Dr. Belknap's reply to this letter is the last reference to the project which has any interest: "The Monarch called upon me last Monday evening, when I was abroad, and left word that he should come again next day at noon, upon business. The real business was to fish out what I had heard from you. I had then received only your short letter, and told him that I had heard nothing. He talked about the magazine, and about my being a partner, and about the business of an editor, and about his being a lawyer (which, by the way, was new to me), and about the value of a share, which, as he then estimated it, would be from £50 to £100 per annum, etc., etc., but expected to hear from you and the proprietors more particularly by the next post, and then we were to have a farther conference. The next post brought me your long letter, and he has not made his appearance since. I suppose, by what you say in confidence to me, that he finds he cannot be director general, and possibly suspects that he may have very little to do. I find myself under some embarrassment with regard to this personage. However, as he is going to marry into a family with some branches of which I have long had a very agreeable connection, I must suffer myself to be in a degree of acquaintance with him, especially if (as he threatens) he should make this place [Boston] his future residence. If I cannot esteem him as a friend, I do not wish to make him an enemy, and I am very awkward in the art of Chesterfield. Hence arises my embarrassment. What he has told Thomas I know not, but I must do him the justice to say that he did not tell me the names of any of the proprietors, excepting yourself and himself; nor do I know who the others are."
Hazard's papers were finally published by themselves, and the Magazine and Register never got beyond the proposals point. Before the collection was published, however, another magazine loomed up, for the regular failure of each venture never seemed to dampen the ardor of magazine projectors. The story of the enterprise sketched in these letters may be taken as the story of all,—sanguine literary men and inert subscribers; a class of material is reckoned upon which always seems abundant, vastly interesting to the persons who hold it, but insufficient to beguile subscribers. Mr. Hazard, with his collection of papers, expects five hundred pounds, and his associates think him not unreasonable, especially after he agrees to pay one fourth himself; and with all his prudence and shrewdness he begins to count on the profits of the magazine with something of Webster's facile hope.
Webster himself, in spite of the dislike with which Hazard and Belknap agreed to regard him, appears in an honorable light. No doubt he was consequential and eager to have a hand in what was going on, but he had the confidence and courage which seem to have been lacking in his associates. His impulsive dashes at literature and capricious excursions into the realms of language were offensive to highly conservative and orderly scholars like these correspondents, and they sniffed at him rather contemptuously; but Webster could disregard the criticism of others when he had such unbounded self-reliance and zeal. He did not count the cost carefully of what he undertook, but allowed himself the luxury of seizing at once upon what engaged his interest. The publication of "Winthrop's Journal," referred to in the correspondence, was an undertaking which a more scholarly man might have set about with greater care and deliberation. Webster never read the original. He saw a copy from it in the possession of Governor Trumbull, and, perceiving the value of the material, made haste to get it published. He employed a secretary of the governor, who made a copy of the copy, comparing it with the original, which Webster had never seen. Mr. Savage, the learned editor of the Journal in its complete form, sarcastically says: "The celebrated philologist, who in his English Dictionary triumphed over the difficulties of derivation in our etymology from Danish, Russian, Irish, Welsh, German, high or low, Sanscrit, Persian, or Chaldee fountains, might, after exhausting his patience, have reputably shrunk from encounter with the manuscript of Winthrop." But it was something for Webster to have succeeded in securing a publication of the book in 1790, and the credit due him is not lessened by the fact that he risked his whole property in the enterprise, and lost money.
He was at this time far from being settled in life. For half a dozen years he had been scrambling along as well as he could, teaching, lecturing, practicing a little law, working his books, writing for the newspapers, securing the passage of copyright laws, trying this city and that with new ventures, none of which gave him a subsistence. Meanwhile, he had met in Philadelphia a Boston lady, whom his diary shows him to have followed with the zeal of his ardent nature; and it is not to be wondered at that he carried his point here, as so often elsewhere, and settled, as he thought at the time, in Hartford, in 1789, with his wife, Rebecca, daughter of Mr. William Greenleaf, of Boston. His brief account of himself at this date was in the summary: "I had an enterprising turn of mind, was bold, vain, and inexperienced." John Trumbull, writing to Oliver Wolcott, announces that "Webster has returned, and brought with him a pretty wife. I wish him success, but I doubt, in the present decay of business in our profession [the law], whether his profits will enable him to keep up the style he sets out with. I fear he will breakfast upon Institutes, dine upon Dissertations, and go to bed supperless." The breakfast was indeed likely to prove the only substantial meal; how substantial it proved we have already noticed. No doubt Webster appeared to his friends, as half to himself, a restless, uneasy man, incapable of steady application to law, and making hazardous ventures in literature in that combined character of author and publisher which the circumstances of the time rendered almost necessary to any one who undertook to make a profession of letters.
