The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 33, July, 1860: A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And PoliticsVarious
Science
The Atlantic Monthly, Volume 06, No. 33, July, 1860: A Magazine Of Literature, Art, And Politics
Various
American periodicals
made personal issues, and was never diverted by them from his strict
and full duty. Instead of "greatly finding quarrel in a straw," where
some supposed honor was at stake, he would suffer himself rather than
that his case should suffer. Early in his practice, when a friend
told him he bore too much from opposing counsel without rebuking
them, he said: "Do you suppose I care what those men say? I want to
get my client's case." Want of pugnacity too often passes for want of
courage. We have seen him in positions where we wished he could have
been more personally demonstrative, and (to apply the language of the
ring to the contests of the court-room) that he could have stood
still and struck straight from the shoulder; but when we remember how
perfectly he saw through and through the faults and foibles of men,
how his mischievous and genial irony, when it touched personal
character, stamped and characterized it for life, and how keen was
the edge and how fine the play of every weapon in his full armory of
sarcasm and ridicule, (of which his speech in the Senate in reply to
Mr. McDuffie's personalities gives masterly exhibition,) we are
thankful that his sensibility was so exquisite and his temper so
sweet, that he was a delight instead of a terror, and that he was
loved instead of feared. Delicacy should be commensurate to power,
that each may be complete. It would seem almost impossible that a
lawyer with a practice truly immense, passing a great part of his
life in public and heated contests and in discussing and often
severely criticizing the motives and conduct of parties and
witnesses, should not make many enemies; but he was so essentially
modest, simple, gentlemanly, and tender, so considerate of the
feelings of others, so evidently trying to mitigate the pain which it
was often his duty to inflict, that we never heard of his searching
and subtile examination of witnesses, or his profound and exhaustive
analysis of character and motive, or his instantaneous and
irresistible retorts upon counsel, creating or leaving behind him, in
the bar or out of it, malice or ill-will in a human being. One of the
most touching and beautiful things we ever saw in a court-room would
have been in other hands purely painful and repulsive. It was his
examination of the wretched women who were witnesses in the Tirrell
case. His tact in eliciting what was necessary to be known, and which
they would have concealed, was forgotten and lost in his chivalrous
and Christian recognition of their common humanity, and in his
gentlemanly thoughtfulness that even they were still women, with
feelings yet sensitive to eye and word.
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