ity and character to the
place. His house still stands there, and ought to become the property of
the bar of this country. It is now a pretty old house, made of brick and
moderately roomy.

AT THE BAR.

The basis of Marshall's ability at the bar was his understanding. Not
highly read, he had one of those clear understandings which was equal to
a mill-pond of book-learning. His first practice was among his old
companions in arms, who felt that he was a soldier by nature, and one of
those who loved the fellowship of the camp better than military or
political ambition. Ragged and dissipated, they used to come to him for
protection, and at a time when imprisonment for debt and cruel
executions were in vogue. He not only defended them, but loaned them
money. He lost some good clients by not paying more attention to his
clothing, but these outward circumstances could not long keep back
recognition of the fact that he was the finest arguer of a case at the
Richmond bar, which then contained such men as Edmund Randolph, Patrick
Henry, and later, William Wirt. He was not an orator, did not cultivate
his voice, did not labor hard; but he had the power to penetrate to the
very center of the subject, discover the chief point, and rally all his
forces there. If he was defending a case, he would turn his attention to
some other than the main point, in order to let the prosecution assemble
its powers at the wrong place. With a military eye he saw the strong and
weak positions, and, like Rembrandt painting, he threw all his light on
the right spot. The character of his argument was a perspicuous, easy,
onward, accumulative, reasoning statement. He had but one gesture--to
lift up his hand and bring it down on the place before him constantly.
He discarded fancy or poetry in his arguments. William Wirt said of him,
in a sentence worth committing to memory as a specimen of good style in
the early quarter of this century: "All his eloquence consists in the
apparent deep self-conviction and emphatic earnestness of his manner;
the corresponding simplicity and energy of his style; the close and
logical connection of his thoughts, and the easy graduations by which he
opens his lights on the attentive minds of his hearers. The audience are
never permitted to pause for a moment. There is no stopping to weave
garlands of flowers to hang in festoons around a favorite argument. On
the contrary, every sentence is progressive; every idea sheds ne