those whom he
addressed. So thoroughly was he master of his subject, difficult and
intricate as it confessedly is, that in not a single instance, except
during the lectures of the last year, did he take a note or scrap of
memoranda into the class room.

While he has always been a close and devoted student of the law, Mr.
Paine has yet found time for general reading, and has hung for many an
hour over the pages of the English classics with keen delight. For Homer
and Virgil he still retains the relish of his early days, and, in the
intervals of professional toil, has often slaked his thirst for the
waters of Helicon in long and copious draughts. How well he appreciated
the advantages of an acquaintance with literature, he showed early in a
suggestive and instructive lecture on "Reading," which we heard him
deliver before the Lyceum at Hallowell more than forty years ago. With
his lamented friend Judge B.F. Thomas, he believes that a man cannot be
a great lawyer who is nothing else,--that exclusive devotion to the
study and practice of the law tends to acumen rather than to breadth, to
subtlety rather than to strength. "The air is thin among the apices of
the law, as on the granite needles of the Alps. Men must find
refreshment and strength in the quiet valleys at their feet."

With his brethren of the bar Mr. Paine has always held the friendliest
relations, and he has enjoyed their highest esteem. To none, even the
humblest of his fellow advocates, has he ever manifested any of the
haughtiness of a Pinkney, or any of that ruggedness and asperity which
gained for the morose and sullen Thurlow the nickname of _the
tiger_. Amid the fiercest janglings and hottest contentions of the
bar, he has never forgotten that courtesy which should mark the
collision, not less than the friendly intercourse, of cultivated and
polished minds. His victories, won easily by argumentative ability,
tact, and intellectual keenness, unaided by passion, have strikingly
contrasted with the costly victories of advocates less self-restrained.
Though naturally witty and quick at retort, he has never used the weapon
in a way to wound the feelings of an adversary. In examining and
cross-examining witnesses, he has assumed their veracity, whenever it
has been possible to do so; and though he has had the eye of a lynx and
the scent of a hound for prevarication in all its forms, yet he has
never sought by browbeating and other arts of the pettifogger, to