The year before he came of age he was admitted to the bar by legislative act. In the same year he married his true mate and settled at Washington. For four years the famous William H. Crawford was the judge of the circuit. Toombs was born into the Crawford faction, and the judge who, as there was no supreme court then, was law autocrat of his circuit, gave him favor from the first. The courts were full of lucrative business. The old dockets show that in five years Toombs was getting his full share in his own county and the adjoining ones. The diligent attention that he gave every detail of preparation of his cases, had, in a year or two after his call, made him first choice of every eminent lawyer for junior. One of these was Cone, a native of Connecticut, who had received a good education both literary and professional, before he came south. Toombs, who had known the great American lawyers of his time, always said after his death in 1859 that Cone was the best of all. Lumpkin used to tell that during a visit to England he haunted the courts, but he never found a single counsel who spoke to a law point as luminously and convincingly as Cone. Another one of these was Lumpkin. He is, I believe, the most eloquent man that Georgia ever produced. He had some tincture of letters; but he was without Choate's pre-eminent self-culture and daily drafts of inspiration from the immortal fountains. A. H. Stephens admired Choate greatly. He heard the latter's reply to Buchanan. Often, at Liberty Hall--as Stephens called his residence--he would repeat with gusto the passage in which Choate roasts Buchanan for his inculcation of hate to England. Stephens contended that if all that education and art had done for each--Choate and Lumpkin--could have been removed, a comparison would, as he believed, show Lumpkin to be the stronger advocate by nature. These three--Cone, Lumpkin, and Toombs--were often on the same side. But whether Toombs had them as associates or as adversaries, they were always in these early years of his at the bar, in his eye. With the unremitted attentiveness of what we may call his subconscious observation, and a receptivity always active and greedy, he seems to have soon appropriated all of Cone's law and all of Lumpkin's advocacy--that is, he had, as he did with the speech and language heard by him every day, transmuted them into the rare and precious staple peculiar to his own _sui generis_ self.