evidence, and the allusion to the father's testimony, are the parts which appear to us most fitted for specimens:—

"Gentlemen, this kind of evidence is not satisfactory; general impressions as to time are not to be relied on. If I were called upon to state the particular day on which any witness testified in this cause, I could not do it. Every man will notice the same thing in his own mind. There is no one of these young men that could give any account of himself for any other day in the month of April. They are made to remember the fact, and then they think they remember the time. He has no means of knowing it was Tuesday more than any other time. He did not know it at first, he could not know it afterwards. He says he called himself to an account; this has no more to do with the murder than with the man in the moon. Such testimony is not worthy to be relied

on in any forty shilling cause. self to an account? Did he suppose that he should be suspected? Had he any intimation of this conspiracy?

What occasion had he to call him

"Suppose, gentlemen, you were either of you asked where you were, or what you were doing, on the 15th day of June; you could not answer this question without calling to mind some events to make it certain. Just as well may you remember on what you dined on each day of the year past. Time is identical. Its subdivisions are all alike. No man knows one day from another, or one hour from another, but by some fact connected with it. Days and hours are not visible to the senses, nor to be apprehended and distinguished by the understanding. The flow of time is known only by something which makes it; and he who speaks of the date of occurrences with nothing to guide his recollection, speaks at random, and is not to be relied on.'

"I come to the testimony of the father. I find myself incapable of speaking of him or his testimony with severity. Unfortunate old man? Another Lear, in the conduct of his children; another Lear, I fear, in the effect of his distress upon his mind and understanding. He is brought here to testify, under circumstances that disarm severity, and call loudly for sympathy. Though it is impossible not to see that his story cannot be credited, yet I am not able to speak of him otherwise than in sorrow and grief. Unhappy father! he strives to remember, perhaps persuades himself that he does remember, on the evening of the murder he was himself at home at ten o'clock. He thinks, or seems to think, that his son came in at about five minutes past ten. He fancies that he remembers his conversation; he thinks he spoke of bolting the door;

he thinks he asked the time of night; he seems to remember his then going to his bed. Alas! these are but the swimming fancies of an agitated and distressed mind. Alas! they are but the dreams of hope; its uncertain lights flickering on the thick darkness of parental distress. Alas! the miserable father knows nothing, in reality, of all these things."

Mr. Webster concluded as follows:

"Gentlemen, I have gone through with the evidence in this case, and have endeavoured to state it plainly and fairly before you. I think there are conclusions to be drawn from it, which you cannot doubt. I think you cannot doubt that there was a conspiracy formed for the purpose of committing this murder, and who the conspirators were.

"That you cannot doubt that the Crowninshields and the Knapps were the parties in this conspiracy.

"That you cannot doubt that the prisoner at the bar knew that the murder was to be done on the night of the 6th of April.

"That you cannot doubt that the murderers of Captain White were the suspicious persons seen in and about Brown Street on that night.

"That you cannot doubt that Richard Crowninshield was the perpetrator of that crime.

"That you cannot doubt that the prisoner at the bar was in Brown Street on that night.

"If there, then it must be by agreement, to countenance, to aid the perpetrator. And if so, then he is guilty as Principal.

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Gentlemen, your whole concern should be to do your duty, and leave consequences to take care of themselves. You will receive the law from the Court. Your verdict, it is true, may endanger the prisoner's life; but then it is to save other lives. If the prisoner's guilt has been shown and proved, beyond all reasonable doubt, you will convict him. If such reasonable doubts of guilt still remain, you will acquit him. You are the judges of the whole case. You owe a duty to the public as well as to the prisoner at the bar. You cannot presume to be wiser than the law. Your duty is a plain, straight-forward one. Doubtless we would all judge him in merey. Towards him, as an individual, the law inculcates no hostility; but towards him, if proved to be a murderer, the law, and the oaths you have taken, and public justice, demand that you do your duty.

"With consciences satisfied with the discharge of duty, no con

sequences can harm you. There is no evil that we cannot either face or fly from, but the consciousness of duty disregarded...

"A sense of duty pursues us ever. It is omnipresent like the Deity. If we take to ourselves the wings of the morning, and dwell in the utmost parts of the seas, duty performed, or duty violated, is still with us, for our happiness or our misery. If we say the darkness shall cover us, in the darkness as in the light, our obligations are yet with us. We cannot escape their power, nor fly from their presence. They are with us in this life, will be with us at its close; and in that scene of inconceivable solemnity which lies yet further onward, we shall still find ourselves surrounded by the consciousness of duty, to pain us wherever it has been violated, and to console us so far as God may have given us grace to perform it."

