that he might enjoy its rather scanty advantages of a liberal education,
and by means of which he was there to plead its cause before the supreme
tribunal of the nation, rushed suddenly upon his mind in an overwhelming
flood. The justices of the Supreme Court--great lawyers, tried and
toughened by experience into a certain obdurate sense of justice, and
insensible to any common appeal to their hearts--melted into unwonted
tenderness, as, in broken words, the advocate proceeded to state his own
indebtedness to the "small college," whose rights and privileges he was
there to defend. Chief Justice Marshall's eyes were filled with tears;
and the eyes of the other justices were suffused with a moisture similar
to that which afflicted the eyes of the Chief. As the orator gradually
recovered his accustomed stern composure of manner, he turned to the
counsel on the other side,--one of whom, at least, was a graduate of
Dartmouth,--and in his deepest and most thrilling tones, thus concluded
his argument: "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 this right
hand, have her turn to me and say, _Et tu quoque, mi fili!_--And thou
too, my son." The effect was overwhelming; yet by what simple means was
it produced, and with what small expenditure of words! The eloquence was
plainly "in the man, in the subject, and in the occasion," but most
emphatically was it in the MAN.

Webster's extreme solicitude to make his style thoroughly
_Websterian_--a style unimitated because it is in itself inimitable--is
observable in the care he took in revising all his speeches and
addresses which were published under his own authority. His great
Plymouth oration of 1820 did not appear in a pamphlet form until a year
after its delivery. The chief reason of this delay was probably due to
his desire of stating the main political idea of the oration, that