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I told him I must have a good deal-three or four hundred dollars. He gave it to me, and, with this in my pocket, I hired a sleigh,' and set off for home. I got home one afternoon, just at sunset, and saw my father in his little room, sitting in his arm-chair. He was pretty old then, and tall, and very thin. His face was pale, and his cheek sunken, and his eyeswhich were always large, and very black-seemed larger and blacker than I ever saw them. He seemed glad to see me, and, almost as soon as I sat down, he said: 'Well, Daniel, we have got that office for you.' 'Yes, father,' said I, 'the gentlemen were very kind, I must go and thank them.' 'They gave it to you without my saying a word about it.' 'I must go and see Judge Farrar, and tell him I am much obliged to him.' And so I talked about it very carelessly, and tried to make my father understand me. At last he began to have some suspicion of what I meant; and he straightened himself up in his chair, and looked at me as if he would look me through. 'Daniel, Daniel,' said he, don't you mean to take that office?' 'No, indeed, father,' said I; ‘I hope I can do much better than that. I mean to use my tongue in the courts, not my pen; to be an actor, not a register of other men's acts. I hope yet, sir, to astonish your honor in your own court by my professional attainments.'

"For a moment I thought he was angry. He rocked his chair, slightly; a flash went over an eye, softened by age, but still as black as jet; but it was gone, and I thought I saw that parental partiality was, after all, a little gratified at this apparent devotion to an honorable profession, and this seeming confidence of success in it. He looked at me for as much as a minute, and then said very slowly, 'Well, my son, your mother has always said you would come to something or nothing. She was not sure which; I think you are now about settling that doubt for her.' This he said, and never a word spoke more to me on the subject. I stayed at home a week, paid any little bills that came in, bought what was necessary for the family, promised to come to him again as soon as I was admitted to the bar, and returned to Boston."

The time was now approaching for his admission to the bar, and the choice of a place of settlement. "In some country town in New Hampshire," he writes to one of his friends just before his admission, "I shall probably put off my character of a rover, and fix my feet for a season. Having been for the winter a wandering comet, in the spring I become a falling star, and shall drop from the firmament of Boston gayety and pleasure to the level of a rustic village-of silence and ohscurity."

He means that he hired a seat in a country sleigh that had come down to the market. At that time, he says in the Autobiography, "Stage-coaches no more

ran into the centre of New Hampshire than they ran to Baffin's Bay."

1805.

Letter to Mr. Fuller, March 10

He was admitted to practice in March, 1805, in the Court of Common Pleas in Boston, on the motion of Mr. Gore. It was the custom then for the patron to make a short speech introducing the pupil to the court. It is a well-known tradition that on this occasion Mr. Gore predicted the future eminence of his young friend. What he said has not been preserved; but that he said what Mr. Webster never forgot, that it was distinctly a prediction, and that it excited in him a resolve that it should not go unfulfilled, we have upon his own authority, although he appears to have been unwilling to repeat the words of Mr. Gore's address. This ceremony being over, he went immediately to Amherst, in New Hampshire, where his father then was, attending a session of the court. It was his wish at this time to settle in Portsmouth; but he resolved not to leave the immediate neighborhood of Salisbury during his father's life. Accordingly, he established himself in the adjoining village of Boscawen; and there, in the spring of 1805, he began the life of a country lawyer.

Before he left Boston, he had made a considerable purchase of books, for which he was to remit the money from New Hampshire. The money was forwarded, but the letter containing it was stolen from the messenger before it reached the hands of Ezekiel. Many letters passed between the brothers, and many plans were devised for raising another sum sufficient to obtain the books. At first, Ezekiel was desired to wait upon the bookseller, explain the loss, and request that the books might be put again upon his shelves. At length it was arranged that Ezekiel should ask Mr. Thacher, a member of the Boston bar, to become surety for the payment; to which that gentleman at once assented.

Furnished with this security, Ezekiel repaired to the bookseller's shop, tendered the indorsement of Mr. Thacher upon his own note, and asked for the books. But the worthy bibliopole refused all security, kindly forwarded the books, and gave all the credit that was asked. He lived to witness Mr. Webster's whole career.'

Books, indeed, were quite essential to his existence where he See the Autobiography.

spondence, i., 20.

(Corre

2 The bookseller was Mr. Samuel H. Parker.

now was. The life which he led at Boscawen, for two years and a half, would have been insupportable without them. He described it in his letters as 66 a life of writs and summonses." "Other mechanics do pretty well here," he said, “and I am determined to try my luck among others."'

