lso one of the very best
examples of Everett, who, with all his fertility of original
genius, borrowed so much, and so enriched and improved everything
that he borrowed. Cicero said of Antonius:

"Omnia veniebant Antonio in mentem; eaque suo quaeque loco,
ubi pluimum proficere et valere possent, ut ab imperatore
equites pedites levis armatura, sic ab illo in maxume opportunis
orationis partibus conlocabantur."

Now see what Everett does with this thought in his eulogy,
spoken in Faneuil Hall, the week after Choate's death:

"He is sometimes satisfied, in concise epigrammatic clauses,
to skirmish with his light troops, and drive in the enemy's
outposts. It is only on fitting occasions, when great principles
are to be vindicated, and solemn truths told, when some moral
or political Waterloo or Solferino is to be fought, that he
puts on the entire panoply of his gorgeous rhetoric. It is
then that his majestic sentences swell to the dimensions
of his majestic thought; then it is that we hear afar off the
awful roar of his rifled ordnance; and when he has stormed
the heights, and broken the centre, and trampled the squares,
and turned the staggering wings of the adversary, that he
sounds his imperial clarion along the whole line of battle,
and moves forward with all his hosts, in one overwhelming
charge."

One of the most remarkable advocates of my day was Sidney
Bartlett. He seldom addressed juries, and almost never public
assemblies. He was a partner of Chief Justice Shaw before
1830. He argued cases before the Supreme Court of the United
States and before the Supreme Court of Massachusetts after
he was ninety. He cared for no other audience. He had a
marvellous compactness of speech, and a marvellous sagacity
in seeing the turning-point of a great question. He found
the place where the roads diverged, got the Court's face set
in the right direction, and then stopped. He would argue
in ten or fifteen minutes a point where some powerful antagonist
like Curtis or Choate would take hours to reply. I once told
him that his method of argument was to that of ordinary lawyers
like logarithms to ordinary mathematics. He seemed pleased
with the compliment, and said, "Yes, I know I argue over their
heads. The Chief Justice told me he wished I would talk a
little longer." I do not know that Bartlett ought to be reckoned
among orators. But he had a great power of convincing, and
giving his intellectual delight t