, melted into
the tenderness of a child.

"Mr. Webster had now recovered his composure, and, fixing his keen
eyes on Chief Justice Marshall, said in that deep tone with which he
sometimes thrilled the heart of an audience: 'Sir, I know not how others
may feel... but for myself, when I see my Alma Mater surrounded, like
Caesar in the Senate house, by those who are reiterating stab after
stab, I would not, for my right hand, have her turn to me and say, Et tu
quoque mi fili! And thou, too, my son!'"

Whether this extraordinary scene, first described thirty-four years
afterward by a putative witness of it, ever really occurred or not,
it is today impossible to say. * But at least it would be an error to
attribute to it great importance. From the same source we have it that
at Exeter, too, Webster had made the judges weep--yet they had gone out
and decided against him. Judges do not always decide the way they weep!

* Professor Goodrich of Yale, who is responsible for the story,
communicated it to Rufus Choate in 1853. It next appears on Goodrich's
authority in Curtis's "Webster," vol. II, pp. 169-71.

Of the strictly legal part of his argument Webster himself has left us a
synopsis. Fully three-quarters of it dealt with the questions which had
been discussed by Mason before the State Supreme Court under the New
Hampshire Constitution and was largely irrelevant to the great point
at issue at Washington. Joseph Hopkinson, who was now associated with
Webster, contributed far more to the content of Marshall's opinion; yet
he, too, left one important question entirely to the Chief Justice's
ingenuity, as will be indicated shortly. Fortunately for the College its
opponents were ill prepared to take advantage of the vulnerable points
of its defense. For some unknown reason, Bartlett and Sullivan, who had
carried the day at Exeter, had now given place to William Wirt and John
Holmes. Of these the former had just been made Attorney-General of the
United States and had no time to give to the case--indeed he admitted
that "he had hardly thought of it till it was called on." As for Holmes,
he was a "kaleidoscopic politician" and barroom wit, best known to
contemporaries as "the noisy eulogist and reputed protege of Jefferson."
A remarkable strategy that, which stood such a person up before John
Marshall to plead the right of state Legislatures to dictate the
fortunes of liberal institutions!

The arguments were concluded on