Marshall owed to counsel a somewhat similar debt in the way of leading up to his decisions, for, as Story points out, "he was solicitous to hear arguments and not to decide cases without them, nor did any judge ever profit more by them." But in the field of Constitutional Law, at least, Marshall used counsel's argument not so much to indicate what his own judicial goal ought to be as to discover the best route thereto--often, indeed, through the welcome stimulus which a clash of views gave to his reasoning powers. ¹ This was in the case of Ogden vs. Saunders, 12 Wheaton, 213 (1827). Though the wealth of available legal talent at this period was impressively illustrated in connection both with Chase's impeachment and with Burr's trial, yet on neither of these occasions appeared William Pinkney of Maryland, the attorney to whom Marshall acknowledged his greatest indebtedness, and who was universally acknowledged to be the leader of the American Bar from 1810 until his death twelve years later. Besides being a great lawyer, Pinkney was also a notable personality, as George Ticknor's sketch of him as he appeared before the Supreme Court in 1815 goes to prove: You must imagine, if you can, a man formed on nature's most liberal scale, who at the age of 50 is possessed with the ambition of being a pretty fellow, wears corsets to diminish his bulk, uses cosmetics, as he told Mrs. Gore, to smooth and soften a skin growing somewhat wrinkled and rigid with age, dresses in a style which would be thought foppish in a much younger man. You must imagine such a man standing before the gravest tribunal in the land, and engaged in causes of the deepest moment; but still apparently thinking how he can declaim like a practised rhetorician in the London Cockpit, which he used to frequent. Yet you must, at the same time, imagine his declamation to be chaste and precise in its language and cogent, logical and learned in its argument, free from the artifice and affectation of his manner, and in short, opposite to what you might fairly have expected from his first appearance and tones. And when you have compounded these inconsistencies in your imagination, and united qualities which on common occasions nature seems to hold asunder, you will, perhaps, begin to form some idea of what Mr. Pinkney is. Such was the man whom Marshall, Story, and Taney all considered the greatest lawyer who had ever appeared before the Supreme Court.