treated him very caressingly and affectionately. He had been graduated only one year." 1

Mr. Webster returned to Fryeburg, and remained there in the same occupations until the following September. From three persons who knew him there, and who were ever afterward numbered among his cherished friends, we learn something of interest concerning him. One of them was Jacob W. McGaw, Esq., then a young lawyer in Fryeburg, with whom he lived at Mr. Osgood's. "Here," said Mr. McGaw, "was laid the foundation of that friendship, which, by his generous indulgence, has remained constant and uninterrupted till the time of his death, notwithstanding the very great changes which occurred in our relative positions, by reason of his constant elevation from one grade of honor to another, till he attained a standing from which human greatness knows no progress." Another was Samuel Osgood, son of the registrar, a young man who was near his own age, and who was just then completing his preparation to enter college at an advanced standing. With this gentleman, who became an eminent divine at Springfield, in Massachusetts, he contracted a friendship which was mutually preserved amidst all the changes of their lives. The third was the Honorable Samuel Fessenden, of Portland, son of the Rev. William Fessenden, of Fryeburg, who was Secretary of the Board of Trustees of the Academy. Mr. Samuel Fessenden was nearly of the same age with Mr. Webster, and they were strongly attached to each other. "If I ever loved a man," Mr. Fessenden wrote after Mr. Webster's death, "not a near relative, and out of the pale of kindred, that man was Daniel Webster." "

Mr. McGaw tells us that "he had not then attained the full development of manhood. Neither the physical nor intellectual expression of his countenance had become so striking as in subsequent life. His cheeks were thin, and his cheek-bones high. There was nothing specially noticeable about him then except his full, steady, large, and searching eyes. Nobody could see those eyes and ever forget their appearance, or him who pos

1 MSS.-Mr. Ticknor was then passing a summer near Hanover (previous to his

entering the college), on a visit with his father and mother.

? MSS.

sessed them. His gentleness, modesty, and social habits won for him the good-will of his acquaintances and pupils."

"He was always," says Dr. Osgood, "dignified in his deportment. He was usually serious, but often facetious and pleasant. He was an agreeable companion, and eminently social with all who shared his friendship. He was greatly beloved by all who knew him. His habits were strictly abstemious, and he neither took wine nor strong drink. He was punctual in his attendance upon public worship, and ever opened his school with prayer. I never heard him use a profane word, and never saw him lose his temper."

Mr. Fessenden, in a letter addressed to the literary executors, after Mr. Webster's decease, observes:

"The first I ever knew of Daniel Webster was immediately after he left college, and was employed by my father, the secretary of the Trustees of Fryeburg Academy, to become the principal instructor in that institution. He was not, when he commenced, twenty years old. I heard no one complain that his scholarship was not adequate to the duty he had assumed. On the contrary, I heard the Rev. Dr. Nathaniel Porter, of Conway, and my father, the Rev. William Fessenden, of Fryeburg, both of whom were good scholars, and the former, Dr. Porter, a very great man, say that Daniel Webster was then a very good scholar for one of his years. He did, while at Fryeburg, exhibit traits of talent and genius which drew from those two divines, and from other professional gentlemen, unqualified praise of his powers of mind. I remember very distinctly hearing my father remark that, if Mr. Webster should live, and have health, and pursue a straightforward course of industry and virtue, he would become one of the greatest men this country had produced.”

His reading at Fryeburg was chiefly in history and politics, and English literature. He began then to investigate carefully some parts of the political history of the United States. He read Adams's Defence of the American Constitutions, Williams's Vermont, and Mosheim's Ecclesiastical History; and he continued his reading of Blackstone's Commentaries. Here, too, he found Mr. Ames's celebrated speech on the British treaty, and committed it to memory. He read the Spectator and the Tatler, and the whole of Pope's poetical works, with many other things. Some idea of his industry may be formed from this list, when we remember that he was at the same time teaching a school, and copying deeds four evenings in the week.

All his hours that could be spared from labor, or necessary recreation, were spent in study or in meditation in the fields, and he rarely went abroad in his rambles without a book.'

What he was as a teacher, is sufficiently attested by the fact that he was earnestly pressed to remain on an increased salary. "A compensation annually of five or six hundred dollars," he writes to Bingham, "a house to live in, a piece of land to cultivate, and, inter nos solos, a clerkship of the Common Pleas, are now probably within the reach and possession of your friend."

I cannot say that he hesitated much, but he did honestly put down upon paper both sides of the question.

