How many advocates weary juries into forgetfulness by long-continued repetition of their cross-examination, often giving a clever witness opportunities of rehabilitating himself, forgetting Josh Billings’s immortal advice: “When you strike ile, stop boring; many a man has bored clean thru and let the ile run out of the bottom.”
But whatever sound maxims may be cited, it is to be feared that there will always be a line of advocacy answering to the definition of length without breadth. Nor will the old story, first told, perhaps, of Chief Baron Kelly, ever want a new and even more long-winded hero. A legal comrade of Kelly on circuit dreamed that they appeared before the tribunal on the Great Day of Judgment. Upon Kelly’s name being called, and his being put up in the dock, the recording angel arose and shouted out in a loud voice, “No other case will be taken to-day!”
Lest I should provoke a similar reproof from a devout reader, let me leave the Lamp of Wit upon the altar of justice and retire from the pulpit.
V
THE LAMP
OF ELOQUENCE
V
THE LAMP OF ELOQUENCE
The eloquence of advocates of the past must largely be taken on trust. There is no evidence of it that is not hearsay. For, though we have the accounts of ear-witnesses of the eloquence of Erskine, Scarlett, Choate, or Lincoln, and can ourselves read their speeches, the effect of their eloquence does not remain. We are told about it by those who experienced it, and can believe or not as we choose. It is the same with actors. It requires genius to describe acting, so that the reader captures some of the experience of the witness. Fielding did it for Garrick when he took Partridge to see Hamlet; Charles Lamb can feature the old actors for us on the screen of the written page; but how few real records remain of the eloquence of the advocates of old!
Perhaps the best way to realise their powers is to read their speeches aloud; but even then they seem diffuse and out of proportion to the present interest in the litigation. The most eloquent advocacy that is reported in print is to be found not in law reports, but in fiction—in the speeches of Portia and Serjeant Buzfuz, for instance, where for all time the world continues hanging on the lips of the advocate in excited sympathy with the client.
There are some who think that rhetoric at the Bar has fallen in esteem. The modern world has certainly lost its taste for sweet and honeyed sentences, and sets a truer value on fine phrases and the fopperies of the tongue; but there will always be a high place in the profession for the man who speaks good English with smooth elocution, and whose speeches fall within Pope’s description:
Fit words attended on his weighty sense,
And mild persuasion flow’d in eloquence.