Page:Sketches of the life and character of Patrick Henry.djvu/99

 liigh order. His voice, action, style, were stately, and uncommonly impressive; but gigantic as he was in re- lation to other men, he was but a pigmy, when opposed in a criminal trial, to the arch magician, Henry. In those cases Mr. Henry was perfectly irresistible. He adapted himself, without effort to the character of the cause; seiz- ed with the quickness of intuition, its defensible point, and never permitted the juiy to lose sight of it. Sir Joshua Reynolds has said of Titian, that, by a few strokes of his pencil, he knew how to mark the image and charac- ter of whatever object he attempted; and produced, by this means a truer representation, than any of his pre- decessors, who finished every hair. In like manner, Mr. Henry by a few master strokes upon the evidence, could in general stamp upon the cause whatever image or character he pleased; and convert it into tragedy or comedy, at his sovereign will, and with a power which no efforts of his adversary could counteract. He never wearied the jury by a dry and minute analysis of the evidence; he did not expend his strength in finishing the hairs; he produced all his high effect by those rare master touches, and by the resistless skill, with which, in a very few words, he could mould and colour the pro- minent facts of a cause to his purpose. He had won- derful address too, in leading off the minds of his hearers from the contemplation of unfavourable points, if at any time they were too stubborn to yield to his power of transformation. He beguiled the hearer so far from them, as to diminish them by distance, and soften, if not entirely cast into shade, their too strong natural colours. At this distance too, he had a better opportunity of throwing upon them a false light, by an apparently casual ray of refraction from other points in the evidence, whose powers no man better knew how to

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