One of the most stinging and dramatic events that ever occurred in the Senate-chamber, as a distinguished Senator from Maine has told the writer, was the manner in which Webster turned upon his opponents the taunt of Hayne, that the ghost of the murdered coalition, like Banquo’s, would not down at their bidding, and had brought up him and his friends to defend themselves. Webster replied that it was not the friends but the enemies of the murdered Banquo, at whose bidding the spirit would not down. The ghost of Banquo, like that of Hamlet, was an honest ghost; then turning on and pointing to Calhoun, who, as Vice-President in Jackson’s first administration, was presiding over the Senate, and whose reputed ambition to succeed as President had signally failed, he asked: “Those who murdered Banquo, what did they win by it? Substantial good? Permanent power? Or disappointment rather, and sore mortification;--dust and ashes--the common fate of vaulting ambition overleaping itself?... Did they not soon find that for another they had ‘filed their mind,’ that their ambition had put “‘A barren sceptre in their gripe, Thence to be wrenched by an unlineal hand-- No son of theirs succeeding.’” Calhoun showed his emotion and moved in his chair. In a speech made three years afterwards, when a Senator, he denied that he had aspired after the presidency. Webster defended at great length, and successfully, the policy of the East as to the public lands, internal improvements, and the tariff. He showed that Calhoun himself was originally in favor of internal improvements, and that he voted for tariffs; that in 1816 a protective tariff (denounced as such) was supported by South Carolina votes and was opposed by Massachusetts; that under the tariffs of 1816, 1824, 1828, which were protective tariffs and had become the policy of the country, Massachusetts became interested in manufacturing; so he, Mr. Webster, in 1828 supported a protective tariff, though in 1816 and 1824 he had opposed it. As to Hayne’s “carrying the war into the enemy’s country by attacking Massachusetts,” Webster asks: “Has he disproved a fact, refuted a proposition, weakened an argument, maintained by me?” And “what sort of a war has he made of it? Why, sir, he has stretched a drag net over the whole surface of perished pamphlets, indiscreet sermons, frothy paragraphs, and fuming popular addresses; over whatever the pulpit in its moments of alarm, the press in its heats, and parties in their extravagance, have severally thrown off in times of general excitement and violence.” Webster, declining to separate these accusations and answer them, asks: “But what had this to do with the controversy on hand; why should New England be abused for holding opinions as dangerous to the Union as those which he now holds? Why does he find no fault with those opinions recently promulgated in South Carolina?”