The ease with which Webster walked about the Jericho of English lexicography, blowing his trumpet of destruction, was an American ease, born of a sense that America was a continent and not a province. He transferred the capital of literature from London to Boston, or New York, or Hartford,--he was indifferent so long as it was in the United States. He thought Washington as good an authority on spelling as Dr. Johnson, and much better than King George. He took the Bible as a book to be used, not as a piece of antiquity to be sheltered in a museum, and with an American practicality set about making it more serviceable in his own way. He foresaw the vast crowds of American children; he knew that the integrity of the country was conditioned on the intelligibility of their votes, and he turned his back on England less with indifference to her than with an absorption in his own country. He made a Speller which has sown votes and muskets; he made alone a Dictionary, which has grown, under the impulse he gave it, into a national encyclopædia, possessing an irresistible momentum. Indeed, is not the very existence of that book in its current form a witness to the same Americanism which Webster displayed, only now in a firmer, finer, and more complex form? In the high walks of scholarship, where nationality would seem to be effaced, we have had very recently a capital illustration of the inevitable tendency of national traits to seek expression. The Appendix to the "Revised Version of the New Testament" contains the variations proposed by the American company from the text as otherwise determined. There were in the English company men of radical temperament and of conservative; there were in the American company like distinctions; nevertheless the final separation between the two companies is largely on this line, and one can easily see how much sympathy, Webster, for example, would have expressed with the position which the American company took, a position not of dissent but of independent assertion. The separation between England and America which was so effectual in Webster's conception, and thus determined much of his thought, was really incipient and not complete. The two countries are more widely separate to-day than they were then, while the outward signs of separation are in many ways less conspicuous. The forces of national life have been diverging, and the resultant in character and literature is more sure and ineffaceable.