address jurors with classical or formal correctness. Napoleon, at St.
Helena, after reading one of his bulletins, which had produced the
great and exact effect for which he had intended it, exclaimed,--"And
yet they said I couldn't write!"

The true Yankee is suspicious of eloquence, and "stops a metaphor
like a suspected person in an enemy's country." A stranger, who
looked in for a few minutes upon one of Mr. Choate's jury-arguments,
and saw a lawyer with a lithe and elastic figure of about five feet
and eleven inches, with a face not merely of a scholarly paleness,
but wrinkled all over, and, as it were, scathed with thought and with
past nervous and intellectual struggles, yet still beautiful, with
black hair curling as if from heat and dewy from heightened action
and intensity of thought and feeling, and heard a clear, sympathetic,
and varying voice uttering rapidly and unhesitatingly, sometimes with
sweet caesural and almost monotonous cadences, and again with
startling and electric shocks, language now exquisitely delicate and
poetic, now vehement in its direct force, and again decorated and
wild with Eastern extravagance and fervor of fancy, would have
thought him the last man to have been born on New England soil, or to
convince the judgments of twelve Yankee jurors. But those twelve men,
if he had opened the case himself, had been quietly, simply, and
sympathetically led into a knowledge of its facts in connection with
its actors and their motives; they had seen how calmly and with what
tact he had examined his witnesses, how ready, graceful, and unheated
had been his arguments to the court, and how complete throughout had
been his self-possession and self-control; they had, moreover,
learned and become interested in the case, and were no longer the
same hard and dispassionate men with whom he had begun, and they
knew, as the casual spectator could not know, how systematically he
was arguing while he was also vehemently enforcing his case. _He_,
meanwhile, knew his twelve men, and what arguments, appeals, and
illustrations were needed to reach the minds of one or all. He did
not care how certain extravagances of style struck the critical
spectator, if they stamped and riveted certain points of his case in
the minds of his jury. With the keenest perception of the ridiculous
himself, he did not hesitate to say things which, disconnected from
his purpose, might seem ridiculous. One consequence of these
audacitie