He is
endeavoring to persuade and convince twelve men upon a question in
which they have no direct pecuniary or personal interest, and he must
more or less know and adapt his reasoning and his style to each
juror's mind. He should know no audience but the judge and these
twelve men. Retainers never seek and should not find counsel who
address jurors with classical or formal correctness. Napoleon, at St.
Helena, after reading one of his bulletins, which had produced the
great and exact effect for which he had intended it, exclaimed,--"And
yet they said I couldn't write!"
The true Yankee is suspicious of eloquence, and "stops a metaphor
like a suspected person in an enemy's country." A stranger, who
looked in for a few minutes upon one of Mr. Choate's jury-arguments,
and saw a lawyer with a lithe and elastic figure of about five feet
and eleven inches, with a face not merely of a scholarly paleness,
but wrinkled all over, and, as it were, scathed with thought and with
past nervous and intellectual struggles, yet still beautiful, with
black hair curling as if from heat and dewy from heightened action
and intensity of thought and feeling, and heard a clear, sympathetic,
and varying voice uttering rapidly and unhesitatingly, sometimes with
sweet caesural and almost monotonous cadences, and again with
startling and electric shocks, language now exquisitely delicate and
poetic, now vehement in its direct force, and again decorated and
wild with Eastern extravagance and fervor of fancy, would have
thought him the last man to have been born on New England soil, or to
convince the judgments of twelve Yankee jurors.
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