There was no congenial society for him, and he yet wanted that support which other young men, similarly situated, have found, from having formed that tender connection which may be the solace of present silence and obscurity, even when the beloved object is far away. He was not in love, and apparently he was not likely to be. He endured " the burden of perpetual solitude and seclusion," by devoting himself to business and study. His practice extended over three counties, Hillsborough, Rockingham, and Grafton.' It amounted to not more than six or seven hundred dollars a year; but this was sufficient for his support, besides leaving a small sum for the increase of his library. His studies during this period were various, and more extensive, I imagine, than they were during the same length of time at any former portion of his life, especially in the law and in history. With what energy he continued to resist the influences of that kind of practice in which most young men must begin their professional life, how he labored at this time to make himself a real lawyer, and how well he estimated the means that were to make him one, his correspondence shows. After reading what is now to be quoted, no one need be surprised that, as soon as he stepped forth from that little village in the interior of New Hampshire, he stood at once the equal and the competitor of men who were many years his seniors, and who had long occupied the foremost places at the bar of New England.'

"Study is the grand requisite for a lawyer. Men may be born poets, and leap from their cradle painters; Nature may have made them musi

1 He revenged himself upon the writs and summonses by turning them into

verse:

"All good sheriffs in the land,
We command,

That forthwith you arrest John Dyer,
Esquire,

If in your precinct you can find him,
And bind him," etc., etc.

He then adds: "If the Legislature will
but put our writs into a poetical and

musical form, it will certainly be the most harmonious thing they ever did." -Letter to Bingham, January 19, 1806.)

2 "Scattering business over so much surface," he said, "is like spilling water upon the ground."

3 Mr. Webster has said in his Autobiography (written in 1829), that, with the exception of instances in which he had been associated with the Attorney.

cians, and called on them only to exercise, and not to acquire, ability; but law is artificial. It is a human science, to be learned, not inspired. Let there be a genius for whom Nature has done so much as apparently to have left nothing for application, yet, to make a lawyer, application must do as much as if Nature had done nothing. The evil is, that an accursed thirst for money violates every thing. We cannot study, because we must pettifog. We learn the low recourses of attorneyism, when we should learn the conceptions, the reasonings, and the opinions of Cicero and Murray. The love of fame is extinguished, every ardent wish for knowledge repressed; conscience put in jeopardy, and the best feelings of the heart indurated by the mean, money-catching, abominable practices which cover with disgrace a part of the modern practitioners of the law. . . . Our profession is good, if practised in the spirit of it; it is damnable fraud and iniquity when its true spirit is supplied by a spirit of mischiefmaking and money-catching."

1

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His first speech at the bar was made during the first year of his residence at Boscawen, and after the lapse of forty years he remembered with the deepest tenderness that his father heard it. But his father never heard him a second time. He appears. to have been unable to go abroad during the succeeding winter, and he died in April, 1806. In a burial-place set apart in his

General of the United States, he had hardly ten times in his life acted as junior counsel.

'Letter to Bingham, January 19, 1806.

Letter to Mr. Blatchford, written from Franklin, May 3, 1846.-(Correspondence, ii., 225.) He states the same fact in the Autobiography.

own field, "beneath the shadows of a tall pine," he was laid by filial hands. Writing from that spot, when he was nearly of the same age at which his father died, Mr. Webster said: "I neither left him nor forsook him. My opening an office in Boscawen was, that I might be near him. I closed his eyes in this very house. He died at sixty-seven years of age, after a life of exertion, toil, and exposure: a private soldier, an officer, a legislator, a judge, every thing that a man could be to whom learning never had disclosed her 'ample page." "1

It is not easy to determine whether Mr. Webster's first speech, which he says was made when his father " was on the bench," was made in the Court of Common Pleas, of which his father was a judge, or in the Superior Court of Judicature of which the Honorable Jeremiah Smith was the chief justice. The local tradition in the county of Grafton, at the period of Mr. Webster's death, was that his first cause was a case of some notoriety, that was tried in 1805, at Plymouth in that county, in the Superior Court, and that Judge Smith was on the bench. If this was the case in which his father heard him, Judge Webster must have been invited to take a seat on the bench according to the usual courtesy, but he could not have been present in his official capacity, as he was a member of an inferior court. Nor could his son, in the year 1805, have been entitled to argue a cause to the jury in the Superior Court, since he was not admitted as a counsellor of that court until 1807. On the other hand, there is something more authentic than a tradition, respecting a cause which was tried before Chief-Justice Smith, in what was then the county of Hillsborough, in 1806, and in which Mr. Webster was allowed to take the part of junior counsel; and it was after hearing him in this case that Judge Smith is said to have remarked, on leaving the court-house, that "he had never before met such a young man as that."' Both of these were civil cases. very powerful speech which he

1 Letter to Mr. Blatchford, written from Franklin, May 3, 1846.-(Correspondence, ii., 225.)

My authority for this statement is a letter addressed to one of the literary executors, in 1853, by Mr. Alfred Rus

There is also an account of a made in defence of a person

sell, a gentleman who visited Plymouth at that time, and carefully gathered the tradition of what was there supposed to have been Mr. Webster's first cause.

3 See Morrison's "Life of Chief-Jus tice Smith," pp. 179, 180. Boston, 1845

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