ull and just claims upon him, entering into his
opinions and nature with the sympathetic and dramatic realization we
have described, he could not faithfully perform the prescribed and
admitted duty of the advocate,--necessarily, with him, involving his
throwing the whole force of his physical and intellectual vitality
into every case he tried,--without being a vehement partisan, or
without being sometimes charged with misstating evidence or going too
far for his client. Occasionally this may have been true; but we see
the explanation in the very quality of his genius and temperament,
and not in conscious or intentional wrong-doing.

His ability and method in his strictly legal arguments to courts of
law are substantially indicated in what we have already said. His
manner, however, was here calm, his general views of his subject
large and philosophic, his legal learning full, his reasoning clear,
strong, and consequential, his discrimination quick and sure, and his
detection of a logical fallacy unerring, his style, though sometimes
fairly open to the charge of redundancy, graceful and transparent in
its exhibition of his argument, and his mind always at home, and in
its easiest and most natural exercise, when anything in his case rose
into connection with great principles.

While exhibiting in his jury-trials, as we have shown, this double
process of absolute identification and of perfect supervision and
self-control,--of instantaneous imaginative dips into his work, and
of as instantaneous withdrawal from it,--of purposely and yet
completely throwing himself in one sentence into the realization of
an emotion, thus perfectly conveying his meaning while living the
thought, and yet coming out of it to see quicker than any one that it
might be made absurd by displacement,--he always had, as it were, an
air-drawn, circle of larger thought and superintending relation far
around the immediate question into which he passed so dramatically.
Within this outer circle, attached and related to it by everything in
the subject-matter of real poetic or philosophic importance, was his
case, creatively woven and spread in artistic light and perspective;
and between the two (if we do not press our illustration beyond clear
limits) was a heat-lightning-like play of mind, showing itself, at
one moment, in unexpected flashes of poetic analogy, at another in
Puck-like mischief, and again in imaginative irony or humor.

As he recovered him