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THE OLD
MEMBERS OF THE CALHOUN AND KALAMAZOO
COUNTY BARS BY A. D. P. VAN BUREN
Perhaps no profession abounds with so great a number of social, companionable fellows; free lances, ready at any time to discuss, in their shrewd, quaint, off hand manner, the faults and foibles of mankind, especially of that class with whom they have been in such close intimacy. And what a fund of material for the raconteur, rich in anecdote and incident, they have gathered from their experience in "trying cases, " which, as they meet in the bar room, or congregate in the courts, they weave into admirable stories. A knot of old lawyers thus assembled reminds one of a set of players in the green room, breaking their "unpremeditated jokes in the interval of business. " And, what a contrast between such an encounter of rival wits and the after meeting of these same rivals, in an encounter of serious and almost tragic earnestness on the boards. The old lawyer seems to resort to colloquial life for diversion, or for relaxation from the strain of hard labor. Here he finds leisure, and a tonic that invigorates him for his accustomed business routine and severe mental contests in the court room. But the old stagers are gone. Their eloquence is a thing of the past. The old forums, now occupied by their successors, no longer echo with the brilliant oratory of the old days. The decline of oratory in America is very apparent. There is scarcely a lingering trace in our courts of the forensic eloquence once so* potent at the bar of Lexington in Henry Clay's best day, or at the Mississippi bar in S. S. Prentiss' day, or at the Columbia county (N. Y. ) bar in Elisha Williams' time. Not that we now lack genius or talent in the profession of law, but that there is a lack of enthusiasm to kindle that genius and talent into a blaze of eloquence. Not that there is a lack of logic or learning at the bar of to-day, but that we need the intense passion to set that logic and learning on fire, before we can have genuine eloquence. ' Bradley, Stuart, Littlejohn, Chipman, Church, when aroused, and Van Arman at his best, were eloquent men. They, as younger men, belonged to the epoch of oratory we have referred to, and may be said to have been among the last orators of this period of eloquent speech.
Michigan
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