not differ from most men of this
age, and it only amounts to saying that Mr. Webster did not have a deeply
religious temperament. He did not have the ardent proselyting spirit which
is the surest indication of a profoundly religious nature; the spirit of
the Saracen Emir crying, "Forward! Paradise is under the shadow of our
swords." When, therefore, he turned his noble powers to a defence of
religion, he did not speak with that impassioned fervor which, coming from
the depths of a man's heart, savors of inspiration and seems essential to
the highest religious eloquence. He believed thoroughly every word he
uttered, but he did not feel it, and in things spiritual the heart must be
enlisted as well as the head. It was wittily said of a well-known
anti-slavery leader, that had he lived in the Middle Ages he would have
gone to the stake for a principle, under a misapprehension as to the facts.
Mr. Webster not only could never have misapprehended facts, but, if he had
flourished in the Middle Ages he would have been a stanch and honest
supporter of the strongest government and of the dominant church. Perhaps
this defines his religious character as well as anything, and explains why
the argument in the Girard will case, fine as it was, did not reach the
elevation and force which he so often displayed on other themes.

The Rhode Island case grew out of the troubles known at that period as
Dorr's rebellion. It involved a discussion not only of the constitutional
provisions for suppressing insurrections and securing to every State a
republican form of government, but also of the general history and theory
of the American governments, both state and national. There was thus
offered to Mr. Webster that full scope and large field in which he
delighted, and which were always peculiarly favorable to his talents. His
argument was purely constitutional, and although not so closely reasoned,
perhaps, as some of his earlier efforts, is, on the whole, as fine a
specimen as we have of his intellectual power as a constitutional lawyer at
the bar of the highest national tribunal. Mr. Webster did not often
transcend the proper limits of purely legal discussion in the courts, and
yet even when the question was wholly legal, the court-room would be
crowded by ladies as well as gentlemen, to hear him speak. It was so at the
hearing of the Girard suit; and during the strictly legal arguments in the
Charles River Bridge case, the court-room, Judge