Such is the case of this enormous criminal. Events belonging to history, enrolled in the records of the Senate, and familiar to the country, are deliberately shut out from view, while we are treated to legal niceties without end. The lawyers have made a painful record. Nothing ever occurred so much calculated to bring the profession into disrepute; for never before has been such a theatre where lawyers were actors. Their peculiarities have been exhibited. Here was a great question of justice, appealing to the highest sentiments, and involving the best interests of the country; but lawyers, instinctive for the dialectics of the profession, forgot everlasting truth, never to be forgotten with impunity. They started at once in full cry, and the quibble became to them what Dr. Johnson says it was to the great dramatist: “He follows it at all adventures; it is sure to lead him out of his way, and sure to ingulf him in the mire. It has some malignant power over his mind, and its fascinations are irresistible.… A quibble is the golden apple for which he will always turn aside from his career, or stoop from his elevation. A quibble, poor and barren as it is, gave him such delight that he was content to purchase it by the sacrifice of reason, propriety, and truth.”[216] In this Shakespearean spirit our lawyers have acted. They have pursued quibbles with the ardor of the great dramatist, and even now are chasing them through the Senate Chamber. Unhappily this is according to history, and our lawyers are not among the splendid exceptions. But there is reward for those who stand firm. Who does not reverence the exalted magistrate of France, the Chancellor L’Hospital, who set the great example of rectitude and perfect justice? Who does not honor those lawyers of English history through whose toils Liberty was upheld? There was Selden, so wise and learned; Pym, so grand in statesmanship; Somers, who did so much to establish the best securities of the Constitution. Nor can I forget, at a later day, that greatest advocate, Erskine, who lent to the oppressed his wonderful eloquence; nor Mackintosh and Brougham, who carried into courts that enlarged intelligence and sympathetic nature which the profession of the law could not constrain. These are among the names that have already had their reward, above the artful crowd which in all times has come to the defence of prerogative. It is no new thing that we witness now. The lawyer in other days has been, as we know him, prone to the support of power, and ready with technical reasons. Whichever side he takes, he finds reasons plenty as pins. When free to choose, and not hired, his argument is the reflection of himself. All that he says is his own image. He takes sides on a law point according to his sentiments. Cultured in law, and with aptitude sharpened by its contests, too easily he finds a legal reason for an illegal judgment. Next to an outright mercenary, give me a lawyer to betray a great cause.