Comparing Marshall and Randolph, Gilmer says:—
"The powers of these two gentlemen are strikingly contrasted by nature. In Mr. Marshall's speeches, all is reasoning; in Mr. Randolph's everything is declamation. The former scarcely uses a figure; the latter hardly an abstraction. One is awkward; the other graceful.
"One is indifferent as to his words, and slovenly in his pronunciation; the other adapts his phrases to the sense with poetick felicity; his voice to the sound with musical exactness.
"There is no breach in the train of Mr. Marshall's thoughts; little connection between Mr. Randolph's. Each has his separate excellence, but either is far from being a finished orator."[507]
Another invaluable first-hand analysis of Marshall's style and manner of argument is that of William Wirt, himself, in the vivacious descriptions of "The British Spy":—
"He possesses one original, and, almost supernatural faculty, the faculty of developing a subject by a single glance of his mind, and detecting at once, the very point on which every controversy depends. No matter what the question; though ten times more knotty than 'the gnarled oak,' the lightning of heaven is not more rapid nor more resistless, than his astonishing penetration.
"Nor does the exercise of it seem to cost him an effort. On the contrary, it is as easy as vision. I am persuaded that his eye does not fly over a landscape and take in its various objects with more promptitude and facility, than his mind embraces and analyses the most complex subject.
"Possessing while at the bar this intellectual elevation, which enabled him to look down and comprehend the whole ground at once, he determined immediately and without difficulty, on which side the question might be most advantageously approached and assailed.
"In a bad cause his art consisted in laying his premises so remotely from the point directly in debate, or else in terms so general and so spacious, that the hearer, seeing no consequence which could be drawn from them, was just as willing to admit them as not; but his premises once admitted, the demonstration, however distant, followed as certainly, as cogently, as inevitably, as any demonstration in Euclid."[508]
Marshall's supremacy, now unchallenged, at the Virginia bar was noted by foreign observers. La Rochefoucauld testifies to this in his exhaustive volumes of travel:—