pelling-Book, and of the rate at which it could be had in
quantities. Country merchants began to lay in supplies of Webster's
Spelling-Book, when they came to the nearest trading town, as
confidently as they bought West India goods or English tools. Webster
gave lectures, as he traveled north and south, upon the English
language. His reputation was forming upon this line, and it is not
unlikely that his partial failure in political and journalistic work was
due to his identification with the occupation of a school-master. A more
complete account would be that he did not do these things thoroughly
well, because his strongest attraction was in another direction. He
seems, through the twenty years or more which followed the first
publication of his Spelling-Book, to have his hand close by the
throttle-lever without knowing it. The practical demands of self-support
no doubt controlled his inclinations, and forced him into one situation
after another where his choice would not send him, and he spent these
years in a struggle for maintenance. Then he was an impulsive, a
generous, and an ambitious man. He loved society; he liked the stir of
men and the bustle of management. As we have already seen, he was ready
to venture all he had upon the stakes which his ardor set up. He took
risks in publishing, which could be justified only by his own
enthusiasm, and entertained himself with speculations in literature
which were agreeable to contemplate, but often disastrous to realize.
There is a half-despairing letter to Josiah Quincy[13] which discloses
the hard lines of his practical life. Trumbull had jested at Webster's
slight capital for house-keeping, and Webster himself reached points in
his career where even Institutes and Dissertations seemed to fail him.
The letter is dated at New Haven, February 12, 1811. He writes with
some irritation, "My name has been so much bandied about that I am quite
willing it should be seen and heard no more at present," and then passes
to the more important matters in his mind: "I am engaged in a work which
gives me great pleasure, and the tracing of language through more than
twenty different dialects has opened a new and before unexplored field.
I have within two years past made discoveries which, if ever published,
must interest the literati of all Europe, and render it necessary to
revise all the lexicons--Hebrew, Greek, and Latin--now used as classical
books. But what can I do? My own resources