I shall not undertake to define or describe a proceeding like this in words of my own. But I may be permitted, without discourtesy, to use a sentiment advanced by himself, and leave its application to be made by its author. It is in the same connection that Mr. Webster makes the following remark: “I know no passion more appropriate to devils than the passion for gross misrepresentation and libel.” Can any mortal specify a grosser instance of “gross misrepresentation and libel” than when one of the parties to a public discussion has uttered an obnoxious sentiment, and when this sentiment has met with very general reprobation, and when, in the progress of the discussion, the guilty party professes to restate the case, that he should then expunge the false sentiment he originally advanced, foist a trite and common-place one in its stead, then apply the criticism made on the suppressed sentiment to the forged one, and proceed to condemn his critic for “nonsense” or “dishonesty”? Is it not as palpable a case of alteration, as to change the date of a note of hand in order to take it out of the statute of limitations, or to obliterate the description of the premises in a deed, and put a more valuable estate in its place? This proceeding is worse, if possible, than the former “misrepresentation and libel” of my argument and myself, contained in the Newburyport letter. But the subject is painful, and I leave it. 2. Following up his attack upon me, Mr. Webster proceeds to say: “In classical times, there was a set of small but rapacious critics, denominated _captatores verborum_, who snatched and caught at particular expressions; expended their strength on the _disjecta membra_ of language; birds of rapine which preyed on words and syllables, and gorged themselves with feeding on the garbage of phrases, chopped, dislocated, and torn asunder by themselves, as flesh and limbs are by the claws of unclean birds.” May I most respectfully ask Mr. Webster on what authority he says there was, “in classical times,” any such “set” of “small but rapacious critics,” as he here speaks of--or exemplifies? In my ignorance, I have always supposed the “_captator_” of classical times, to be a kind of “genius” the very opposite of what Mr. Webster describes. Horace, Juvenal, and Livy represent him as a selfish, sycophantic gift-seeker, or fortune-hunter; not a twister, torturer, or interpolator, even, of words and phrases. If _captator_ meant a cavilling, cynical critic, then _captatrix_ should mean a scold, a vixen, or virago; but its true meaning was “a fawning gossip,” or “mean flatterer.”