“Not many days ago I saw at breakfast the notablest of all your notabilities, Daniel Webster. He is a magnificent specimen. You might say to all the world, ‘This is our Yankee Englishman; such limbs we make in Yankee-land!’ As a logic-fencer, advocate or parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back him at first sight against the extant world. The tanned complexion, that amorphous crag-like face, the dull black eyes under the precipice of brows [I am sure no one ever called Mr. Webster’s eyes dull before or since], like dull anthracite furnaces only waiting to be _blown_, the mastiff mouth accurately closed—I have not traced so much of _silent Berseker’s rage_ that I remember of in any other man. ‘I guess I should not like to be your nigger.’ Webster is not loquacious, but he is pertinent, conclusive, a dignified, perfectly-bred man, though not English in breeding, a man worthy of the best reception among us, and meeting such, I understand.” In a letter to Mr. Ticknor, John Kenyon indulges in some reminiscences of Mr. Webster, whom he met intimately, having traveled with him and his family party during four days. “Coleridge used to say that he had seldom known or heard of any great man who had not ‘much of the woman in him.’ Even so, that large intellect of Daniel Webster seemed to be coupled with all softer feelings, and his countenance and bearing at the very first impressed me with this. “All men, without having studied either science, are, we all know, more or less phrenologists and physiognomists. Right or wrong, I had found as I thought much sensibility in Webster’s countenance. A few weeks afterwards I had an opportunity of learning that it was not there _only_. We were in a hackney coach, driving along the New Road to Baring’s in the City. It was a longish drive, and we had time to get into a train of talk, also we were by that time what I may presume to call ‘intimate.’ I said, ‘Mr. Webster, you once, I believe, had a brother?’ ’Yes,’ he kindly said, ‘when I see you and your brother together I often think of him,’ and—I speak the fact as it was—I saw, after a little more talk on the subject of his brother, the tears begin to trickle down his cheek till he said to me, ‘I’ll give you an account of my early life,’ and he began with his father, and the farm in New Hampshire, and his own early education, and that of his brother, the details of his courtship and first marriage, and his no property at the time, but of his hopes in his profession and of his success, as he spoke showing much emotion. How could one help loving a man at once so powerful and so tender?” The opinions of those who are themselves eminent are of interest. Let us see, therefore, what Hallam, the historian, says of our subject.