It is a little significant of Webster's relation to literature that he moved outside of the knot of men known in our literary history as the Hartford wits. So many recent claimants for the position of democratic jester have engaged the public attention that the Hartford wits who amused our grandfathers rest their fame now rather upon tradition than upon any perennial liveliness. By their solitude in the pages of American literature their very title has acquired a certain gravity, and we are apt to regard them with respect rather than to read them for amusement. Fossil wits seem properly to be classed with the formation from which they are dug, and not with living types of the same order. Yet no picture of the times in which Webster lived would be complete without a slight reminiscence of this coterie, and the fact that Webster was the neighbor of these men and himself living by letters suggests a fresh illustration of the truth that kinship in literature is something finer and closer than mere circumstantial neighborliness. Trumbull, Hopkins, Alsop, Dwight, and the minor stars in this twinkling galaxy, were staunch Federalists, and the occasion of their joint efforts was chiefly political, but Webster's Federalism did not give him a place in the set.
The "Echo" was the title which the wits gave to a series of satires that mocked the prose of the day. If an editor published a piece of bloated writing, the bubble was pricked by the poetical version; if a politician disclosed his weakness, his words were caught up and made to turn him into ridicule. The wits were on the lookout for humbug in any quarter, but they had their pet aversions, Sam Adams and the Jacobins being oftenest pilloried. A bombastic account of a thunder-storm in Boston appears to have given occasion for the first skit, and it was scarcely necessary to do more than parody the grandiloquent newspaper language. "The clouds soon dissipated, and the appearance of the azure vault left trivial hopes of further needful supplies from the uncorked bottles of heaven. In a few moments the horizon was again overshadowed, and an almost impenetrable gloom mantled the face of the skies.... The majestic roar of disploded thunders, now bursting with a sudden crash, and now wasting the rumbling ECHO of their sounds in other lands, added indescribable grandeur to the sublime scene." The suggestion of the "Echo" came from this phrase, and the success of the first venture easily directed the writers into the use of their instrument for lashing political enemies. Two numbers were given to matters of trivial or temporary interest, and then there was a shot at a piece of fustian in the "Boston Argus" on Liberty, followed shortly after by a gibe at some correspondent of the "Argus," who frantically exclaimed, on the occasion of a town meeting refusing to hear Sam Adams: "Shall Europe hear, shall our Southern brethren be told, that Samuel Adams rose to speak in the midst of his fellow-citizens, and was silenced!" A few lines from this satire will best illustrate the vigorous treatment which the wits employed, and the gusto with which they jostled the great Democrat:—
"Shall Europe hear, shall Gallia's king be told,
That Prince so spirited, so wise and bold,
Whose duteous subjects, anxious to improve
On common forms of loyalty and love,
Took from their sovereign's hands the reins of state,
For fear his royal nerves could not support the weight?
And shall our worthy brethren of the South
Be told Sam Adams could not ope his mouth?
That mouth whence streams of elocution flowed,
Like tail of saw-mill, rapid, rough, and loud,
Sweet as the honey-dews that Maia pours
O'er her green forests and her tufts of flowers,—
That potent mouth, whence issued words of force
To stun an ox, or terrify a horse.
Be told that while those brats whose feeble sight
But just had oped on Freedom's dawning light,
Born in the nick of time that bliss to know
Which to his great and mighty toils we owe,
Received applause from Sages, Fools, and Boys,
The mighty Samuel could not make a noise?
Be told that, silenced by their clam'rous din,
He vainly tried one word to dove-tail in;
That though he strove to speak with might and main
His voice and strivings equally were vain?
* * * * *
Hard has he toiled and richly earned his gains,
Ruined his fingers and spun out his brains
To acquire the right to ope his ponderous jaws,
As the great champion of Sedition's cause.
Once his soft words like streams of melted tar
Stuck in our cars and led us on to war;
But now we hear the self-same accents flow
Unmoved as quails when buried up in snow.
Is his voice weak? That dreadful voice, we're told,
Once made King George the Third through fear turn cold,
Europa's kingdoms to their centre shake,
When mighty Samuel bawl'd at Freedom's stake.