“Pay ransom to the owner And fill the bag to the brim. Who is the owner? The slave is owner, And ever was. Pay _him_!”
And Mr. Cabot chronicles the fact that the _gran’ rifiuto_--the great backsliding of Mr. Webster when he cast his vote in Congress for the Fugitive Slave Law of 1850--was the one thing that ever moved him to heated denunciation. He felt Webster’s apostasy as strongly as he had admired his genius. “Who has not helped to praise him? Simply he was the one American of our time whom we could produce as a finished work of nature.” There is a passage in his journal (not a rough jotting, but, like most of the entries in it, a finished piece of writing), which is admirably descriptive of the wonderful orator and is moreover one of the very few portraits, or even personal sketches, yielded by Mr. Cabot’s selections. It shows that he could observe the human figure and “render” it to good purpose.
“His splendid wrath, when his eyes become fire, is good to see, so intellectual it is--the wrath of the fact and the cause he espouses, and not at all personal to himself.... These village parties must be dish-water to him, yet he shows himself just good-natured, just nonchalant enough; and he has his own way, without offending any one or losing any ground.... His expensiveness seems necessary to him; were he too prudent a Yankee it would be a sad deduction from his magnificence. I only wish he would not truckle [to the slave-holders]. I do not care how much he spends.”