THE SPEECHES OF DANIEL WEBSTER.* IF the "Battle of the

Books" should ever be waged again, it is obvious that the 'Moderns' will fight, and will always continue to fight, at an advantage. Their army is continually receiving reinforcements, but the muster-roll of their antagonist can only be increased by some lucky discovery, of which the most sanguine scholars are now beginning to despair. For we reckon as " Moderns " all who have written or shall write since the birth of Dante, and as 'Ancients' all who wrote before the death of Plutarch. Even in the present century, "great bards" have died whose writings alone might almost weigh against the sum of the productions of the Latin Muse. And since the days of Boyle and Bentley the ranks of modern historians have been strengthened by such stalwart soldiers, to name no others, as Gibbon, Prescott, and Mommsen. It may be long, indeed, before Plato and Aristotle are thrust from the pride of place which they still unquestionably hold, except in the opinions of those who never read them. There is, however, one department of literature where the" Ancients " seem likely to retain their supremacy, and whence, in Henry Coleridge's noble words, "we may even now hear them challenging posterity in charmed accents, and daunt- ing our rivalry with armour of celestial temper." That depart- ment is oratory. The results of printing and a host of other agencies are at work, which make it more and more improbable that the marvels of ancient oratory will ever be repeated. Great speeches, speeches of surpassing energy aful eloquence, we may look for, and not in vain. That in a Burke, a Mirabeau, a Bright, or a Gladstone, there lay, to use a homely word, the makings of a Demosthenes or a Cicero, is undeniable ; but it is hardly con- ceivable that an occasion should arise which will produce a speech that deserves to be named in the same day with the immortal De Corond. Thoughts that breathe and words that burn may flow in torrents from the lips of those born orators of whom no age is so poor, that it cannot boast one specimen.

But we must resign ourselves to look in vain for the marvellous harmonies, the exquisite finish, and the consummate polish which mark the best efforts of Greek and Roman oratory.

Most assuredly no such excellent things as these are to be found in the volume before us, and this we say in no disparage- ment of Daniel Webster. We feel bound, however, to say of the gentleman who has made this selection of the best speeches and orations of the great American orator, that we have found him very tiresome. He tells, in our opinion, the things that he ought not to tell, and he leaves untold the things that he ought to have told. But we must, perforce, be very brief with Mr.

• The Great Speeches and Orations of Daniel Webster. With an Essay, &e., by E. P. Whipple. London: Sampson Low, Marston Searle, and MTh:iron. 1879.

Whipple. To those who would disable our judgment for considering him, we would commend the ponderous pages in which, with a prolixity that deserves the epithet which Falstaff applies to " iteration," he gives us what he says "may be called the natural history of metaphor, comparison, image, trope, and the like." We may notice, too, the following astounding misprint, which, whether it occurs in Everett or no, alike classes Mr. Whipple as an editor. There are mis- prints and misprints, of course, but the reader can judge for himself whether our verdict is too severe. We give the con- text :—

"Christianity and civilisation have laboured together ; it seems, indeed, to be a law of our human condition that they can live and flourish only together. From their blended influence has arisen that delightful spectacle of the prevalence of reason and principle over power and interest, so well described by one who was an honour tc• the age :— ' And sovereign law, the State's collected will, O'er thrones and g'obes elate,

Sits empress,--orowning good, repressing iii: Smit by her sacred frown

The fiend, Discretion, like a vapor, sinks, And e'en the ell-dazzling Crown

Hides his faint rays, and at her bidding shrinks.' "

Sir William Jones wrote " Oppression," and not "Discretion," and however amusing it might be to guess at the genesis of this blunder, if Mr. Whipple were one of ourselves, we must retain our conviction that the incuriosa infelicitas of this de- scription classes a man as an editor.

Of Webster himself we think highly, but not so highly as Mr. Whipple does. An orator's triumphs, in one sense, are more ephemeral than an actor's, and much of Webster's best oratory is on a subject that has lost all interest. The War of Secession was a great evil,—a very great evil indeed. But it was emphatically a necessary evil. Before that war, the Northern and Southern States were united by a Gordian knot which nothing could break but the sword. But this plague-spot was filmed and skinned, to Webster's eye. He knew that the Union was indispensable to the future greatness of America. He was determined, heart and soul, to limit the area of slavery. He did' not prophesy, he proved by arguments of irresistible cogency ; that secession meant and must mean revolution ; and that revolution, in such a case, meant and must mean a bloody war„ of terrible, if not uncertain, issues. But he failed to see that thero was no alternative possible between such a war and unopposed secession. So far as the growth of America was concerned, the Southern States were practically a corpse linked to a living body. Destiny, as cruel as Mezentius,— " Mortua jungebat corpora vivis,

Componens tnanibusque manus, atque oribus ore."

