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274 ence in the halls of legislation, should have been surprised into silence by the terrific onset of Henry Clay, chief of the Senate for twenty years.

In 1845 he returned to the practice of the profession of which he was so fond, and in which he was still busily working when death came to him in 1859.

Rufus Choate is to be ranked as the great American advocate. He was an able law yer, a shining statesman, an all-accomplished man of letters; but these are not his glory. His was that glory of which nightly he had dreamed, and for which he struggled daily from his first entrance upon active life,—the glory of the great advocate, the ruler of the Twelve. To gain this particular attitude in history, he made all his endowments and all his experiences contribute. His preeminence was in dealing with man as man; not educated, ermined man, but the mere mortal man. Him he could magnetize and master.

He accomplished this magical mastery, not by a mere transitory eloquence of pathos and beauty, but by concentrating vast energies upon that specific object. A singularly powerful yet delicate organization, a capacious yet prompt understanding, law learning enough for a lord chancellor, and a lettered eloquence which Hortensius might have admired,—all these were the forces in array when Choate ranged his power in forensic action. And then, finally, he had genius, pure genius.

In court or out of court, a romantic interest always seemed to invest him. With his dishevelled locks waving about his head; his gloomy countenance, in which grief and glory contended,—the signature of sorrows and the consciousness of acknowledged power; the Oriental complexion, speaking of an Asiatic type of man; his darkly burning eyes; his walk, swaying along in that singular gait which made his broad square shoulders careen from side to side, like the opposite bulwarks of a ship; his moody loneliness,—for when off duty he was rarely seen other than alone; his self-absorption of thought, producing a sort of impression as of a mysterious silence around him,—he moved about more like a straggler from an other civilization than a Yankee lawyer of New England growth and stature.

In his manhood as in his youth, everybody loved this romantic man. His brethren at the bar bore testimony to his unfailing urbanity and his unruffled temper. In a profession of forensic fighting, he was always himself at peace. In the management of his cause he was always magnanimous and indulgent to his adversary. Whatever formal concessions he could make to that adversary which would save him trouble,—as of procuring extra witnesses, of guarding against surprise, and such things,—this monarch of the bar would accord with princely liberality. But the miracle about his character was that, with a temperament whose excitableness was daily cultivated on principle to support his eloquence, his self-command was as supreme as his passion was stormy. Though every one else might be in a passion, and he had made them so, he was to be seen as serene as if he had just risen from the breakfast-table; though every one else was galling, ugly, and ill-natured, his words were as composed and honeyed as the utterances in a lady's boudoir.

His humor and wit helped him in every stage of the cause. It relieved the tired attention, and often would kindle up such a sympathetic conflagration of glee all over the court-room, that the dry case seemed to take a new start from that moment, and the lawyers looked up as if they had taken in a sudden draught of fresh air. His humor was most distinguished for its odd association of very opposite ideas, and ideas naturally very distant from one another. Many of his great and sudden mirthful effects were produced by his tone and manner quite as much as by his words.

In a railroad accident case, where they ran over a carriage at a crossing, he was showing that the company could not have