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[39] snuff distributed over his face; and Judge Duval very like the late Vice-President. The Court was opened at half past 11, and Judge Livingston and Judge Marshall read written opinions on two causes.

After a few moments' pause, they proceeded to a case in which Dexter, Pinkney, and Emmett were counsel. It was a high treat, I assure you, to hear these three lawyers in one cause. Pinkney opened it as junior counsel to Emmett; and it was some time before I was so far reconciled to his manner as to be able to attend properly to his argument. His person, dress, and style of speaking are so different from anything which I ever saw before, that I despair of being able to give you an idea of him by description or comparison.

You must imagine, if you can, a man formed on nature's most liberal scale, who, at the age of fifty, is possessed with the ambition of being a pretty fellow, wears corsets to diminish his bulk, uses cosmetics, as he told Mrs. Gore, to smooth and soften a skin growing somewhat wrinkled and rigid with age, and dresses in a style which would be thought foppish in a much younger man. You must imagine such a man standing before the gravest tribunal in the land, and engaged in causes of the deepest moment; but still apparently thinking how he can declaim like a practised rhetorician in the London Cockpit, which he used to frequent Yet you must, at the same time, imagine his declamation to be chaste and precise in its language, and cogent, logical, and learned in its argument, free from the artifice and affectation of his manner, and, in short, opposite to what you might fairly have expected from his first appearance and tones. And when you have compounded these inconsistencies in your imagination, and united qualities which on common occasions nature seems to hold asunder, you will, perhaps, begin to form some idea of what Mr. Pinkney is.

He spoke about an hour, and was followed by Mr. Dexter, who, with that cold severity which seems peculiarly his own, alluded to the circumstance of his being left alone (his coadjutor not having come) to meet two such antagonists; then went on to admit all that Mr. Pinkney had said, and to show that it had nothing to do with the case in hand, and finally concluded by setting up an acute, and, as I suppose it will prove, a successful defence.

Mr. Emmett closed the cause in a style different from either of his predecessors. He is more advanced in life than they are; but he is yet older in sorrows than in years. There is an appearance of premature age in his person, and of a settled melancholy in his countenance, which may be an index to all that we know of himself and his family. At any rate, it wins your interest before he begins to speak.


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