But this, we repeat, Webster failed to see. He feared, and de- tested, and. deplored the existence of slavery. But after all, it was in the bond. It was part and parcel of the Constitution that was his fetish. Hence it comes that his magnificent and logically incontrovertible orations against Southern policy, as em- bodied in the views of 'Jayne and Calhoun, have lost so much of their interest. We quote the following passage, from one of those great speeches, because it touches upon a point that is still within the range of practical politics :—

" The Constitutional authorities of the United States are no longer- a Government, if they be not masters of their own will ; they are no longer a government, if an external power may arrest their proceed- jugs; they are no longer a Government, if Acts passed by both Houses, and approved by the President., may be nullified by State vetoes or State ordinances. Does any one suppose that it could make any difference as to the binding authority of an Act of Congress, and of the duty of a State to respect it, whether it passed by a mere majority of both Houses, or by three.fourths of each, or the unanimous vote of each. Within the limits and restrictions of the Constitution, the Government of the United States, like all other popular governments, acts by majorities. It can net no otherwise. Whoever, therefore, denounces the government of majorities, de- nounces the government of his own country, and denounces all free Governments. And whoever would restrain these majorities, while acting within their constitutional limits, by an external power, whatever he may intend, asserts principles which, if adopted, can lead to nothing else than the destruction of the Government itself."

Of Webster's oratory, on the whole, we should say that it reminds us of Carlyle's description of Mira.beau's oratory. It is singularly free from what we are forced to consider the besetting sins of Irish oratory. Nothing could be more shallow or unjust than to charge it, as one of our contemporaries has done, with " spread-eagleism." In every line we trace evidence of conviction wishing to convince, and of that sincerity and patriotism, that love of truth and love of country which are the wings of political oratory. We think, also, that nothing can be more unfair or absurd than to sneer at Bunker Hill and New Orleans. In the latter engagement, the defeated English were veterans from the army which Wellington said could go anywhere and do anything; and if they were grievously mismanaged, as no doubt they were, they were not more grievously mismanaged than the French cavalry were at Waterloo. The Americans regard Bunker Hill as their Marathon, and they are right in doing so. We are sorry that we have no space for Webster's eloquent and perfectly fair description of that celebrated combat and its consequences, but we cannot refrain from saying that it is something worse than bad-taste for Englishmen to depreciate such a fight, especially in a generation which applauded the Turkish successes at Plevna to the echo, and which has hailed with satisfaction the battle, or to call it by its proper name, the battue, of Ulundi.

It does not lie within the scope of a notice like the present to discuss the claims of Webster "as a master of English style." We should strongly dissent from Mr. Whipple's estimate, which would bracket him with Burke. It seems to us that, so far as style is concerned, IV ebster stands about half-way between Bright and Gladstone, and the enormously disproportionate success which the latter's oratory obtains over his writings may go far to prove the truth of Fox's paradox, that a speech which reads well must be a bad speech. Webster's one great fault is verbiage. Not, indeed, in the structure of his sen- tences, in which he is always clear and simple. But an example will show much better than any words of our own what we mean :—" I know, Sir, that all the portents are discouraging. Would to God I could auspicate good influences ! Would to God that those who think with me and myself could hope for stronger support ! Would that we could stand where we desire to stand ! I see the signs are sinister. But with few, or alone, my position is fixed. If there were time, I would gladly awaken the country. I believe the country might be awakened, although it may be too late. For myself, supported or unsupported, by the blessing of God, I shall do my duty. I see well enough all the hostile indications. But I am sustained by a deep and con- scientious sense of duty, and while supported by that feeling, and while such great interests are at stake, I defy augury, and ask no omen but my country's cause." When we contrast this amplification of Homer's noble line with the line itself, we feel how much there is to be said in favour of Quintilian's opinion that the prince of poets was the prince of orators. But we do not like to part froin one so deserving of admiration and respect as Webster, with a quotation like the above. 'There is a speech of his in this volume, touching the result of which Mr. Whipple, characteristically and provokingly leaves us ignorant, on the Girand will case. The subject- matter of that speech forms one of the burning questions of the day, for it deals with the intimate connection of the Christian ministry with the business of instruction, and the necessity of founding education on a religious basis. Of course, the topic which the orator handles in the following passage is trite, but then the most important, and perhaps the only im- portant, things of this world are precisely those that are trite ; and it is always a matter of novel interest to learn how spirits of a higher order of intellect, like Webster, regard those trite topics :—

"When an intellectual being finds himself on this earth, as soon as the faculties of reason operate, one of the first inquiries of his mind is,—' Shall I be here for ever ? Shall I live here for ever ?' And reasoning from what he SCO3 daily occurring to others, he learns to a certainty that his state of being must one day be changed. I do not mean to say that it may be true that he is created with this con- sciousness, but whether it be consciousness of the result of his reasoning faculties, man soon learns that he must die. And of all sentient beings, he alone, so far as we can judge, attains to this know- ledge. His Maker has made him capable of learning this. Before he knows his origin and destiny, he knows that he has to die. Then comes that most urgent and solemn demand for light that ever pro- ceeded, or can proceed, from the profound and anxious broodings of the human soul. And that question, nothing but God, and the religion of God, can solve. Religion does solve it, and teaches that every man that lives is to live again, and that the duties of this life have reference to the life which is to come. And hence, since the intro- duction of Christianity, it has been the duty, as it has been the effort, of the great and good, to sanctify human knowledge, to bring it to the front, and to baptise learning into Christianity; to gather up all its productions, its earliest and its latest, its blossoms and its fruits, and lay them all upon the altar of religion and virtue."