' When I am thus admonished, I have no disposition to
muse or to sleep."
This does not accord with what is usually observed in our churches,
where sermons of the kind which Mr. Webster extolled dispose many
persons to sleep, though not to muse.
In the same unquestioning manner, he imbibed his father's political
prejudices. We hear this young Federalist call the Republican party
"the Jacobins," just as the reactionists and tories of the present day
speak of the present Republican party as "the radicals." It is amusing
to hear him, in 1802, predict the speedy restoration to power of a
party that was never again to taste its sweets. "Jacobinism and
iniquity," he wrote in his twentieth year, "are so allied in
signification, that the latter always follows the former, just as in
grammar 'the accusative case follows the transitive verb.'" He speaks
of a young friend as "too honest for a Democrat." As late as his
twenty-second year, he was wholly unreconciled to Napoleon, and still
wrote with truly English scorn of "Gallic tastes and Gallic
principles." There is a fine burst in one of his letters of 1804, when
he had been propelled by his brother to Boston to finish his law
studies:--
"Jerome, the brother of the Emperor of the Gauls, is here;
every day you may see him whisking along Cornhill, with the
true French air, with his wife by his side.
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