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placently upon cotton-bales, and little else; and as we seem almost to hear the quick rejoinder, the well-timed and cutting rebuke, under whose infliction some as yet uninitiated and offending wight slinks cowardly off, we are reminded of a trespassing cur, who, startled at the growl of the chained mastiff he has aroused, will be careful in future to learn the length of the chain before he ventures near. We can imagine, too, how impatiently he awaits those distant honors of which he must at least faintly foresee he is to be the future proprietor. We seem to note the very foot-prints smoothly worn by his nervous tread, in restless round, over the floor of his narrow prison, through whose bars he even now glares, almost fiercely, in anticipation of the rioting feast that awaits him. And these days shall not last always. A consuming thirst is within him, an appetite sharpened by long protracted fasting. The door is at length thrown open, and with tense nerve and lithe limb, at a single leap, he bounds into the very middle of the arena. Hardly has his foot touched the sand, when the huzzas of the assembled multitude proclaim his triumph. With scarce a feeble show of resistance, the victim has yielded. He now knows the taste of blood, and he likes it well. The "stump," in these days, is in all its glory. No longer ago, even, than his time, politics were possessed of a vitality which seems almost impossible to one who surveys their present state of apathy and death. Jacksonism was a very different sort of thing from that miserable drab called Fusionism, at once the parent and the child of imbecility. Politics, too, in Mississippi, was a very different thing from politics in the older States. It was almost the only channel in which the thoughts of nineteen-twentieths of the population strongly flowed, and here it was they made their nearest approximation to anything like intellectual activity or enjoyment. Almost every man was a tolerable politician, and a notice of a barbacue, when the first course was to consist of a stirring speech, was sure to attract men whose minds would have nearly perished of starvation, but for the provision thus made for them.

And now the name of PRENTISS gave to these meetings an

additional attraction, and the more so, when it came to be known how well he understood, and how capable he was of supplying their wants. The racy anecdote—the piquant jest-the keen irony-the scathing denunciation-the withering rebuke-the striking metaphor-the apt illustration, all which, as everybody knows, he scattered right and left in such prodigal profusion, went to make up that highly seasoned dish his hearers loved so well. But even on occasions like these, favorable as they doubtless were to the exhibition of skill, and grace, and ingenuity, rather than of sterner qualities, and adapted as they were to develop those which may safely be called inferior gifts, that principle of heartiness in his nature already alluded to, was still asserting its supremacy, and compelled him, in spite of himself, if I may use so strong an expression, to have an aim in view, and to keep his eye upon it. The river flowed, it is true, through a country of tropical luxuriance, in whose bosom were reflected the warmth and the glow of a southern sky, and the gorgeous array of rose-tinted clouds; its banks on either side exhibiting in endless profusion flowers of every varied hue. But for all that the river did not stop its flowing. It still rolled on in undiminished volume, in its own deep, well-defined, appointed channel, a full and sweeping tide, to its appointed end.

It was, then, in the field of oratory, emphatically of popular oratory, that your brother won his spurs. First in order of time came the exhibition, perhaps the development, of those lighter and more graceful accomplishments supposed to be characteristic of the orator, rather than those severer and sterner qualities that belong to the lawyer and advocate. But coming first in the order of time, they fixed the first estimate of his character; and it is not too much to say, that the brilliant reputation he had already won in that capacity, stood in the way of his adding to it another equally brilliant, which by common consent must rest upon attributes not only differing from, but supposed to be incompatible with, those already exhibited. It is necessary that his former achievments in a former field should be forgotten, before men will believe him capable of new ones in a new field; and even when the proof is forthcoming, the mind hesitates to

let go its first impression. They who have only just turned admiringly away from witnessing the dextrous sleight of Saladin, will be slow to believe that the same arm will presently swing with equal ease the battle-axe of a Richard.

These, then, were the circumstances under which the question before named had its origin, and we need not deny that it was a natural question. That a symmetrical development is the exception, and not the rule, we may safely admit, and that an unusual development in one direction is primâ facie evidence of a deficiency elsewhere, we may also admit. But the evidence is primâ facie only. Diverse as two sets of faculties may be, there is surely in the necessity of the case no such antagonism between them as to preclude the possibility of both being found united in great perfection in the same individual. True indeed it is, that such a union is not often found; but Nature loves to disappoint our complacent calculations-to show her disdain for those set formularies by which we seek to limit her freedom, and her contempt for that exact, slavish, narrowminded criticism, which, remembering that the dray-horse is not suited for the turf, would apply the analogy, at once absurd and degrading, to the soul of man.

