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The Green Bag
at the throne and said, “Create him, Father, for I will be with him in all his wanderings and amid all his tempta
tions, and by the experience of his own errors will lead him back to Thee.” There was also something very tender and productive of tears in the few simple words with which he sketched
many of the most serious faults of his oratory. He could never attempt the ornate without overlaying his argument
with those faults of taste which caused a contemporary writer in an English periodical to refer to his great speech in the Knapp trial as being overdone. The
the “awful agony that would beat in
most effective oratorical passage comes like the lightning stroke, rapid, dazzling,
some hearts” during the jury's absence from the room, while his proud remem brance that the prisoner was “some
terrific; clearing the atmosphere, as it were, in one stroke, yet giving no hint of whence it came and leaving no trace
thing better than the common clay" and that it was “the blood of a Ken tuckian” that they “were called upon to shed," were direct appeals to that
eloquence, needless to say, is that which gives to its studied phrases the appear
pride in their state, which he, Clay, Marshall and the other orators of Ken tucky, had instilled into the people of that state, in the many exciting political battles of the past. It was Marshall who said that no great orator of whom he knew suffered
of whither it went.
The best oratorical
ance of extemporaneous inspiration, a difiicult task and one which Webster's phlegmatic disposition rendered pecu liarly difficult to him. He never warmed up enough on ordinary occasions to im part to his speeches the warmth, glow and spontaneity of his reply to Hayne,
so much from being reported into more
and some of his attempts to be grand resulted in a sort of elephantine flounder
words as Crittenden. To his oratory, the grand presence, the slight and per fect modulations of his voice, and the
speech in the Knapp trial reveals its faults perhaps more glaringly to the
expression of the “mobile and eloquent muscles of his face" were an accom
reader than to those who heard the speech itself. That oft lauded apos
paniment of infinite charm and effect.
trophe to duty is unworthy of Webster and yet is singularly Websterian. These heavy, turgid pictures of moral abstrac tions are not in place on an occasion of the kind on which he attempted their
Yet the beautiful philosophy of his plea for mercy, clothed as it is in language of almost unrivaled sweetness, purity
ing in the mazes of rhetoric.
This
and simplicity, is among the finest gems of American oratory. Crittenden's ora
use.
tory was, as a rule, free from afiectation
that the speech is all in this style,
and the ambitious fineries of rhetoric,
for, as a matter of fact, it is in many respects marvelous. Webster was always
and in this respect he stands out in delightful contrast to most of the great orators of his time. The great fault of
those orators was, that they were in clined to overdo, while Crittenden fol lowed those masters of language who
convey their most powerful impressions by suggestion. Had Daniel Webster understood this simple truth he might have eradicated
It must not, however, be thought
happier in the grouping of facts and arraying of arguments than in his attempts at the ornate and grand. By some few admirers, more enthusias tic than discriminating, he has been hailed
as the equal of Edmund Burke, a criti cism which has evoked many a smile. Some competent critics, however, have
contended that he was never the jury
