test orator this country has ever
known, but in the history of eloquence his name will stand with those of
Demosthenes and Cicero, of Chatham and Burke.

CHAPTER VII.

THE STRUGGLE WITH JACKSON AND THE RISE OF THE WHIG PARTY.

In the year preceding the delivery of his great speech Mr. Webster had lost
his brother Ezekiel by sudden death, and he had married for his second wife
Miss Leroy of New York. The former event was a terrible grief to him, and
taken in conjunction with the latter seemed to make a complete break with
the past, and with its struggles and privations, its joys and successes.
The slender girl whom he had married in Salisbury church and the beloved
brother were both gone, and with them went those years of youth in which,--

"He had sighed deep, laughed free,
Starved, feasted, despaired, been happy."

One cannot come to this dividing line in Mr. Webster's life without regret.
There was enough of brilliant achievement and substantial success in what
had gone before to satisfy any man, and it had been honest, simple, and
unaffected. A wider fame and a greater name lay before him, but with them
came also ugly scandals, bitter personal attacks, an ambition which warped
his nature, and finally a terrible mistake. One feels inclined to say of
these later years, with the Roman lover:--

"Shut them in
With their triumphs and their glories and the rest,
Love is best."

The home changed first, and then the public career. The reply which, as
John Quincy Adams said, "utterly demolished the fabric of Hayne's speech
and left scarcely a wreck to be seen," went straight home to the people of
the North. It gave eloquent expression to the strong but undefined feeling
in the popular mind. It found its way into every house and was read
everywhere; it took its place in the school books, to be repeated by shrill
boy voices, and became part of the literature and of the intellectual life
of the country. In those solemn sentences men read the description of what
the United States had come to be under the Constitution, and what American
nationality meant in 1830. The leaders of the young war party in 1812 were
the first to arouse the national sentiment, but no one struck the chord
with such a master hand as Mr. Webster, or drew forth such long and deep
vibrations. There is no single utterance in our history which has done so
much by mere force of words to strengthen th