comprehensive views, rather than to
technical or recondite learning." Story's own bias, which was supported
by his prodigious industry, was just the reverse. The two men thus
supplemented each other admirably. A tradition of some venerability
represents Story as having said that Marshall was wont to remark: "Now
Story, that is the law; you find the precedents for it." Whether true or
not, the tale at least illustrates the truth. Marshall owed to counsel a
somewhat similar debt in the way of leading up to his decisions, for, as
Story points out, "he was solicitous to hear arguments and not to decide
cases without them, nor did any judge ever profit more by them." But
in the field of Constitutional Law, at least, Marshall used counsel's
argument not so much to indicate what his own judicial goal ought to
be as to discover the best route thereto--often, indeed, through the
welcome stimulus which a clash of views gave to his reasoning powers.

* This was in the case of Ogden vs. Saunders, 12 Wheaton, 213
(1827).

Though the wealth of available legal talent at this period was
impressively illustrated in connection both with Chase's impeachment and
with Burr's trial, yet on neither of these occasions appeared William
Pinkney of Maryland, the attorney to whom Marshall acknowledged his
greatest indebtedness, and who was universally acknowledged to be the
leader of the American Bar from 1810 until his death twelve years later.
Besides being a great lawyer, Pinkney was also a notable personality, as
George Ticknor's sketch of him as he appeared before the Supreme Court
in 1815 goes to prove:

"You must imagine, if you can, a man formed on nature's most liberal
scale, who at the age of 50 is possessed with the ambition of being a
pretty fellow, wears corsets to diminish his bulk, uses cosmetics, as
he told Mrs. Gore, to smooth and soften a skin growing somewhat wrinkled
and rigid with age, dresses in a style which would be thought foppish
in a much younger man. You must imagine such a man standing before
the gravest tribunal in the land, and engaged in causes of the deepest
moment; but still apparently thinking how he can declaim like a
practised rhetorician in the London Cockpit, which he used to frequent.
Yet you must, at the same time, imagine his declamation to be chaste and
precise in its language and cogent, logical and learned in its argument,
free from the artifice and affectation of his manner, and in short,
oppo