nt and profound as a reasoner, but his genius
produced such a fusion of imagination and understanding as to give
creativeness to argumentation and philosophy to treatment of facts.

We propose to try to give some idea of those mental characteristics
and peculiarities in which he differed from other lawyers, and to
indicate some salient points of his genius and nature which went to
make up so original and interesting an individuality. Immense labor
and talent will no more produce genius or its results, than mere
natural genius, without their aid and instrumentality, can reach and
maintain the highest rank in any of the great departments of life or
thought. With true genius, imagination is, to be sure, paramount to
great and balanced faculties; but genius is always demonstrating its
superiority to talent as well by its greater rapidity and certainty
in seizing, arranging, and holding facts, and by the extent of its
acquisitions, as by its superior philosophic and artistic grasp and
vision.

Though Mr. Choate was so much more than a mere lawyer, it was in
court that he displayed the full force and variety of his powers.
_Hic currus et arma_. We shall, however, speak more especially of his
jury-trials, because in them more of his whole nature was brought
into play, and because of them and of his management of them there is
and can be no full record. The arguments and triumphs of the great
advocate are almost as evanescent and traditionary as the
conversation of great talkers like Coleridge. In what we have to say
we cannot be expected to call up the arguments and cases themselves,
and we must necessarily be confined to a somewhat general statement
of certain mental qualities and characteristics which were of the
secret of his power. We shall be rewarded, if we succeed in giving in
mere outline some explanation of the fact, that so much of interest
and something of mystery attach themselves throughout the country to
his name and genius.

A jury-trial is in itself dramatic; but mere eloquence is but a small
part of what is demanded of a great advocate. Luther Martin and
Jeremiah Mason were the most eminent American examples of the very
many great jury-lawyers who were almost destitute of all that makes
up popular eloquence. A jury-lawyer is of course greater with it, but
he can do entirely without it. Almost all great trials appeal to the
intellects rather than to the passions of jurors. What an advocate
needs first is th