His speeches have a heat and glow which we can still feel, and a depth and
reality of thought which have secured them a place in literature. He had
not a fiery nature, although there is often so much warmth in what he said.
He was neither high tempered nor quick to anger, but he could be fierce,
and, when adulation had warped him in those later years, he was capable of
striking ugly blows which sometimes wounded friends as well as enemies.
There remains one marked quality to be noticed in Mr. Webster, which was of
immense negative service to him. This was his sense of humor. Mr. Nichol,
in his recent history of American literature, speaks of Mr. Webster as
deficient in this respect. Either the critic himself is deficient in humor
or he has studied only Webster's collected works, which give no indication
of the real humor in the man. That Mr. Webster was not a humorist is
unquestionably true, and although he used a sarcasm which made his
opponents seem absurd and even ridiculous at times, and in his more
unstudied efforts would provoke mirth by some happy and playful allusion,
some felicitous quotation or ingenious antithesis, he was too stately in
every essential respect ever to seek to make mere fun or to excite the
laughter of his hearers by deliberate exertions and with malice
aforethought.
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