more thorough comprehension of the forces at work in the
organization of national life may yet enable us to see with greater
distinctness the degree of Webster's power and function. The last result
of historical study is the determination of national genius, and for
that time and the slow evolution of national character are requisite. I
am sure that the dignity of Webster's position in our history is more
intelligible to-day than it was in his own time. I am confident that the
twentieth century will give him a juster meed than we are giving him
to-day.

It was at once his fortune and his misfortune to pass his life
contemporaneously with the birth and adolescence of a great nation, and
to feel the passion of the hour. There is unquestionably a parochial
sort of nationality which it is easy to satirize. No one could well set
it out in stronger light than Webster himself in those passages in the
preface to his Dictionary which I have already quoted. He is judiciously
silent concerning the American poets of his time, being careful,
even,--most unkindest cut!--not to commit himself to the support of
Joel Barlow's heroic verse; but he produces a list of American
prosaists, whom he places back to back with their English fellows. He
has a proper sense of the importance of language to a nation, and
appears to be perplexed by the implied question: If Englishmen and
Americans speak the same language, how in the world are we to tell them
apart and keep them apart? Then again, since there has been a revolution
resulting in governmental independence, what stands in the way of a
complete independence, so that the spick and span new nation may go to
the language tailors and be dressed in a new suit of parts of speech?
"Let us seize the present moment," he cries, "and establish a national
language as well as a national government." Never was there such a
chance, he thinks, for clearing away the rubbish which has accumulated
for generations in our clumsy, inelegant language. Hand him the Bible
which people have foolishly regarded as a great conservator of the
English tongue, and he will give you a new edition "purified from the
numerous errors." Knock off the useless appendages to words which serve
only to muffle simple sounds. Innocent iconoclast, with his
school-master ferrule!

It is worth our while to make serious answer to these serious
propositions, since the true aspect of native literature may thus be
disclosed. The Revolutio