Excerpt from Daniel Webster
IF Daniel Webster had had the good fortune to die on March 6, 1850, the story of his career would have been the despair of biographers. To tell the truth, and at the same time to avoid a lapse into the horrors of grandiloquence, would have been one of the supreme tests of literary skill. But Nature has an unbroken custom of inserting the compensation balance into her work; and thus, in the case of Webster, it came about that he was unkindly kept alive a little too long, whereby he encountered the occasion of the seventh of March, 1850, and made upon that day a speech which is perhaps the most famous in our history, and also surely the most unfortunate. The order of subse quent events shows plainly that there was no rea son for this too long survival upon his part. For his great work had already been done; and neither that speech, nor anything which he did afterward in the brief remainder of his life, much afiected the course of events in the country. It was cruel that the end, which was so near at hand, should yet have sufiered this little postponement.
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