called the criminal practice. It places the life and liberty of your fellow creatures in a good degree into your keeping. In capital cases, the responsibility is immense. The vital spark is committed to your hands, to preserve it alive or extinguish it forever One argument omitted, it is lost-one bold, fervid, eloquent appeal, and it is saved. To make such an appeal, the advocate must feel what he says; it must come from him with a heart heaving, and a lip quivering with genuine emotion; no sickly, morbid sentimentality will serve the great occasion. He must fully realize the prisoner's sad and helpless condition. The sweetness of human life--the value of the immortal soul that may be lost and ruined by being ushered prematurely into another world, with all its sins green and blooming upon it. Thoughts and sentiments like these, caught from the Book of God, that great fountain of knowledge of what pertains to the immortality and grandeur of the human soul, may enable him to rescue his victim from the deadly grasp of his pursuers. There is no prouder triumph, no sweeter pleasure than is enjoyed by the successful advocate in capital cases. He feels that he has baffled the malice of enemies; that he has snatched his client sometimes from the very jaws of perjury; that he has overcome the unconscious prejudices of both judge and jury; that by the magic power of eloquence he has converted the infuriated cry of the multitude for his crucifixion into a long and exulting shout at his deliverance.

Such

The natural ardor of youth will induce you to desire a large or full practice at the very beginning of your career. success would probably prove the grave of all high future eminence. Immersed in cases, many of them of no great importance, either as it relates to the amount involved or the compensation to be received, you would necessarily be deprived of the opportunity still farther to prosecute your studies, and to dive yet deeper into the profound mysteries of the law. More especially should not this fullness of practice be sought by undervaluing yourselves in the acceptance of fees below the usual standard of compensation. You must ever remember that you have not repaired to the precincts of the court for the mere purpose of making money-of growing rich upon the er

rors and vices of mankind. In so ignoble an aim sheer avarice could have pointed out to you many avenues more likely to

ensure your success.

To a genteel competency, even to affluence, you will be entitled; but let it be an agreeable incident, not the chief object of your toils and labors. The diffusion of knowledge, the elevation of the moral and intellectual standard of society, will be far more ennobling to you than the acquisition of sordid gain. It is difficult, perhaps impossible, to estimate the vast amount of useful knowledge disseminated by a good lawyer in the course of a long practice. His contributions to the judge on the bench will be felt and acknowledged by him in almost every trial. They will be seen in the profound attention of juries, and in their rendition of verdicts responsive to the intelligent and able argument he has submitted. The thousands who throng the courts from day to day, and who hang with eager attention on his speeches, return to their homes with minds improved, with sentiments of reverence and respect for the laws and institutions of their country enlarged, and with unbounded admiration for the advocate who has thus inspired them with fresh incentives to virtue and patriotism. To such a man the church looks when her altars are invaded. The State calls upon him when some great constitutional subject is to be expounded. Whatever individual in the city, the field, or the workshop, shall find his rights invaded or his liberty assailed, hastens to him for redress, and hails with confidence and joy the alacrity with which he espouses his cause. Such a man cannot remain a very long time in the practice. The flood-tide of public admiration will bear him upwards to the bench, to the senate chamber, or to be some high minister of State, enlarging the circle of his influence, and from a more commanding eminence, shedding the light of his devotion to learning, to justice and good morals farther and wider around him.

Gentlemen, we indulge the pleasing hope that each one of you is emulous of the fame of such a lawyer as we have just described. We suppose you to have overcome all the obstacles of preparatory study-that you have been fortunate in the selection of your place of residence, and that clients begin

to come freely if they do not throng about your office. Still we should be unkind and negligent of our duty on this occasion if we did not warn you that your trials and difficulties are not yet ended: a new class of difficulties, not at all resembling those we have heretofore considered. They result from the new associations which you must form on entering into the crowded temple of justice. Associations with those clients whose causes you have espoused-with the witnesses on both sides who are to testify in them--with the judge who is to preside over them—with the opposite counsel whose duty it will be to baffle you if he can at every turn, and drive you and your cause if possible, with mortification and much cost, out of How delicate, how various, how responsible these new relations! Were we to venture one general counsel, to be applied to this whole class thus grouped together, without entering on details, we would simply advise, that with every body -clients, witnesses, judges and adversary counsel--on all occasions, in consultation, on trial, during periods of defeat and disaster as well as of success and triumph, resolve to be the gentleman; to speak like one-to act like one-to feel like one. If native instinct does not prompt you to do so, let your high and polished education, and the proud inspirations of your profession, hold you up to the lofty elevation of the true gentleman. The true gentleman never passes a deliberate insult, and never submits to one. He exhibits no insolence to inferiors, and never allows it from either equals or superiors. He never will exult over a prostrate enemy, nor in hours of defeat and disaster, which must some time come to all practitioners, allow himself to become peevish and insulting to those whose good fortune it may have been to succeed over him.