And since the estimate I am attempting to present of your brother as a man, is designed to be only subsidiary to my main purpose of showing what might, à priori, have been expected of him as a lawyer, I remark further, that even were it true that a diversity of gifts is to be had only at the price of possessing some of them in an inferior degree, it is still a price that may well be paid in a profession like that of the law, where the diversity of which I speak, contributing largely as it does towards a common and partial success, is absolutely indispensable in order to attain the highest. If there be any into whose net nothing comes amiss, it is the lawyer; and to him, with greater propriety than to almost any other, may be offered the admonition given to his son by the thrifty husbandman, "to waste nothing, since at some time a place shall be found for the most worthless scrap."

Happily, however, no such sacrifice as that just alluded to was

required of your brother. As was said at the commencement of these remarks, there was found in him a remarkable, and at the same time most healthful union of manifold attributes, subsisting not at variance with, or to the prejudice of each other, but dwelling together in a bond of fraternal amity-a league for mutual aid. If he possessed a mind eminently graceful, capable of investing the most rugged and difficult paths with the charms of poesy, it was a mind, too, that gave no sign of fainting in that fiercer grapple-those closer encounters, to which the massive strength of a sinewy intellect alone is equal. If with despotic energy and license, he subsidized the universe to his imagery, he no less submissively acknowledged the authority of a rigid taste, which always and instantly discarded mere tinkling gauds and meretricious ornaments. If by the aid of his imagination the path of his argument was attended by a brilliancy almost dazzling, it could not be said of it, as was once remarked of a production of the celebrated John Foster, "all luminous, but no light." There was both light and heat, and if the first ever seemed in excess, we should remember-to recur to the illustration of the blow-pipe-that it was steel which was burning. Was he gifted with a fluency of speech not only far beyond the common average, but to an extent rarely witnessed even in the most distinguished speakers, it still was not a fluency that obscured or kept back his meaning; but so swiftly obedient did each word answer to the gentle summons-so orderly and so gracefully did it fall into place, that whole sentences seemed to present themselves as so many many-syllabled words, ready formed to his mind.

Having taken this very general, and necessarily imperfect survey of his character as a man, with a view to the à priori argument which it furnishes as to what might be expected of his chances as a lawyer, there remains but little room, and but little necessity too, for inquiring how far the argument is sustained by the facts in his history. But as the sketch may appear to be incomplete without them, I proceed to add a few words illustrative of this point. And in this connection, it is all-important to bear in mind how utterly dissimilar are all the accidents upon which rest, and by whose aid are built up, the reputations

respectively of the lawyer and the orator. To the highest efforts of the former-those efforts upon which his reputation must chiefly rest--who, and how many are the witnesses? The judges on the bench, in some instances the parties interested in the suit, and perhaps a score more or less of his professional brethren, his competitors in the race, in a vast majority of cases compose his audience. The question at issue-involving as it may momentous rights-has for the most part only a local importance, very rarely extends beyond the limits of the State where it arises, and is totally destitute of that general, national interest which attaches to those great political truths that so frequently fall within the province of the public speaker. A legal reputation, then, which extends beyond the boundaries of the State where it is acquired, must necessarily be of slow growth and difficult acquisition. But the same condition of things which renders its acquisition slow and difficult, renders the proof upon which it rests also difficult. But I must not enlarge. The allusion once made, it can hardly fail to suggest a multitude of similar reflections all to the same purpose, which taken together fully explain the inequality of proof in the two cases, and show that any inference drawn from it-in this particular instanceprejudicial to your brother's reputation in that department where the proof is least accessible, would be erroneous.

And an examination of the judicial records of the State where he spent the larger portion of his professional life, would abundantly and unequivocally corroborate the à priori view already presented. The Mississippi bar at this time was distinguished for its ability. The great financial embarrassment, commencing in 1835, and extending through a series of years, the insolvent or crippled condition of Southern merchants, resulting from this embarrassment and forcing Northern creditors to resort to compulsory measures to recover their debts; above all, the explosion of the most extensive, and extensively corrupt and fraudulent banking system ever known, which added greatly to the already existing entanglement and perplexity-these things altogether furnished a most fruitful source of contention which the courts were called upon to adjust. The amount of property thus at stake was immense. Litigation

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