CHAPTER IV.

1792-1794.

HIS LIBRARY.-FIRST CASE.-DIFFICULTIES ATTENDING IT IS ASSISTED BY A FRIEND.-A TRIUMPH.-HIS COMPANIONABLE QUALITIES.-HABITS OF DESULTORY STUDY.-PRACTISES IN ALBEMARLE.

We have the young practitioner now fairly embarked upon the sea of his profession.

There is good authority for saying that his library and professional equipment were not of the most various or effective description. He has told the story himself, that his whole magazine of intellectual artillery, at this period, comprised no other munitions than a copy of Blackstone, two volumes of Don Quixotte and a volume of Tristram Shandy. Behind these, there was, probably, a twelve-months study, partly, no doubt, travelled along the flinty highway of Coke and Littleton, but, we may be pretty confident in the conjecture, not less diligently conversant with the secret and pleasant byways of Tom Jones, Roderick Random and their kindred adventurers.

He was now upon a theatre to which he had anxiously aspired, and one which would surely try his metal. He came to this probation under some fearful disadvantages;-that is to say, with no great store of legal provision, and with his constitutional timidity still unconquered.

Only those who have gone through the ordeal of public contest, with this weight upon their shoulders, can estimate the oppression, the horror, I might say-of such a drawback. The ordinary pursuits of business-life give one no insight into the sufferings of the public speaker who is compelled to struggle against the reluctance of a diffident nature. The young hero of the buskin when first brought to the footlights to confront that combined Hydra and Briareus, an assembled audience, can tell a piteous tale of terror, if asked to describe his emotions. The novitiate of a legislative hall may give an interesting experience to the same

point. But, more severe than either, is the experiment of the disconsolate barrister when he rises, for the first time, to discourse the most difficult and perplexing of all human lore in the presence of the frowning and solemn majesty of the bench; or when he faces that personal embodiment of popular justice, the twelve "probos et legales homines," which the traverser who "puts himself upon his country," is taught to believe, by a violent fiction, to be the country itself, but in which the maiden orator sees only a most formidable fragment of it. The young votary who, for the first time, stands in this presence, surrounded by its usual and characteristic auditory drawn thither by that insatiable love of the scenery and incident of the judicial drama, which is prescriptively the passion of the multitude; when he sees the compact pavement of heads extending into every nook within the horizon of his vision, with their multitudinous eyes concentred upon one focus, and that focus himself,-all eager to hear every word, the general curiosity overcoming all uneasiness of attitude, all discomfort of the heated atmosphere, all hunger and thirst-what is there in Fuseli's imagination of nightmare to give a more frightful picture of the oppressed brain and bewildered sight than this spectacle, presented to a shy and unpractised youth ineffectually laboring, in advance, to repress the throes of a consitutional diffidence!*

Such are the trials familiar to those whose professions compel them to encounter this discipline.

Wirt's enunciation was still defective: it was confused and hurried. His voice, when undisturbed by that timidity which deprived him of his command over it, was rich and melodious. His person was at this time quite as prepossessing as it was remarked to be in his later manhood. His manners were well adapted to make friends.

One such scene I have witnessed, and I remember the agony with which the confused novitiate arose a second time-having been but a moment before compelled to take his seat in the hope to collect his routed thoughts. His second essay was not more fortunate than the first. He stood silent for a brief space, and at the end was able to say-"Gentlemen, I declare to Heaven, that if I had an enemy upon whose head I would invoke the most cruel torture, I could wish him no other fate than to stand where I stand now." Curiously enough the sympathy which this appeal brought him, seemed almost instantly to give him strength. A short pause was followed by another effort which was completely, and even triumphantly successful.

His first appearance at the bar is described by his biographer pretty much from his own account of the incident. It was well remembered amongst Mr. Wirt's early friends. Luckily for him, this first accost was attended by some excitements which overmastered his shyness and reserve, and saved him many pains. The occasion and its events are set forth with so much interest in Cruse's memoir, that I take pleasure in offering his description of it in his own words.

"With these advantages and defects, such as they were," says the memoir, "he was to begin the competitions of the bar in a part of the country where he was quite unknown, and where much talent had pre-occupied the ground, with experience on its side and acquaintance with the people and their affairs. There is no part of the world where, more than in Virginia, these embarrassments would be lessened to a new adventurer; as there is no where a more courteous race of gentlemen accessible to the prepossessions which merit excites. There was, however, another embarrassment; our lawyer had no cause. But he encountered here a young friend much in the same circumstances, but who had a single case, which he proposed to share with Wirt, as the means of making a joint debut. With this small stock in trade they went to attend the first County Court.

