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The Green Bag

save criminals. Evarts was a greater lawyer than orator, and ﬁgured promi nently in several of the greatest trials

was equal to Matt H. Carpenter. He added to the learning and literary

in our history. The addresses of Judah P. Benjamin

lawyer, the presence and the silver voice

orator, and perhaps none of the three

accomplishments of

the scholar

and

before juries are said to have been won

of the orator.

derfully impressive and beautiful. After leaving America he became the head of

various writers styled the perfection of

His voice has been by

His reputation for this character of speech, however, lives mainly in tradi

melody. Like most of modern orators he was rather diffuse yet withal inter esting. He belonged to the school of persuasive reasoners who without many passages of supreme beauty managed to make their speeches meet the require

tion, but if this alone be followed he would take high rank indeed, since his

ments of the case and carry conviction with them. A large portion of the elo

the English bar, and was in all probabil ity the most widely learned lawyer of the English-speaking race since 1860.

legal

speeches never failed to elicit

quence lay in the voice of the speaker

the same applause that always greeted

and in his magnetic qualities. Carpenter's contemporary, Ben Hill, known as “the stormy petrel of debate,"

his admittedly splendid political and Parliamentary and occasional ad dresses. After the war, the great jury orators

of the country were notably fewer and less eloquent. Public life still lured the great orators from the bar, while at the

same time public sentiment began to prohibit the public men from accepting

legal employment at the hands of cer tain interests which had hitherto been their chief source of income. Thus

was a great jury orator.

His was a high

type of intellect. He could present an array of facts in a manner almost invin cible. Strength was his chief character istic, and when he indulged in sarcasm, sentiment, or invective, it was generally to make more terrible and potent the effectiveness of his argument. There “was argument even in his declama tion.”

while there were many great lawyers

A very different type was Daniel W.

there were comparatively few really

Voorhees, whose speeches glowed with

great orators.

the fervid, the ﬁery and opalescent beau

Charles O’Conor ﬁrst won national

ties of rhetoric.

His defense of John

fame as a lawyer in the case of McFar

Cook, charged with treason in connection

land v. McFarland, and from that day until his death held a high rank both as orator and lawyer. His oratory was

with one of John Brown's raids, was the wonder of its day, and a copy of it printed on silk was sent by some of his

more practical than beautiful, and will

admirers who heard it. The peroration, with its plea for mercy all glowing in golden rhetoric, is one of the best ever

hardly be read for its own interest by any one. Beach, on the other hand, while equally as persuasive, was more eloquent. He possessed the heart, the sentiment, that sways juries, and he

could clothe those sentiments in such beautiful language as to make them worthy of a place literature. Brady was not equal to either of these as an

delivered. In this case the orator was conﬁned to a plea for mercy inasmuch as his client had pleaded guilty, and it

must be confessed that he threw his soul into the task with great fervor and won all the success possible. Even greater, however, was his speech