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The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster - With an Essay on Daniel Webster as a Master of English Style by Daniel Webster;Edwin P. Whipple
page 22 of 1648 (01%)
His father's name was Nehemiah."

Or these:--

"Napoleon, that great ex_ile_,
Who scoured all Europe like a file."

And Webster's prose was then almost as bad as his verse, though it was
modelled on what was considered fine writing at the opening of the
present century. He writes to his dearest student friends in a style
which is profoundly insincere, though the thoughts are often good, and
the fact of his love for his friends cannot be doubted. He had committed
to memory Fisher Ames's noble speech on the British Treaty, and had
probably read some of Burke's great pamphlets on the French Revolution.
The stripling statesman aimed to talk in their high tone and in their
richly ornamented language, before he had earned the right even to mimic
their style of expression. There is a certain swell in some of his long
sentences, and a kind of good sense in some of his short ones, which
suggest that the writer is a youth endowed with elevation as well as
strength of nature, and is only making a fool of himself because he
thinks he must make a fool of himself in order that he may impress his
correspondents with the idea that he is a master of the horrible jargon
which all bright young fellows at that time innocently supposed to
constitute eloquence. Thus, in February, 1800, he writes thus to his
friend Bingham: "In my melancholy moments I presage the most dire
calamities. I already see in my imagination the time when the banner of
civil war shall be unfurled; when Discord's hydra form shall set up her
hideous yell, and from her hundred mouths shall howl destruction through
our empire; and when American blood shall be made to flow in rivers by
American swords! But propitious Heaven prevent such dreadful calamities!
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