The argument ended [runs the tale], Mr. Webster stood for some moments silent before the Court, while every eye was fixed intently upon him. At length, addressing the Chief Justice, he proceeded thus: "This, sir, is my case. It is the case ... of every college in our land.... Sir, you may destroy this little institution.... You may put it out. But if you do so, you must carry through your work! You must extinguish, one after another, all those greater lights of science, which, for more than a century have thrown their radiance over our land. It is, Sir, as I have said, a small college. And yet there are those who love it--" Here, the feelings which he had thus far succeeded in keeping down, broke forth, his lips quivered; his firm cheeks trembled with emotion, his eyes filled with tears.... The court-room during these two or three minutes presented an extraordinary spectacle. Chief Justice Marshall, with his tall and gaunt figure bent over, as if to catch the slightest whisper, the deep furrows of his cheek expanded with emotion, and his eyes suffused with tears; Mr. Justice Washington at his side, with small and emaciated frame, and countenance more like marble than I ever saw on any other human being.... There was not one among the strong-minded men of that assembly who could think it unmanly to weep, when he saw standing before him the man who had made such an argument, melted into the tenderness of a child. Mr. Webster had now recovered his composure, and, fixing his keen eyes on Chief Justice Marshall, said in that deep tone with which he sometimes thrilled the heart of an audience: "Sir, I know not how others may feel ... but for myself, when I see my Alma Mater surrounded, like Cæsar in the Senate house, by those who are reiterating stab after stab, I would not, for my right hand, have her turn to me and say, Et tu quoque mi fili! And thou, too, my son!" Whether this extraordinary scene, first described thirty-four years afterward by a putative witness of it, ever really occurred or not, it is today impossible to say. ¹ But at least it would be an error to attribute to it great importance. From the same source we have it that at Exeter, too, Webster had made the judges weep--yet they had gone out and decided against him. Judges do not always decide the way they weep! ¹ Professor Goodrich of Yale, who is responsible for the story, communicated it to Rufus Choate in 1853. It next appears on Goodrich's authority in Curtis's Webster, vol. II, pp. 169-71.