He was at this time far from being settled in life. For half a dozen years he had been scrambling along as well as he could, teaching, lecturing, practicing a little law, working his books, writing for the newspapers, securing the passage of copyright laws, trying this city and that with new ventures, none of which gave him a subsistence. Meanwhile, he had met in Philadelphia a Boston lady, whom his diary shows him to have followed with the zeal of his ardent nature; and it is not to be wondered at that he carried his point here, as so often elsewhere, and settled, as he thought at the time, in Hartford, in 1789, with his wife, Rebecca, daughter of Mr. William Greenleaf, of Boston. His brief account of himself at this date was in the summary: "I had an enterprising turn of mind, was bold, vain, and inexperienced." John Trumbull, writing to Oliver Wolcott, announces that "Webster has returned, and brought with him a pretty wife. I wish him success, but I doubt, in the present decay of business in our profession [the law], whether his profits will enable him to keep up the style he sets out with. I fear he will breakfast upon Institutes, dine upon Dissertations, and go to bed supperless." The breakfast was indeed likely to prove the only substantial meal; how substantial it proved we have already noticed. No doubt Webster appeared to his friends, as half to himself, a restless, uneasy man, incapable of steady application to law, and making hazardous ventures in literature in that combined character of author and publisher which the circumstances of the time rendered almost necessary to any one who undertook to make a profession of letters. It is a little significant of Webster's relation to literature that he moved outside of the knot of men known in our literary history as the Hartford wits. So many recent claimants for the position of democratic jester have engaged the public attention that the Hartford wits who amused our grandfathers rest their fame now rather upon tradition than upon any perennial liveliness. By their solitude in the pages of American literature their very title has acquired a certain gravity, and we are apt to regard them with respect rather than to read them for amusement. Fossil wits seem properly to be classed with the formation from which they are dug, and not with living types of the same order. Yet no picture of the times in which Webster lived would be complete without a slight reminiscence of this coterie, and the fact that Webster was the neighbor of these men and himself living by letters suggests a fresh illustration of the truth that kinship in literature is something finer and closer than mere circumstantial neighborliness. Trumbull, Hopkins, Alsop, Dwight, and the minor stars in this twinkling galaxy, were staunch Federalists, and the occasion of their joint efforts was chiefly political, but Webster's Federalism did not give him a place in the set.