McDuffie's personalities gives masterly exhibition,) we are
thankful that his sensibility was so exquisite and his temper so
sweet, that he was a delight instead of a terror, and that he was
loved instead of feared. Delicacy should be commensurate to power,
that each may be complete. It would seem almost impossible that a
lawyer with a practice truly immense, passing a great part of his
life in public and heated contests and in discussing and often
severely criticizing the motives and conduct of parties and
witnesses, should not make many enemies; but he was so essentially
modest, simple, gentlemanly, and tender, so considerate of the
feelings of others, so evidently trying to mitigate the pain which it
was often his duty to inflict, that we never heard of his searching
and subtile examination of witnesses, or his profound and exhaustive
analysis of character and motive, or his instantaneous and
irresistible retorts upon counsel, creating or leaving behind him, in
the bar or out of it, malice or ill-will in a human being. One of the
most touching and beautiful things we ever saw in a court-room would
have been in other hands purely painful and repulsive.
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