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CALIFORNIA

THE LAWYER, THE STATESMAN,

AND THE SOLDIER.

RUFUS CHOATE.

IF in imagination we can command the presence of a man only less than six feet in height, with a full, deep breast, high and unseemly shoulders, hips and legs slender and in appearance weak, arms long, hands and feet large and ill-formed, a head broad, chaste, symmetrical, covered with a luxuriant suit of black, glossy, wavy hair, a face intellectually handsome and equally attractive to men and to women, a complexion dark and bronzed as becomes the natives of the tropical isles of the East, a beard scanty and vagrant, mouth and nose large, lips thin and long, an eye black, gentle and winning in repose, but brilliant, commanding, and persuasive in moments of excitement-we shall have thus and now created an imperfect picture of Rufus Choate as he presented himself to his contemporaries when his physical qualities had not been wasted by disease nor impaired by age.

And if from this sketch we are in doubt whether

the subject of it was an attractive person, we should realize that his manners and ways were as gentle as the manners and ways of the best bred woman, that to the young he was always kind and often affectionate, to the aged respectful, and that to those in authority he was ever deferential without being or appearing to be a sycophant.

And to these charms of person and benignity of manners we are to superadd a voice that in conversation, debate, or oration was copious, commanding, sonorous, and emotional, responding like music to every change of thought, and, in its variety of tone and sweep of accent and emphasis, touching and influencing not only the sentiments and feelings but even the opinions and judgments of men. His vocabulary knew no limits except those set by the language itself; and such was his facility in its use as to extort from the stern Chief-Justice of the Supreme Judicial Court of Massachusetts the remark, when told that Webster's new dictionary contained many thousand additional words, "I beg of you not to let Choate hear of it!"

His gestures seemed extravagant often, but they were justified usually by the wonderful rhetoric which he commanded and so used that it was accepted as the natural, the inevitable outflow of his mind. While he seldom made a plain statement of the exact truth either in conversation or in argu

ment, he yet expressed the truth by a manifest exaggeration of the truth.

When he offered wine to friends and omitted to join them, he said, "I keep a little wine in my house, but as for myself I don't drink a glass once in a thousand years." Borrowing the language of the profession in regard to challenges of jurors, he said of a brother at the bar whose manners and ways were disagreeable, "Some persons we hate for cause, but ***we hate peremptorily."

Upon his return from the Senate of the United States in 1842, standing in the doorway of a meeting-house then nearly a century old in a country town of Massachusetts, and speaking to the multitude within and without the building, in explanation and defense of the bankrupt law then recently enacted under the lead of the Whig party, he emphasized and made attractive the restoration to active business of the body of bankrupts by the cxclamation, "In an instant we created five hundred thousand full-grown, able-bodied men!"

Mr. Choate's facility in the use of language, his urbanity of manner, and his ability to express contempt without wounding visibly the subject of it, were illustrated when he was closing an argument in behalf of a client who was seeking compensation for injury to his person, his horse, carriage, and harness. Mr. Choate discoursed of the injury to

his client, to the horse, and to the carriage, and was about taking his seat, when his junior touched him and said, "You have omitted the harness." Though annoyed by the suggestion of so insignificant a matter, he turned to the jury and with his accustomed urbanity, said " Ah, Mr. Foreman and gentlemen of the jury, the harness!-a safe, sound, substantial, serviceable (pausing and dropping his voice), second-hand harness," and sat down.

Mr. Choate lived and labored under the influence of that dainty and dangerous gift of nature which finds relief only in physical excesses or in unremitting intellectual work-a sensitive, nervous organization. He seldom indulged himself in amusements and except when compelled by illness he had no relaxation from the toils of public and professional life.

When warned by an associate that his constant labors were imperiling his health, he said, "I have no alternative but the insane asylum."

Again, when asked how his constitution held out, he answered: "That was gone long ago; I am now living on the by-laws."

In Mr. Choate's nature there was a singular mixture of timidity and professional courage. It is said that in consultation with his associates he was too often doubtful of success, but, when the excitement of the trial was on, there were no indications

of fear. His movements, tones, and arguments were those of an advocate accustomed to victory, and confident alike in his cause and in the supremacy of his own powers. But his constitutional timidity appeared in his politics and in his political career. It was unfortunately conspicuous in his controversy in the Senate with Mr. Clay, and in his acceptance in 1856 of the candidacy of Mr. Buchanan, manifestly through fear of a rupture with the South. It can not be denied, however, that his speech at Lowell in that year is full of statesmanship mingled with solemn prophecies as to the consequences of the slavery agitation, if only we accept his thesis that it was better to endure slavery than to suffer the horrors of civil war. In his opinion then, we had only a choice of evils. He chose to endure those we had, rather than to fly to others he knew not of. Genius in oratory and capacity in statesmanship are not often combined in the same person.

Nor can it be asserted with confidence that any great orator was ever eminently successful in the practicaal ffairs of government.

Cicero may have been an exception, but even his career is open to question in that respect. Certainly the elder Pitt, Burke, Lamartine, Kossuth, and Castelar are instances of failure, and some of them are conspicuous examples.

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