ormulas of the
law burst their mouldy cerements and leap forth into life, tender
and beautiful to protect, or awful to warn or punish. Mysteries are
unfolded, secrets reveal themselves, hidden things are proclaimed, and
courts and juries, awed and abashed, yet elevated and inspired, accept
and act upon his conclusions as infallible. For one hour he touches
the pinnacle of human achievement.

After all, the effectiveness of the advocate is not so much in what
he says, as in the way he says it. One man with real strength arises
outside, and batters and bangs with real power, deals forcible blows,
and yet does not carry his point; while another, with less intellect,
gets up within the charmed circle of the sympathies, by the warm,
human side of a jury, whom they don't think of resisting, and could
not if they tried.

The speaker usually rises a little outside of the subject, on a sort
of neutral ground, and Bart made the transit of this, naturally and
simply. He graphically explained to the jury those legal phantoms,
John Doe and Richard Roe; how Richard was always maltreating and
dispossessing John, and how John was always going to law with Dick,
and was hence an immense favorite with lawyers; and how, when Dick is
sued, he always, having got up a muss, notifies the actual party in
possession, and who ought to have been sued; tells him he must look
out for himself, and hurries off to find where John has squat himself
into other property; and thereupon he thrusts him out again, and so
on. It was a fiction invented by the English lawyers to try the right
of two parties to the possession of real estate; because they could
do it in no other way, and the 4th of July had not freed us from this
relic of antiquity. The issue here was, whether Fisk had a better
right to the possession of this land, than had Cole; and whatever did
not in some way help to enlighten them on that issue, had no business
to be said at all.

In a few happy strokes, he sketched the defendant buying this land,
packing up, bidding adieu to the dear down-country home, and his
toilsome journey into the woods, arrival, and purchase, and poor,
hard life of toil and deprivation: here was his all. He sketched the
plaintiff as a well or ill-to-do gentleman, of a speculative turn of
mind, whose eye coveted the rich bottom-lands of the defendant; and
finding him helpless and poor, searched out the weak place in his
title, hunted up obscure relatives, and procure