Here, in whatever of opportunity can well come to a junior lawyer at his mere outset, he at once took, by the richness and force of his oratorical powers, his ample command of the theoretic and historical parts of his profession, and the variety and splendor of his general attainments, an easy superiority over all rivalry of the young, and a high place in everything but what practice alone can give, among a bar numbering the strong veteran names of Petigru, King, Drayton, Hayne and Grimké.

In short, the very brilliancy with which our young jurist burst out from the first was, amidst the general suffrage of the better sort, abundantly attended with what he bore about him nothing else to provokethat vulgar malignity of unworthy competitors, who, spiteful and many as they are puny, muster, like Lilliputians, against a Gulliver landed on their shores; dread in him the subverter of their pigmy empire; and rest not, intermit not their small annoyance, until they expel him from their island. 'Tis but the old history of bright parts: it was Sheridan's, before it was Legaré's.

Guileless in his entire character, simple but reserved in his manners, secluded by his tastes; destitute-even if he had not scorned them— of the arts of mere popularity, and without an idea of rising except by absolute merit, he opposed to this sort of cabal nothing but that which, if it vanquishes it at last, must get the better of it slowly—a calm constancy, a severe application to whatever business came, a steady attention to the completion of his technical knowledge. A very remarkable degree of reputation, he had at once created: but employment, which nothing but time can bring about at a bar thronged with competitors and in the possession of able and established pleaders such as we have mentioned, came slowly and (as we have said) with even serious impediments from those qualities as a speaker and a scholar, of which the very lustre often serves, without the aid of envy, to spread a common impression that he who shines in such bright things must be too fine and too lofty ever to make a skilful attorney. That sagacious thing, established opinion-sister to another of equal wit and liberality, which calls itself march of mind— has, in a word, fixed its standard of what the black-letter lawyer shall be permitted to know; insists upon punishing him who visibly exceeds it; and yields not its intelligent repugnance, except most slowly to the compulsion of a powerful will and high parts.

Yet the leading legal examples before the eyes of the crowd thus shutting or made to shut them to the professional merits of Legaré, were such as might have taught them a better judgment. Not only

was his singular ability recognized, among his compeers of the bar, by each much in the proportion as he had ability himself, but it should have been seen that the juridical eminence of the chief of them was almost precisely in the rate of his elegant attainments.

It will have been seen that, besides his admirable training in all the higher auxiliar arts and studies, Legaré had not chosen to appear in the tribunals until he had devoted-without reckoning his severity of application—some two or three or four times the usual space to direct preparation, aided by advantages of instruction as unusual. Sad must it be to have toiled, as he had done, perfectly to qualify one's-self, and then to find that the very fact of that toil and its noble but painful fruits creates a prejudice against one and condemns him to a tardier success. To him fervid with every lofty aspiration, enamoured of genuine greatness and filled not only with the original powers but the attainments that claim it as their due, there cannot well, we imagine, be any keener pang than to be forced to feel that, for him who has need of his times, nature has no more unhappy gift than that of genius, and art no greater curse than an education that places him beyond the sympathies and the ideas of the country in which he is to act. This sad disadvantage of an entire over-education came, we know, to be one of Legaré's most gloomy thoughts, in those periods of depression to which he was constitutionally subject. He saw that if, with nothing but his native strength, he had cast himself into the public arena, the powers he had shown would have been hailed with a much greater favour: that the crowd viewed him as it does some perfect work of the chisel, of which the severe and noble beauties are foreign to all its notions: that it is dangerous to be too superior, too unlike, to the common-place of men: that he had liberalized and elevated himself into what those, of whom he had the greatest need, rather wondered at than enjoyed: that in his lofty selfformation, he had too much dissociated himself from the public about him, risen too high above its ignorance, broken too much from its false and narrow ideas: that, in fine, it is happier and more profitable to be of a commoner cast, to share in some of the vulgar conceptions; for it is to a great extent upon these, and even with them that one must work; and since one must either have or feign them, the former is the better, as well as the easier. Indeed, the poor fellow had, rather unadvisedly, heaped up, in the treasury of his mind, ingots of rubies and diamonds and thousand-pound Bank of England notes; but not half-pence and farthings and small change for the commerce of the crowd and to go to market with. These he had yet to acquire.

His nature was, however, too firm as well as wise, to yield either to any alienation from his country or from his studies. Momentary fits of dejection might shake him: but his mind soon recovered its calm serenity, its confidence in his ultimate triumph over inferior things and momentary misconceptions. Perhaps the war of the unworthy upon him which we have glanced at only stimulated him to that study of which it made a reproach: the blockhead hostility was just fit to rouse him to the stronger vindication of learning and himself. He strove to make himself more practical and to attain all the necessary arts of his profession, that are worthy of it. Its greater arms, its ordnance (so to speak) he knew how to wield; the foin and fence of its lighter weapons, he made haste to learn, as it can only be learnt, in encounter. Grave, sincere, with an unconquerable love of rectitude, he depended on strength of reason and learning to convince, eloquence to persuade, and averse to the tricks by which a pannel is to be mis-led, was always fitter to plead before higher tribunals, unless in difficult cases, where every thing was to be decided by strict investigation, or where the passions were to be moved.

