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. He had, nevertheless, a real and genuine sense of humor. We can see it in his letters, and it comes out in a thousand ways in the details and incidents of his private life. When he had thrown aside the cares of professional or public business, he revelled in hearty, boisterous fun, and he had that sanest of qualities, an honest, boyish love of pure nonsense. He delighted in a good story and dearly loved a joke, although no jester himself. This sense of humor and appreciation of the ridiculous, although they give no color to his published works, where, indeed, they would have been out of place, improved his judgment, smoothed his path through the world, and saved him from those blunders in taste and those follies in action which are ever the pitfalls for men with the fervid, oratorical temperament. This sense of humor gave, also, a great charm to his conversation and to all social intercourse with him. He was a good, but never, so far as can be judged from tradition, an overbearing talker. He never appears to have crushed opposition in conversation, nor to have indulged in monologue, which is so apt to be the foible of famous and successful men who have a solemn sense of their own dignity and importance. What Lord Melbourne said of the great Whig historian, "that he wished he was as sure of anything as Tom Macaulay was of everything," could not be applied to Mr. Webster. He owed his freedom from such a weakness partly, no doubt, to his natural indolence, but still more to the fact that he was not only no pedant, but not even a very learned man. He knew no Greek, but was familiar with Latin. His quotations and allusions were chiefly drawn from Shakespeare, Milton, Homer, and the Bible, where he found what most appealed to him--simplicity and grandeur of thought and diction. At the same time, he was a great reader, and possessed wide information on a vast variety of subjects, which a clear and retentive memory put always at his command. The result of all this was that he was a most charming and entertaining companion.