has no right to go. But he has one disqualification:
he is not a lawyer, and no one but a lawyer can take the full gauge and
dimensions of what Mr. Choate was and did. For Mr. Choate, various as
were his intellectual tastes, wide as was the range of his intellectual
curiosity, made all things else secondary and subservient to legal
studies and professional aspirations. To the law he gave his mind
and life, and all that he did outside of the law was done in those
breathing-spaces and intermissions of professional labor in which most
lawyers in large practice are content to do nothing.

But Professor Brown's biography is satisfactory in all respects, even in
the delineations of the professional character of Mr. Choate, where, if
anywhere, we should have looked for imperfect comprehension. The members
of the bar may rest assured that justice has been done to the legal
claims and merits of one of whom they were so justly proud; and the
public may be assured that the traits of Mr. Choate's character, the
qualities of his mind,--his great and conspicuous powers, as well as his
lighter graces and finer gifts,--have been set down with taste, feeling,
judgment, and discrimination. This seems but measured language, and yet
we mean it for generous praise; bearing always in mind the difficulties
of the subject, and, as Professor Brown has happily said in his preface,
that "the traits of Mr. Choate's character were so peculiar, its lights
and shades so delicate, various, and evanescent." We confess that we sat
down to read the biography not without a little uneasiness, not without
a flutter of apprehension. But all feeling of this kind was soon
dissipated as we went on, and there came in its place a grateful sense
of the grace, skill, and taste which Professor Brown had shown in his
delineation, and the faithful portrait he had produced. And one secret
of this success is to be found in the fact that he had no other object
or purpose than to do justice to his subject. He is entirely free from
self-reference. There is not in the remotest corner of his mind a wish
to magnify his office and draw attention from the theme of the biography
to the biographer himself. He permits himself no digressions, he
obtrudes no needless reflections, enters into no profitless discussions:
he is content to unfold the panorama of Mr. Choate's life, and do little
more than point out the scenes and passages as they pass before the
spectator's eye.

It was