The thought is simple and even obvious, and the expression unadorned, and yet what he said had that subtle quality which stirred and still stirs the heart of every man born on the soil of the old Puritan Commonwealth.
The speech as a whole has all the qualities which made Mr.Webster a great orator, and the same traits run through his other speeches.

An analysis of the reply to Hayne, therefore, gives us all the conditions necessary to forming a correct idea of Mr.Webster's eloquence, of its characteristics and its value.

The Attic school of oratory subordinated form to thought to avoid the misuse of ornament, and triumphed over the more florid practice of the so-called "Asiatics." Rome gave the palm to Atticism, and modern oratory has gone still farther in the same direction, until its predominant quality has become that of making sustained appeals to the understanding.
Logical vigilance and long chains of reasoning, avoided by the ancients, are the essentials of our modern oratory.

Many able men have achieved success under these conditions as forcible and convincing speakers.

But the grand eloquence of modern times is distinguished by the bursts of feeling, of imagery or of invective, joined with convincing argument.