It is easy to compare Mr. Webster with this and the other great orator, and to select points of resemblance and of difference, and show where Mr. Webster was superior and where he fell behind. But the final verdict must be upon all his qualities taken together. He had the most extraordinary physical gifts of face, form, and voice, and employed them to the best advantage. Thus equipped, he delivered a long series of great speeches which can be read to-day with the deepest interest, instruction, and pleasure. He had dignity, grandeur, and force, a strong historic imagination, and great dramatic power when he chose to exert it. He possessed an unerring taste, a capacity for vigorous and telling sarcasm, a glow and fire none the less intense because they were subdued, perfect clearness of statement joined to the highest skill in argument, and he was master of a style which was as forcible as it was simple and pure. Take him for all in all, he was not only the greatest orator this country has ever known, but in the history of eloquence his name will stand with those of Demosthenes and Cicero, of Chatham and Burke. CHAPTER VII. THE STRUGGLE WITH JACKSON AND THE RISE OF THE WHIG PARTY. In the year preceding the delivery of his great speech Mr. Webster had lost his brother Ezekiel by sudden death, and he had married for his second wife Miss Leroy of New York. The former event was a terrible grief to him, and taken in conjunction with the latter seemed to make a complete break with the past, and with its struggles and privations, its joys and successes. The slender girl whom he had married in Salisbury church and the beloved brother were both gone, and with them went those years of youth in which,-- "He had sighed deep, laughed free, Starved, feasted, despaired, been happy." One cannot come to this dividing line in Mr. Webster's life without regret. There was enough of brilliant achievement and substantial success in what had gone before to satisfy any man, and it had been honest, simple, and unaffected. A wider fame and a greater name lay before him, but with them came also ugly scandals, bitter personal attacks, an ambition which warped his nature, and finally a terrible mistake. One feels inclined to say of these later years, with the Roman lover:-- "Shut them in With their triumphs and their glories and the rest, Love is best."