Word: websterisms
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...last year Helena Hall, a vacationing Bennington girl, found a yellowed manuscript in the family attic. The manuscript was Caroline Le Roy Webster's diary of her trip to Europe (1839) with her husband, Senator Daniel Webster of Massachusetts, and his daughter Julia. Published for the first time, as Mr. W. and I, this long-lost journal has the stylistic simplicity of a 19th-Century...
...later years Caroline Webster sometimes watered a redheaded parrot in the belief that it was a geranium. But when she reached England with the statesman she always calls "Mr. W," she was still in her prime and determined to miss nothing. England was impressed by rugged, eloquent Mr. W. Benjamin Disraeli noticed Webster's "fine brow, lofty, broad, and beetled, deepset eyes." Wrote Philosopher Carlyle to Emerson: "He is a magnificent specimen...
...Websters' junket was a series of parties. In London they dined with young Queen Victoria's uncle, the Duke of Sussex, who insisted on giving Mrs. Webster a prize strawberry "from his own plate." Said Mrs. Webster ungratefully: "A thorough radical and not very refined." The Queen gave them "a superb dinner" served on gold & silver plates. Mrs. Webster could not resist washing her hands in the ladies' room "to show that I knew the use of the scented water and napkins...
...time the Websters reached Scotland Caroline was quite annoyed with Mr. W. A good farmer, Statesman Webster kept deserting his wife to look at British livestock. Once he left Caroline to "see some Ayrshire cows." While Mrs. W. was chiefly interested in looking at Durham Cathedral, Mr. W. concentrated on buying "one ram and three ewes." At Oxford he went to see "implements of farming." Mrs. W. looked over the colleges, avoiding Titian's paintings of The Loves of the Gods ("The subject not suited to ladies...
...order"-the great republicans Harriet had come so far to see. She saw everybody. Congressmen "reposed themselves" by Harriet's fireside. "Mr. Clay, sitting upright on the sofa, with his snuffbox ever in his hand, would discourse for many an hour in his even, soft, deliberate tone. . . . Mr. Webster, leaning back at his ease, telling stories, cracking jokes, shaking the sofa with burst after burst of laughter . . . would illuminate an evening. Mr. Calhoun, the cast-iron man, who looks as if he had never been born and never could be extinguished, would come in sometimes." She visited Madison...