Apply this general counsel in the first instance to your intercourse with your own clients. They have paid a most agreeable, perhaps the highest, compliment by selecting you as their advocate. Let then no clumsiness of narrative, no repetition of immaterial circumstances, no tediousness of detail in the history of their wrongs, induce you to grow impatient or uncivil. Had they the same powers of perspicuous condensation which it has cost you many years to acquire, they might not have stood in need of your services. Nor should you betray

or feel irritation when, in the pendency of a cause, your anxious and excited client shall too frequently enquire when it will be tried, or whether witnesses who have importuned him for the privilege may stay away till the morrow, or shall trouble you with the gossip of the streets about the probable result of the trial. In all such cases, the true gentleman listens with patience, answers with brevity, but kindness, and then passes on to his business; sympathizing with the anxiety of his client, who, whilst he annoys, yet honors and respects him.

There is, however, a single case which challenges from the counsel no such mildness and forbearance. When in the original consultation, or in some subsequent disclosure, the client shall avow that he knows that justice is not on his side, but that he is seeking an advantage which accident has laid in his way, in order to gratify some hateful passion of his nature; the pure-minded and virtuous advocate should spurn him from his presence, and withdraw from a cause rendered infamous by his own disclosures. We place upon record a case somewhat analagous to the counsel we have here given. An eminent lawyer, the late Judge Kelly, had been employed in a suit of slander, then pending in one of our courts. On the day of trial, his client met him in the street as he was passing to the court room, and remarked to him, that it was not so much to argue the main merits of his cause, that he had employed him, as it was to abuse and vilify the opposite party; "And so," replied the indignant counsel, "you mistook me for a blackguard, and I take you for a knave, and abandon you and your cause together."

Let us next apply this general, I might say this universal rule, to your examination and comments upon the testimony of witnesses. For the time being, they are, in a great degree, in your power. They are in some sort your prisoners, and therefore, upon the great law of honor, they are entitled to your forbearance, if not your protection. Wantonly to assail them, is cowardice. You have a right, and it is your duty, to subject them to the most searching enquiry-one which, by its closeness, would imply a high degree of suspicion. If, however, you detect no lurking or misleading partiality--no faint footprints of perjured knavery-having passed the ordeal of your

genius and talents, the witness is fairly entitled to your liberal and generous comments. You should cast no ungenerous sneers at him because he happens to be a witness on the opposite side. You may be wounding a sensibility as tender and delicate as your own, and inflicting a stain upon a character dear to him as life, and on a family whose head and representative he is, which no time can obliterate. If, however, the witness comes before the court under suspicious circumstances, and manifests little or no reverence for the high sanctions under which he is testifying-if he fairly subjects himself to the imputation of having given false testimony, then hold him up to the scorn and detestation of all mankind. Let no words of burning denunciation be left unuttered, which might prove a warning to others.

That you should always act the part of a polished and finished gentleman with your brethren of the profession, is so clear a duty that it need scarcely be mentioned. That you should do so with your adversary during the progress of a cause, is of the highest importance. Never take offence at what he may say or do, unless you are well satisfied that it was intended. He feels bound to exhibit much zeal in behalf of, and in some sort to identify himself with, his client. So do you; and whilst both shall do so within the bounds of professional courtesy, no offence ought to be taken by either. But it is a great law of the profession, that each attorney shall be left to fix for himself that degree of identity, and his adversary is never allowed to exceed it by attempting to attach to him any odium that may have fallen on his cause in the progress of the trial. Such an attempt, for its intrinsic injustice, would place you beyond the pale of professional honor, and ought to strike your name from the time-honored and unsullied roll, on which stand recorded the most illustrious names of ancient and of modern time.

But there is no one to whom uniform deference and respect should be so perpetually manifested as to the court. The Judge is the representative of that noble science which you venerate and honor. The ermine which adorns him should admonish you never to forget what is due to his exalted station and office. Approach him without presumptuous familiarity