Mr. McGaw was always of opinion that he did not at this time feel very strongly the promptings of ambition, or entertain any very sanguine expectations of future eminence; or that, if he had such expectations, he concealed them. In proof of this, he refers to several occasions on which Mr. Webster evinced in conversation a very moderate estimate of himself and his future prospects. But we are to remember that, over all his youth, poverty had cast its discouraging shadow, and that the vigor and elasticity of even his spirit must have been occasionally chilled by it. We are to recollect, too, some points of his character which never changed. He was always a serious man in every serious affair of life. Whatever may have been his consciousness of superior intellectual powers, he never treated any thing contemptuously, which obliged him to put himself on a level with others for the purpose of measuring the exertion which he had to put forth. Whatever he may have thought of this offer, which the good people of Fryeburg doubtless made as tempting as they could, he met it with no disdain, even when writing of it to one of his most intimate friends. But he was drawn away from it, first, by his father's desire to have him embrace the profession of the law; and secondly, as I have no doubt, by that mysterious power, which operates unconsciously upon men of great intellect in their youth, leading them toward the destiny which genius creAtes for them, and carrying them away from the proffered comfort of obscure and inferior stations to further efforts and continued privation, until the loftier sphere, which has been scarcely revealed to their vision, is entered in triumph at last. So, at 1 Dr. Osgood.

least, I interpret the sober views which the young Webster thus expressed to his friends, before he finally decided not to make himself for life school-master and denizen of Fryeburg, and Clerk of the Common Pleas for the county of Oxford:

"What shall I do? Shall I say, 'Yes, gentlemen,' and sit down here to spend my days in a kind of comfortable privacy, or shall I relinquish these prospects, and enter into a profession, where my feelings will be constantly harrowed by objects either of dishonesty or misfortune; where my living must be squeezed from penury (for rich folks seldom go to law), and my moral principle continually be at hazard? I agree with you that the law is well calculated to draw forth the powers of the mind, but what are its effects on the heart? Are they equally propitious? Does it inspire benevolence, and awake tenderness; or does it, by a frequent repetition of wretched objects, blunt sensibility, and stifle the still small voice of mercy?

"The talent with which Heaven has intrusted me is small, very small, yet I feel responsible for the use of it, and am not willing to pervert it to purposes reproachful and unjust; nor to hide it, like the slothful servant, in a napkin.

"Now, I will enumerate the inducements that draw me toward the law: First, and principally, it is my father's wish. He does not dictate, it is true, but how much short of dictation is the mere wish of a parent, whose labors of life are wasted on favors to his children? Even the delicacy with which this wish is expressed gives it more effect than it would have in the form of a command. Secondly, my friends generally wish it. They are urgent and pressing. My father even offers me-I will sometime tell you what-and Mr. Thompson offers my tuition gratis, and to relinquish his stand to me.

"On the whole, I imagine I shall make one more trial in the ensuing autumn. If I prosecute the profession, I pray God to fortify me against its temptations. To the winds I dismiss those light hopes of eminence which ambition inspired, and vanity fostered. To be honest, to be capable, to be faithful' to my client and my conscience, I earnestly hope will be my first endeavor. I believe you, my worthy boy, when you tell me what are your intentions. I have long known and long loved the honesty of your heart. But let us not rely too much on ourselves; let us look to some less fallible guide to direct us among the temptations that surround us."

In September, Ezekiel came to Fryeburg, and the two brothers made a journey together to the lower part of Maine, and then returned to Salisbury. Ezekiel soon after went back to college, and Daniel resumed his place in Mr. Thompson's

1 Letter to Bingham, May 18, 1802.

office, where he remained until February or March, 1804. What his studies had thus far been in the law, the reader has seen. Mr. Thompson now made one mistake in directing his reading, to which Mr. Webster thus refers in his autobiography: "He was an admirable man, and a good lawyer himself, but I was put to study in the old way, that is, the hardest books first, and lost much time. I read Coke-Littleton through without understanding a quarter part of it." But he had already mentioned in the same paragraph that he had read two or three volumes of Blackstone's Commentaries; and the criticism therefore, which follows, and is now to be quoted, was intended to point out the inexpediency of making Coke a textbook after Blackstone, with nothing between them to instruct the pupil in the application of the principles of the common law to the transactions of life which form the subjects of ordinary litigation. The best book which Mr. Webster could then find within his reach, for this purpose, was Espinasse's . Nisi Prius; and, inferior as this was to the numerous textbooks since written, it answered very well. His resort to it shows that he did not mean to have it understood, from his observations about Coke, that Mr. Thompson had neglected to inform him that Blackstone's Commentaries was the proper book with which to begin his legal studies. In fact, his correspondence shows that he began Blackstone when he first entered Mr. Thompson's office, in the autumn of 1801. In the Autobiography he says:

“Happening to take up Espinasse's 'Law of Nisi Prius,' I found I could understand it, and, arguing that the object of reading was to understand what was written, I laid down the venerable Coke, et alios similes recerendos, and kept company for a time with Mr. Espinasse and others, the most plain, easy, and intelligible writers. A boy of twenty, with no previous knowledge of such subjects, cannot understand Coke. It is folly to set him on such an author.

"There are propositions in Coke so abstract, and distinctions so nice, and doctrines embracing so many conditions and qualifications, that it requires an effort, not only of a mature mind, but of a mind both strong and mature, to understand him. Why disgust and discourage a boy by telling him that he must break into his profession through such a wall as this? I really often despaired. I thought I never could make myself a lawyer, and was almost going back to the business of school-keeping. A