At the time of Talcott's appointment, though he had not distinguished himself as a legal competitor of Van Buren, he displayed the gentle manners and amiable traits that naturally commended him to one of Van Buren's smooth, adroit methods. The Kinderhook statesman had, however, in selecting him for attorney-general, looked beyond the charming personality to the rapidly developing powers of the lawyer, who was even then captivating all hearers by the strength of his arguments and the splendour of his diction. Contemporaries of Talcott were fond of telling of this remarkable, almost phenomenal gift of speech. One of them mentions "those magical transitions from the subtlest argument to the deepest pathos;" another describes him as "overpowering in the weight of his intellect, who produced in the minds of his audience all the sympathy and emotion of which the mind is capable." William H. Dillingham, a classmate and lifelong friend, declared that the extraordinary qualities which marked his career and so greatly distinguished him in after life--towering genius, astonishing facility in acquiring knowledge, and surpassing eloquence, were developed during his college days. The life of Talcott recalls, in its brilliant activity, the dazzling legal career of Alexander Hamilton. Wherever the greatest lawyers gathered he was in their midst, the "Erskine of the bar." At his last appearance in the Supreme Court of the United States he opposed Daniel Webster in the "Sailors' Snug Harbor" case. "Beginning in a low and measured tone," says Bacon, in his _Early Bar of Oneida County_, "he gathered strength and power as he proceeded in his masterly discourse, and for five hours held the breathless attention of bench and bar and audience, in an argument which the illustrious Marshall declared had not been equalled in that court since the days of the renowned William Pinckney."