Page:Sketches of the life and character of Patrick Henry.djvu/96

 72 SKETCHES OF THE

knowledge of the maritime law, to which, it was believ- ed, he had never before turned his attention.

But this special preparation on a given subject, and that subject too, depending on the liberal and equitable principles of the maritime law, is not at all at variance with the report of his inefficiency, on questions to be decided by the common law merely. The power of ar- guing questions of the latter description to advantage, requires the mind, in the first place, to be deeply im- bued with that peculiar spirit of reasoning which reigns throughout the whole system of the common law; and, in the next, it requires a cool and clear accuracy of thinking, and an elaborate exactness and nicety in the deduction of thought, to which Mr. Henry's early and inveterate habits of indolence, as well as the sublime and excursive feiTour of his genius, were altogether hostile.

It was on questions before a jury, that he was in his natural element. There, his intimate knowledge of hu- man nature, and the rapidity as well as justness of his inferences, from the flitting expressions of the counte- nance, as to what was passing in the hearts of his hearers, availed him fully. The jury might be com- posed of entire strangers, yet he rarely failed to know them, man by man, before the evidence was closed. There was no studied fixture of features, that could long hide the character from his piercing and expe- rienced view. The slightest unguarded turn of counte- nance, or motion of the eye, let him at once into the soul of the man whom he was observing. Or, if he doubted whether his conclusions were correct, from the exliibi- tions of countenance during the narration of the evi- dence, he had a mode of playing a prelude as it were, upon the juiy, in his exordium, which never failed to

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