at all
periods of his life. His letters of this time, as well as the
recollections of his fellow-students, show him the easy, humorous,
rather indolent and strictly correct "good-fellow," whom professors
and companions equally relished. He browsed much in the College
library, and had the habit of bringing to bear upon the lesson of the
hour the information gathered in his miscellaneous reading,--a
practice that much enlivens the monotony of recitation. The half-dozen
youths of his particular set, it appears, plumed themselves upon
resembling the early Christians in having all things in common. The
first to rise in the morning--and he must have been an early riser
indeed who was up before Daniel Webster--"dressed himself in the best
which the united apartments afforded"; the next made the best
selection from what remained; and the last was happy if he found rags
enough to justify his appearance in the chapel. The relator of this
pleasant reminiscence adds, that he was once the possessor of an
eminently respectable beaver hat, a costly article of resplendent
lustre. It was missing one day, could not be found, and was given up
for lost. Several weeks after "friend Dan" returned from a distant
town, where he had been teaching school, wearing the lost beaver, and
relieving its proprietor from the necessity of covering his head with
a battered and long-discarded hat of felt. How like the Daniel Webster
of later years, who never could acquire the sense of _meum_ and
_tuum_, supposed to be the basis of civilization!

Mr. Webster always spoke slightingly of his early oratorical efforts,
and requested Mr. Everett, the editor of his works, not to search them
out. He was not just to the productions of his youth, if we may judge
from the Fourth-of-July oration which he delivered in 1800, when he
was a Junior at Dartmouth, eighteen years of age. This glowing psalm
of the republican David is perfectly characteristic, and entirely
worthy of him. The times that tried men's souls,--how recent and vivid
they were to the sons of Ebenezer Webster, who had led forth from the
New Hampshire hills the neighbors at whose firesides Ezekiel and
Daniel had listened, open-mouthed, to the thousand forgotten incidents
of the war. Their professors of history were old John Bowen, who had
once been a prisoner with the Indians; Robert Wise, who had sailed
round the world and fought in the Revolution on _both_ sides; George
Bayly, a pioneer, who saw the f