the novelists, satirists, philanthropic
reformers, and Bohemians of our day have done so much to discredit, and
make dis-respectable to the heart and the imagination, as the word
"respectable." Webster always uses it as a term of eulogy. A respectable
man is, to his mind, a person who performs all his duties to his family,
his country, and his God; a person who is not only virtuous, but who has
a clear perception of the relation which connects one virtue with
another by "the golden thread" of moderation, and who, whether he be a
man of genius, or a business man of average talent, or an intelligent
mechanic, or a farmer of sound moral and mental character, is to be
considered "respectable" because he is one of those citizens whose
intelligence and integrity constitute the foundation on which the
Republic rests. As late as 1843, in his noble oration on the completion
of the Bunker Hill Monument, he declared that if our American
institutions had done nothing more than to produce the character of
Washington, that alone would entitle them to the respect of mankind.
"Washington is all our own!... I would cheerfully put the question
to-day to the intelligence of Europe and the world, what character of
the century, upon the whole, stands out in the relief of history, most
pure, most _respectable_, most sublime; and I doubt not, that, by a
suffrage approaching to unanimity, the answer would be Washington!" It
is needless to quote other instances of the peculiar meaning he put into
the word "respectable," when we thus find him challenging the Europe of
the eighteenth century to name a match for Washington, and placing "most
respectable" after "most pure," and immediately preceding "most
sublime," in his enumeration of the three qualities in which Washington
surpassed all men of his century.

It has been often remarked that Webster adapted his style, even his
habits of mind and modes of reasoning, to t