Rufus Choate. the city or the State only, but of the whole nation. So let the statue stand, as notice to all who seek to enter here, that the first requisite of all true renown in our noble profession — renown not for a day or a life only, but for generations — is Character. And next I would point to it as a monu ment to self-discipline; and here he was in deed without a rival, You may search the biographies of all the great lawyers of the world, and you will find none that surpassed, I think none that approached him in this rare quality and power. The advocate who would control others must first, last and al ways control himself. " Every educated man," he once said, " should remember that • great parts are a great trust,' " and, con scious of his talents and powers, he surely never forgot that. You may be certain that after his distinguished college career at Dart mouth — first always where there was none second — after all that the law school, and a year spent under the tuition of William Wirt, then at the zenith of his fame, could lend to his equipment, and after the five years of patient study in his office at Danvers, where he was the only lawyer, he brought to the subsequent actual practice of his profession an outfit of learning, of skill and research, which most of us would have thought sufficient for a lifetime. But with him it was only the beginning. His power of labor was inexhaustible, and down to the last hour of his professional life he never relaxed the most acute and searching study, not of the case in hand only, but of the whole body of the law, and of everything in history, poetry, philosophy and literature that could lend anything of strength and lustre to the performance of his professional duties. His hand, his head, his heart, his imagination were never out of training. Think of a man already walking the giddy heights of assured success, already a senator of the United States from Massachusetts, or even years afterwards, when the end of his professional labors was already in sight,
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schooling himself to daily tasks in law, in rhetoric, in oratory, seeking always for the actual truth, and for the " best language " in which to embody it — the "precisely one right word " by which to utter it — think of such a man, with all his ardent taste for the beautiful in every domain of human life, go ing through the grinding work of taking each successive volume of the Massachusetts Reports as they came out, down to the last year of his practice, and making a brief in every case in which he had not been himself engaged, with new researches to see how he might have presented it, and thus to keep up with the procession of the law. Verily "all things are full of labor; man cannot utter it : the eye is not satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing." So let no man seek to follow in his foot steps, unless he is ready to demonstrate in his own person, that infinite work is the only touchstone of the highest standing in the law, and that the sluggard and the slothful who enter here must leave all hope behind. Again we hail this statue, which shall stand here as long as bronze shall endure, as the fit representative of one who was i'he per fect embodiment of absolute loyalty to his profession, in the highest and largest and noblest sense; and if I might presume to speak for the whole American Bar, I would say that in its universal judgment he stands in this regard preeminent, yes, foremost still. Truly he did that pious homage to the Law, which Hooker exacted for her from all things in Heaven and Earth, and was gov erned by that ever-present sense of debt and duty to the profession, of which Lord Bacon spoke. He entered her Courts as a High Priest, arrayed and equipped for the most sacred offices of the Temple. He be longs to the heroic age of the Bar, and, after the retirement of Webster, he was chief among its heroes. He was the center of a group of lawyers and advocates, the ablest and the strongest we have known, by whose aid the chief tribunal of this ancient com