"Their case was one of joint assault and battery, with joint judgment against three, of whom two had been released subsequently to the judgment, and the third, who had been taken in execution and imprisoned, claimed the benefit of that release as enuring to himself. Under these circumstances, the matter of discharge having happened since the judgment, the old remedy was by the writ of audita querela. But Mr. Wirt and his associates had learned from their Blackstone that the indulgence of courts in modern times, in granting summary relief, in such cases, had, in a great measure superseded the use of the old writ; and accordingly presented their case in the form of a motion.

"The motion was opened by Wirt's friend with all the alarm of a first essay. The bench was then, in Virginia County Courts, composed of the ordinary justices of the peace; and the elder members of the bar, by a usage, the more necessary from the constitution of the tribunal, frequently interposed as amici curiæ, or informers of the conscience of the court. It appears that on the

case being opened, some of these customary advisers denied that a release to one, after judgment, released the other, and they denied, also, the propriety of the form of proceeding. The ire of our beginner was kindled by this reception of his friend, and by this voluntary interference with their motion; and when he came to reply he forgot the natural alarms of the occasion, and maintained his point with recollection and firmness. This awaked the generosity of an elder member of the bar, a person of consideration in the neighborhood and a good lawyer. He stepped in as an auxiliary, remarking that he also was amicus curia, and, perhaps, as much entitled to act as such as others; in which capacity he would state his conviction of the propriety of the motion, and that the court was not at liberty to disregard it; adding that its having come from a new quarter gave it but a stronger claim on the candor and urbanity of a Virginian bar. The two friends carried their point in triumph, and the worthy ally told his brethren, in his plain phrase, that they had best make fair weather with one who promised to be a thorn in their side. The advice was, we dare say, unnecessary. The bar of that county wanted neither talent nor courtesy; and the champion having vindicated his pretensions to enter the list, was thenceforward engaged in many a courteous passage at arms.

"The auxiliary mentioned in the above anecdote, was the late General John Miner, of Fredericksburg, of whom Wirt, in subsequent years, often spoke with strong gratitude and esteem. 'There was never,' he says, 'a more finished and engaging gentleman, nor one of a more warm, honest and affectionate heart. He was as brave a man and as true a patriot as ever lived. He was a most excellent lawyer too, with a most persuasive flow of eloquence, simple, natural and graceful, and most affecting wherever there was room for pathos; and his pathos was not artificial rhetoric; it was of that true sort which flows from a feeling heart and a noble mind. He was my firm and constant friend from that day through a long life; and took occasion, several times in after years, to remind me of his prophecy, and to insist on my obligation to sustain his 'prophetic reputation.' He left a large and most respectable family, and lives embalmed in the hearts of all who knew him.""

In this his first adventure, he was more successful than those who knew him best had expected. He was indebted for this, in no small degree, to the lucky accident of having his temper aroused for the conflict. We may suppose, too, that the aid and comfort of that powerful ally to whom the story refers, was felt, not less in the kindness and encouragement of a friendly countenance bestowed upon the young pleader at his first rising, than in the substantial assistance given before the trial was ended. The sympathy of a good natured face, the warm gaze of a friendly eye, and the silent gesture of approbation and assent are potent antidotes to the alarms which players are wont to call "the stage fright," and what, in the Hall of Themis, we may term, in analogy to this, "the fright of the bar."

The ordeal, however, was past. The ice was broken, and the new barrister felt that he might thenceforth walk into the courts unquestioned.

Those who knew Wirt in that day were accustomed to speak of him as a gay and happy companion, careless somewhat of the labor of his profession, and more disposed to cultivate the congenial pleasures of good fellowship than to pursue, by any painful toil, the road to fame. It was therefore usual to say, that, at this period of his life, he gave no very recognizable pledge of that eminence which he afterwards attained. It may be true that his studies were not so conversant with the deeps of legal science, as one might demand from the ambitious lawyer, and even that he doffed aside the sometimes admonishing hopes of a solid professional fame; but it can scarcely be true that an active and apprehensive mind, such as his, was suffered either to rest for want of use, or to devote itself to frivolous or useless subjects. We have many evidences in the letters and other papers which have reached us, that the most absorbing passion of his nature was a longing for that renown which was chiefly to be won in forensic triumphs. We may confess it to be equally true that there is apparent, in all that has transpired, regarding this portion of the life of Mr. Wirt, a sad want of system in his study. There are minds, however, of the very highest power, which seem to reject system with instinctive aversion, and to pursue their aims with what might be called a capricious versatility of study; which, being susceptible of vivid impressions from the objects upon which they are employed, are VOL. 1-6