April, 1817. Mr. Webster had been elected to Congress from Portsmouth, New Hampshire, in 1813, and his term expired in March, 1816. In August of that year (1816) he removed his family to Boston, and decided to devote himself exclusively to the profession of the law. He had won a high position both in law and politics in New Hampshire. The change of residence marks an era in the life of Mr. Webster. Mr. Lodge says that there is a tradition that the worthies of the Puritan city were disposed at first to treat the newcomer somewhat cavalierly, but that they soon learned that it was worse than useless to attempt such a course with a man whose magnificent physical and intellectual bearing won the admiration of all who met him. He now began a career of great professional distinction, and took a place at the Boston bar even more conspicuous than his friends had anticipated--that of an equal of the most famous of its members. His cases called him before the Massachusetts Supreme Court, the Circuit Court of the United States, and the United States Supreme Court. Among the first cases which came to him on his retirement from political life was the Goodridge Robbery Case, the argument in which was addressed to the jury at the term of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts held at Ipswich in April, 1817. The singularly dramatic story of the prosecutor, the almost universal belief in the guilt of the accused, both by the public and by the members of the Essex bar, and the impossibility of accounting for the motive (self-robbery) assumed by the defence, make this exhibition of Mr. Webster's "acute, penetrating, and terrifying" power of cross-examination,--by which such a complicated and ingenious story was unravelled,--one of the most memorable in the history of the