self from abandonment to some part of his case or
argument to guide and mould the whole, so, going into his library, he
could, as completely, for minutes or for hours, banish and forget his
anxieties and dramatic excitements, and pass into the cooling air and
loftier and purer stimulations of the great minds of other times and
countries and of the great questions that overhang us all. His mind,
capacious, informed, wise, doubting, "looking before and after," here
found its highest pleasures, and its little, but most loved repose.
"The more a man does, the more he can do"; and, notwithstanding his
immense practice, and that by physical and intellectual constitution
he couldn't _half_ do anything, he never allowed a day of his life to
pass, without reading some, if ever so little, Greek, and it was a
surprise to those who knew him well to find that he kept up with
everything important in modern literature. Rising and going to bed
early, taking early morning exercise, having a strong constitution,
though he was subject to sudden but quickly overcome nervous and
bilious illness, wasting no time, caring nothing for the coarser
social enjoyments, leading, out of court, a self-withdrawn and
solitary life, though playful, genial, and stimulating in social
intercourse, with a memory as tenacious and ready as his apprehension
was quick, with high powers of detecting, mastering, arranging, and
fusing his acquisitions, and of penetrating to the centre of
historical characters and events,--it is not strange, though he may
not have been critically exact and nice in questions of quantity and
college exercises, that his scholarship was large and available in
all its higher aims and uses.

It will naturally be asked, how such qualities as we have described
manifested themselves in character, and in political and other fields
of thought and exertion. Fair abilities, zeal, industry, a sanguine
temperament, and some special bent or fitness for the profession of
the law, will make a good and successful lawyer. Such a man's mind
will be entirely in and limited by the immediate case in hand, and
virtually his intellectual life will be recorded in his cases. But
with Mr. Choate, the dramatic genius and large scope and vision which
made him superior to other great advocates at the same time prevented
his overestimating the value of his work in kind or degree, showed
him how ephemeral are the actual triumphs and how small the real
value of near