When he started at the bar, however, he
had not acquired the tact to impress an ordinary assembly. In one case
which he conducted before the General Assembly of the Kirk of
Scotland, when defending a parish minister threatened with deposition
for drunkenness and unseemly behaviour, he certainly missed the proper
tone,--first receiving a censure for the freedom of his manner in
treating the allegations against his client, and then so far
collapsing under the rebuke of the Moderator, as to lose the force and
urgency necessary to produce an effect on his audience. But these were
merely a boy's mishaps. He was certainly by no means a Heaven-born
orator, and therefore could not expect to spring into exceptionally
_early_ distinction, and the only true reason for his relative failure
was that he was so full of literary power, and so proudly impatient of
the fetters which prudence seemed to impose on his extra-professional
proceedings, that he never gained the credit he deserved for the
general common sense, the unwearied industry, and the keen
appreciation of the ins and outs of legal method, which might have
raised him to the highest reputation even as a judge.
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