We should be doing Mr. Webster's oratorical reputation great injustice, were we to leave it resting on extracts from a single speech on circumstantial evidence; yet this is the only speech of a strictly forensic character in the volume that affords any evidence of the characteristic qualities of his mind, the other forensic arguments being exclusively occu pied by dry matters of law. We must, therefore, resort to a fiction till very lately in full operation in our courts: having brought Mr. Webster within our jurisdiction as a lawyer, we shall proceed to try him in his public or political capacity, for which the most ample materials are fortunately afforded us. Nor in doing this shall we be digressing very widely from the proper object of our work; for some of the passages we have it in contemplation to quote, relate to legal topics which we have had frequent occasion to discuss. The first speech in the collection, entitled "A Discourse delivered at Plymouth, in commemoration of the First Settlement of New England," reviews the origin, rise, and existing circumstances. of the colony. He begins by vindicating from the imputation of fancifulness the associations excited by the genius of the place the rock on which the first settlers landed, and then proceeds to the following a happy parallel between civil and military achievements.

"Of the ten thousand battles which have been fought; of all the fields fertilized with carnage; of the banners which have been bathed in blood; of the warriors who have hoped that they had

risen from the field of conquest to a glory as bright and as durable as the stars, how few that continue long to interest mankind! The victory of yesterday is reversed by the defeat of to-day; the star of military glory, rising like a meteor, like a meteor has fallen; disgrace and disaster hang upon the heels of conquest and renown; victor and vanquished presently pass away to oblivion, and the world goes on in its course, with the loss only of so many lives and so much treasure.

"But if this be frequently, or generally, the fortune of military achievements, it is not always so. There are enterprises, military as well as civil, which sometimes check the current of events, give a new turn to human affairs, and transmit their consequences through ages. We see their importance in their results, and call them great, because great things follow. There have been battles which have fixed the fate of nations. These come down to us in history with a solid and permanent interest, not created by a display of glittering armor, the rush of adverse battalions, the sinking and rising of pennons, the flight, the pursuit, and the victory; but by their effect in advancing or retarding human knowledge, in overthrowing or establishing despotism, in extending or destroying human happiness. When the traveller pauses on the plain of Marathon, what are the emotions which most strongly agitate his breast? What is that glorious recollection which thrills through his frame, and suffuses his eyes?-Not, I imagine, that Grecian skill and Grecian valor were here most signally displayed; but that Greece herself was here saved. It is, because to this spot, and to the event which has rendered it immortal, he refers all the succeeding glories of the republic. It is because if that day had gone otherwise, Greece had perished. It is because he perceives that her philosophers and orators, her poets and painters, her sculptors and architects, her governments and free institutions, point backward to Marathon, and that their future existence seems to have been suspended on the contingency, whether the Persian or the Grecian banner should wave victorious in the beams of that day's setting sun. And as his imagination kindles at the retrospect, he is transported back to the interesting moment, he counts the fearful odds of the contending hosts, his interest for the result overwhelms him; he trembles, as if it were still uncertain, and seems to doubt whether he may consider Socrates and Plato, Demostheness, Sophocles and Phidias, as secure, yet, to himself and to the world.

If we conquer,' said the Athenian commander on the morning of that decisive day, If we conquer, we shall make Athens the greatest city of Greece.' A prophecy, how well fulfilled!

If

God prosper us,' might have been the more appropriate language of our Fathers, when they landed upon this Rock;- if God prosper us, we shall here begin a work which shall last for ages; we shall plant here a new society, in the principles of the fullest liberty, and the purest religion: we shall subdue this wilderness which is before us; we shall fill this region of the great continent, which stretches almost from pole to pole, with civilisation and Christianity; the temples of the true God shall rise, where now ascends the smoke of idolatrous sacrifice; fields and gardens, the flowers of summer, and the waving and golden harvest of autumn, shall extend over a thousand hills and stretch along a thousand vallies, never yet, since the creation, reclaimed to the use of civilized man. We shall whiten this coast with the canvass of a prosperous commerce: we shall stud the long and winding shore with a hundred cities. That which we sow in weakness shall be raised in strength. From our sincere but houseless worship, there shall spring splendid temples to record God's goodness; from the simplicity of our social union, there shall arise wise and politic constitutions and government, full of the liberty which we ourselves bring and breathe; from our zeal for learning, institutions shall spring which shall scatter the light of knowledge throughout the land, and, in time, paying back where they have borrowed, shall contribute their part to the great aggregate of human knowledge; and our descendants, through all generations, shall look back to this spot, and to this hour, with unabated affection and regard.'

It has long been deemed a good joke against the Americans, taken indiscriminately, to suppose their country was colonised, like New South Wales, by that class of persons so humorously described by Barrington, who was one of them:

"True patriots we, for be it understood,

We left our country for our country's good:"

And when, amongst other grounds of complaint against the English army for burning Washington, it was urged that the records of the colony had been destroyed, the Courier newspaper replied, that this part of the mischief might be easily repaired by presenting Congress with a complete copy of the Newgate Calendar. The prejudice, we trust, has long died away which gave this sort of imputation its currency, and both English and Americans will recognise Mr. Webster's description as not merely eloquent but true: