was at once too chivalrous and
too wise to browbeat; arguing to the court unexpected questions of
law with full and available legal learning; carrying in his mind the
case, and the known or surmised plan of attack of his antagonist, and
shaping his own case to meet it; holding an exquisitely sensitive
physical and mental organization in such perfect control as never to
be irritated or disturbed; throwing his whole force on a given point,
and rising to a joyousness of power in meeting the great obstacles to
his success; and finally, with little or no respite for preparation,
weaving visibly, as it were, before the mental eye, from all these
elicited materials, his closing argument, which, as we have said, was
all the more effective, because profound reasoning and exquisite tact
and influence were involved in it as a work of art.

He had the temperament of the great actors,--that of the elder Kean
and the elder Booth, not of Kemble and Macready,--and, like them, had
the power of almost instantly passing into the nature and thought and
emotion of another, and of not only absolutely realizing them, but of
realizing them all the more completely because he had at the same
time perfect self-direction and self-control. The absurd question is
often asked, whether an actor is ever the character he represents
throughout a whole play. He could be so, only if insane. But every
great actor and orator must be capable of instantaneous abandonment
to his part, and of as instantaneous withdrawal from it,--like the
elder Booth, joking one minute at a side-scene and in the next having
the big tears of a realized Lear running down his cheeks. An eminent
critic says,--"Genius always lights its own fire,"--and this constant
double process of mind,--one of self-direction and self-control, the
other of absolute abandonment and identification,--each the more
complete for the other,--the dramatic poet, the impassioned orator,
and the great interpretative actor, all know, whenever the whole mind
and nature are in their highest action. Mr. Choate, therefore, from
pure force of mental constitution, threw himself into the life and
position of the parties and witnesses in a jury-case, and they
necessarily became _dramatis personae_, and moved in an atmosphere of
his own creation. His narrative was the simplest and most artistic
exhibition of his case thus seen and presented from the point of
their lives and natures, and not from the dry facts and poi