With Mr. Emerson’s indignation at Webster’s fall was mingled great sorrow. From his youth he had admired and revered him. The verses about him printed in the Appendix to the _Poems_ show the change of feeling. He used to quote Browning’s “Lost Leader” as applying to him, and admired Whittier’s fine poem “Ichabod” (“The glory is departed,” I. Samuel, iv., 21, 22) on his apostasy. Mr. Emerson’s faithfulness to his sense of duty, leading him, against his native instincts, into the turmoil of politics, striving to undo the mischief that a leader once revered had wrought in the minds of Americans, is shown in the extract from his journal with regard to this lecture:— “At New York Tabernacle, on the 7th March, I saw the great audience with dismay, and told the bragging secretary that I was most thankful to those that staid at home; every auditor was a new affliction, and if all had staid away, by rain or preoccupation, I had been best pleased.” [135] _Page 217, note 1._ In _Lectures and Biographical Sketches_, in the essay on Aristocracy, and also in that on The Man of Letters, the duty of loyalty to his thought and his order is urged as a trait of the gentleman and the scholar, and in the latter essay, the scholar’s duty to stand for what is generous and free. [136] _Page 219, note 1._ Mr. Emerson in his early youth did come near slavery for a short time. His diary at St. Augustine, quoted by Mr. Cabot in his Memoir, mentions that, while he was attending a meeting of the Bible Society, a slave-auction was going on outside, but it does not appear that he actually saw it. [137] _Page 221, note 1._ Carlyle described Webster as “a magnificent specimen.... As a Logic-fencer, Advocate, or Parliamentary Hercules, one would incline to back him at first sight against all the extant world. The tanned complexion, that amorphous, crag-like face, the dull black eyes under their precipice of brows, like dull anthracite furnaces needing only to be blown, the mastiff-mouth, accurately closed:—I have not traced as much of _silent Berserkir-rage_, that I remember of, in any other man.”[D] [138] _Page 225, note 1._ Mr. James S. Gibbons (of the _New York Tribune_) in a letter written to his son two days after this speech was delivered, says, referring evidently to this passage:— “Emerson gave us a fine lecture on Webster. He made him stand before us in the proportions of a giant; and then with one word crushed him to powder.” [139] _Page 226, note 1._ Professor John H. Wright of Harvard University has kindly furnished me with the passage from Dio Cassius, xlvii. 49, where it is said of Brutus:— Καὶ ἀναβοήσας τοῦτο δὴ Ἡράκλειον ὦ τλῆμον ἀρετή, λόγος ἄρ’ ἦσθ’, ἐγὼ δέ σε ὡς ἔργον ἤσκουν· σὺ δ’ ἄρ’ ἐδούλευες τύχῃ,— παρακάλεσέ τινα τῶν συνόντων, ἵν’ αὐτὸν ἀποκτείνῃ,—