public and heated contests and in discussing and often severely criticizing the motives and conduct of parties and witnesses, should not make many enemies; but he was so essentially modest, simple, gentlemanly, and tender, so considerate of the feelings of others, so evidently trying to mitigate the pain which it was often his duty to inflict, that we never heard of his searching and subtile examination of witnesses, or his profound and exhaustive analysis of character and motive, or his instantaneous and irresistible retorts upon counsel, creating or leaving behind him, in the bar or out of it, malice or ill-will in a human being.  One of the most touching and beautiful things we ever saw in a court-room would have been in other hands purely painful and repulsive.  It was his examination of the wretched women who were witnesses in the Tirrell case.  His tact in eliciting what was necessary to be known, and which they would have concealed, was forgotten and lost in his chivalrous and Christian recognition of their common humanity, and in his gentlemanly thoughtfulness that even they were still women, with feelings yet sensitive to eye and word.

In jury-trials it would be foolish to judge style by severe or classic standards.  If an advocate have skill and insight and adequate powers of expression, his style must yield and vary with the circumstances of different cases and the minds of different juries and jurors.  When a friend of Erskine asked him, at the close of a jury-argument, why he so unusually and iteratively, and with such singular illustration, prolonged one part of his case, he said,—­“It took me two hours to make that fat man with the buff waistcoat join the eleven!”

All men of great powers of practical influence over the minds of men know how stupid and dull of apprehension the mass of mankind are; and no one knows better than a great jury-lawyer in how many different ways it is often necessary to present arguments, and how they must be pressed, urged, and hammered into most men’s minds.  He is endeavoring to persuade and convince twelve men upon a question in which they have no direct pecuniary or personal interest, and he must more or less know and adapt his reasoning and his style to each juror’s mind.  He should know no audience but the judge and these twelve men.  Retainers never seek and should not find counsel who address jurors with classical or formal correctness.  Napoleon, at St. Helena, after reading one of his bulletins, which had produced the great and exact effect for which he had intended it, exclaimed,—­“And yet they said I couldn’t write!”