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.
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