As before remarked, Mr. Brady never relied upon his eloquence alone for success at the bar.  He had a profound respect for his profession, and scorned its trickeries.  He worked faithfully over the cases intrusted to him, studied them carefully, and never brought them to trial till he was thorough master of the law bearing upon them.  This enabled him frequently to present issues which a less learned man would not have dreamed of.  When he was retained as counsel for Huntington the forger, he conceived the idea that the man was morally unaccountable for his deed, and his theory of moral insanity, as developed by him in this case, is one of the most powerful arguments upon the subject to be found in any language.  He read every thing he could find on the subject of insanity, and when he went into court there was not a physician in the land better informed with respect to it than he.  The cases in which he was frequently engaged required an unusual acquaintance with medical jurisprudence, and he was regarded as one of the best authorities on the subject in the country.

His power over a jury was remarkable.  He never lost sight of the “twelve peers,” and by his dexterous management soon had them so thoroughly under the influence of his magnetic mind that they hung upon his words, followed his every act, laughed or cried as he willed, and seemed capable of thinking only as he permitted them.  He defended fifty-one men for their lives in the course of his practice, and brought them all off in safety.

[Illustration:  “THEY ARE GOING TO HANG MY BROTHER, AND YOU CAN SAVE HIM!”]

Mr. Clarke, from whose memoir I have already quoted, relates the following incidents in his career: 

“The case of a young man charged with murder, in what was claimed to be an accidental fracas, attracted a good deal of interest.  He was a Mason, and that society applied to Mr. Brady to defend him, tendering twenty-five hundred dollars as a fee; but for some cause he declined the case.  Not long after, one afternoon, a neatly-dressed, modest young girl came to the office and asked for Mr. Brady.  Told to walk into his private office, she timidly approached his desk, and saying, ’Mr. Brady, they are going to hang my brother, and you can save him.  I’ve brought you this money; please don’t let my brother die,’ she burst into tears.  It was a roll of two hundred and fifty dollars, which the poor girl had begged in sums of five and ten dollars.  The kind-hearted man heard her story.  ‘They shall not hang your brother, my child,’ said he, and putting the roll of bills in an envelope, told her to take it to her mother, and he would ask for it when he wanted it.  The boy was cleared.  In Mr. Brady’s parlor hangs an exquisite picture, by Durand, with a letter on the back asking him to accept it as a mark of appreciation for his generous kindness in defending this poor boy.  Mr. Brady prized that picture....

“Once when, in the height of his appeal to the jury, a dog began barking vigorously, he whirled around, shook his finger at the dog and said, gravely, with the quickness of thought, ’I am Sir Oracle, and when I ope my lips let no dog bark!’