they brought in Texas and “reännexed” California and New Mexico. He was exerting all his great talents to do an act of precisely the same character which Messrs. Dix and Niles had done;--that is, to open new territory to slavery. And doubtless the first thought which arose in many a mind was the same melancholy one which spontaneously arose in my own, that should he succeed in arguing down, or laughing down the “_Wilmot_” as he twice scornfully called the great proviso of freedom; and should he then betake himself to penitence and prayer, and by years of effort, strive to stay back from slavery the regions he had doomed to it, he would only have elevated himself to the very “platform” on which Messrs. Dix and Niles stood _when he made them the objects of his taunts and ridicule_! FOOTNOTES: [12] The above criticism on Mr. Webster’s latinity aroused many self-supposed scholars, or at least fair proficients in the Latin grammar, to take up the pen in his defence. But unluckily, the quills they seized were plucked, not from the Roman eagle, but from the wings of some of those “unclean birds,” to which Mr. Webster had introduced them. Among the most conspicuous of these defenders of Mr. Webster’s ludicrous blunder, was Professor Felton, of Harvard College. If any person wishes to see one of the most neat, elegant, and at the same time thorough cases of _deplumation_, any where to be found in literary history, in which an individual who strutted on to the stage as a _peacock_, was soon obliged to leave it as a _daw_, he has only to read Dr. Beck’s articles in “The Literary World,” in which the fabricated quotation of Mr. Webster, and Professor Felton’s defence of it, are shown to be exceedingly bad as Latin, and much worse as logic. [13] Cong. Globe, 1st session 30th Congress, p. 533. [14] Professor Stuart, in a pamphlet entitled “Conscience and the Constitution,” pp. 78, 9, steps in to defend Mr. Webster’s position that we are bound, by contract with Texas, to admit from her territory, “slave states to the number of four;” and he incidentally refers to and combats my views on this subject. I respectfully submit to the revered and learned professor a single consideration, which I trust will convince him that I am not in error.