e finest of all Mr.
Webster's efforts in this field. It is certainly one of the very best of
his productions, but he showed on the next great occasion a distinct
improvement, which he long maintained. Five years after the oration at
Plymouth, he delivered the address on the laying of the corner-stone of
Bunker Hill monument. The superiority to the first oration was not in
essentials, but in details, the fruit of a ripening and expanding mind. At
Bunker Hill, as at Plymouth, he displayed the massiveness of thought, the
dignity and grandeur of expression, and the range of vision which are all
so characteristic of his intellect and which were so much enhanced by his
wonderful physical attributes. But in the later oration there is a greater
finish and smoothness. We appreciate the fact that the Plymouth oration is
a succession of eloquent fragments; the same is true of the Bunker Hill
address, but we no longer realize it. The continuity is, in appearance,
unbroken, and the whole work is rounded and polished. The style, too, is
now perfected. It is at once plain, direct, massive, and vivid. The
sentences are generally short and always clear, but never monotonous. The
preference for Anglo-Saxon words and the exclusion of Latin derivatives are
extremely marked, and we find here in rare perfection that highest
attribute of style, the union of simplicity, picturesqueness, and force.

In the first Bunker Hill oration Mr. Webster touched his highest point in
the difficult task of commemorative oratory. In that field he not only
stands unrivalled, but no one has approached him. The innumerable
productions of this class by other men, many of a high degree of
excellence, are forgotten, while those of Webster form part of the
education of every American school-boy, are widely read, and have entered
into the literature and thought of the country. The orations of Plymouth
and Bunker Hill are grouped in Webster's works with a number of other
speeches professedly of the same kind. But only a very few of these are
strictly occasional; the great majority are chiefly, if not wholly,
political speeches, containing merely passages here and there in the same
vein as his great commemorative addresses. Before finally leaving the
subject, however, it will be well to glance for a moment at the few
orations which properly belong to the same class as the first two which we
have been considering.

The Bunker Hill oration, after the lapse of only a yea