peculiar handwriting was as well known to his townsmen and neighbors, was as frequent a topic of observation and comment, as any of the traits of his mind and character.  We need hardly add that this popular image which was called Mr. Choate resembled the real man about as much as a sign-post daub of General Washington resembles the head by Stuart.  The skill of the true artist is shown in catching and transferring to the canvas the delicate distinctions which make a difference between faces which have a general similarity.  No man had more need of this fine discrimination in order to have justice done him than Mr. Choate; for there was no man who would have been more imperfectly known, had he been known only by those prominent and obvious characteristics which all the world could see.  He was a great and successful lawyer, but his original taste was for literature rather than law.  Few men were more before the public than he, and yet he loved privacy more than publicity.  He had acquaintances numberless, and facile and gracious manners, but his heart was open to very few.  His eloquence was luxuriant and efflorescent, but he was also a close and compact reasoner.  He had a vein of playful exaggeration in his common speech, but his temperament was earnest, impassioned, almost melancholy.  The more nearly one knew Mr. Choate, the more cause had he to correct superficial impressions.

Professor Brown has many qualifications for the task which was devolved upon him.  He knew, loved, and admired Mr. Choate.  A graduate and professor of Dartmouth College, the son of a former president, he caught a larger portion of the light thrown, back upon the college by the genius and fame of her brilliant son.  A good scholar himself, he is competent to appreciate the ripe scholarship of Mr. Choate, and his love of letters.  His style is clear, simple, and manly.  He has, too, the moral qualities needed in a man who undertakes to write the biography of an eminent man recently deceased, who has left children, relatives, friends, acquaintances, and rivals,—­the tact, the instinct, the judgment which teaches what to say and what to leave unsaid, and refuses to admit the public into those inner chambers of the mind and heart where the public 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.