had any lookout. "They say," he exclaimed, "the engine-driver was the lookout. The engine-driver the lookout! Why, what was he doing at this moment of transcendent interest? What was the lookout doing? Oiling his pumps, they say,—oiling his pumps, gentlemen of the jury! a thing he had no more business to be doing than he had to be writing an epic poem of twenty-four lines." The association of ideas here between the oily engine man and the creation of an epic poem was one of the most extraordinary ever uttered; but its effect was decisive.
His generalship of a case throughout was Napoleonic. He was as careful as Bonaparte to leave no point unguarded, and to pass over nothing which might by possibility be turned to service. He never committed the blunder of despising his enemy, but always fought on the plan of supposing the adversary to be about to display all the possible power of his side. He never believed himself victorious till he was victorious. Until the last moment he fought hard and guardedly, with both prudence and power. His examination of witnesses in chief was admirable, and his cross-examination was a model. He had a profound knowledge of human nature, of the springs of human action, of the thoughts of human hearts. To get at these and make them patent to the jury, he would ask only a few telling questions,—a very few questions, but generally every one of them was fired point blank, and hit the mark.
In a sketch brief as this has necessarily been, it is impossible to do adequate justice to the wonderful powers of such a man as Rufus Choate. To attempt to condense into a few pages that which would fill volumes, is a hopeless task. To appreciate his gigantic intellectual strength and his transcendent genius, one must read his arguments and addresses. These may at first strike the reader as being to some extent extravagant and eccentric; but a second thought will reveal their compact strength.
Other jury advocates may have surpassed him in single points; but take him for all in all, we think he brought more varied and higher qualities, more intellectual weight of metal, to the bar than any other man of our time who has made legal advocacy the almost exclusive theatre of his energies and fame.
THE ROMANCE OF THE LAW REPORTS.
PROBABLY the last places in which most people would expect to find light reading are the libraries of the Inns of Court. It is not a little amusing to witness the looks of wonderment and awe with which the sisters, cousins, and aunts of the Bar gaze upon the well-filled shelves, which are the pride and glory of the Benchers, when they are being shown the libraries. Possibly the feminine mind is accustomed to judge by externals, and we can understand that the spectacle of some thousands of volumes bound in the orthodox law-calf is calculated to suggest reading of a somewhat solid type; to the uninitiated, too, books in bulk are always productive of bewilderment. Moreover, the popular notion of the nature of legal studies is practically limited to the Coke-upon-Littleton or Fearne-on-Remainders style of reading. Yet, as a matter of fact, the law reports are a mine of romance. In these musty and dusty volumes lies great wealth of legend and tradition. They faithfully and graphically record "all the changes and chances of this mortal life," and probably in no literature are the permutations and combinations of existence more thoroughly worked out. The heights and depths of