In this earlier part of his practice, while business, deterred by the suspicion of too much scholarship, came thin and sometimes rather as a benevolence, we remember with amusement the account which he gave us of the progress of that professional success, which none that knew him well ever doubted. "Sir," said he, "do you ask how I get along? Do you enquire what my trade brings me in? 1 will tell you. I have a variety of cases, and, by the bounty of Providence, sometimes get a fee: but in general, sir, I practice upon the old Roman plan; and, like Cicero's, my clients pay me what they likethat is, often, nothing at all."

Still, his general reputation being out of all proportion to its legal rewards, he was, during the first two years of his resumed residence in Charleston, chosen without solicitation, one of that city's representatives in the State Legislature. He accordingly re-appeared in that body in November, 1824, not again to quit it until, by its election, in 1830, he assumed the post of Attorney General of his State.

It was the first rise of that agitation, almost ever since tormenting his State and the Union, which Legaré met, at his return to the Legislature in 1824. The share which he bore in it, honorable as it was to his talents and his intentions, was rather that of the able speaker than of the busy actor. As to the main events, however, we need no more than glance at how the fight began, in 1824, with the famous Anti-Bank, Anti-Internal-Improvement and Anti-Tariff

Resolutions of Judge William Smith, the old leader of the Crawford party of South-Carolina, and of course the stiff State-Rights opponent of Mr. Calhoun, at whom was aimed this whole original movement. For the time, it was completely successful, and gave Judge Smith the party predominance of the State. That being his chief practical aim, the leader paused there; for, beyond the incidental effect of carrying back into popularity and restoring him to a seat in the Senate of the United States, he had not much idea of being logical, and of pushing to their legitimate consequences his own legislative declarations. He would, in a word, have had the matter go no farther; but he had set a stone rolling which was fated to crush him.

What followed, beyond these earlier marches and countermarches, we need not tell. In the earlier contest, Mr. Legaré had, in obedience to that general theory of the distributive powers of the several parts of this federative system which he through life retained, taken part with Judge Smith; but without any purpose of an ultimate remedy, such as Mr. Calhoun afterwards contrived to deduce from his adversary's own principles. Indeed, conservative in all his ideas of government, Legaré no sooner saw the conclusions to which Dr. Cooper and others were bent on driving the movement in which he himself had originally taken part, than he recoiled from that urgent and sharp form of civil controversy, which left, he thought, nothing to the general government but an alternative fatal to either its own or state authority-the alternative, or rather the dilemma, of subjugating or of being subjugated He had, in a word, considered not only warrantable, but highly proper, an opposition of quite a strong character to the gov ernmental usurpations (as he thought them) against which were levelled the South-Carolina resolutions of 1824-5; but a direct conflict of state and federal authorities he looked on as incapable of being reduced into a state remedy, a constitutional, and least of all a peaceful resort. He eloquently and ably resisted, therefore, the movement of Nullification, as soon as it began to declare the purpose of resis tance. The evil itself complained of, he thought was, (as all have since-except, perhaps, Mr. McDuffie-been brought to perceive) greatly exaggerated. At worst, he thought it must speedily yield to what he considered the great curative powers of our system, a little time and much discussion. Reasonable as all these opinions now appear, they were nevertheless, for the time, not those which long prevailed; and the majority with which he at first voted them, in 1828, passed within a few years after, into a minority.

Within the period, however, of Legaré's legislative career in his

own state, a literary episode intervened—that of his collaboration in an important politico-literary journal of the South. V

As we have said, his general political theory was that of the South, State Rights and anti-consolidation; so that when, at the close of 1827, the idea of a literary organ of these opinions was started, under the form of a Southern Review, he lent it at once the zealous aid of his high scholarship and abilities; contributing to it, indeed, a large portion of the masterly articles which adorned it, and which won it, while it continued to exist, a more brilliant reputation than any like publication ever obtained in this country. On more than one occasion, nearly half the papers of the Review were of his composition; and his, (let it be recollected) was none of that shallow facility, born for the encouragement of the rag and paper trade, which writes fast in proportion as ill, and which need never stop, simply because it had no occasion to have begun.

Other powerful hands, however, upheld with him the honors of the Review-the various, the astute, the sententious Cooper, master of almost every part of science, of a great amount of literature, and giving life and force to every thing he touched, by the epigrammatic conciseness and liveliness of his style; the ingenious and able Elliott the elder; the curious and elegant skill of the accomplished and lamented Nott in literary antiquities and history; these, with the occasional efforts of the vehement McDuffie, of the rare legal ability and wit of Petigru, the mathematical analysis of Wallace, the heavy scholarship of Henry, with now and then a paper from more youthful or less marked contributors, whom we need not name, made up together an array of talent such as the South has never, on any other occasion, thrown upon any literary undertaking. Able and elegant writers, however, as those whom we have named were known to be, it was continually felt that the contributions of Mr. Legaré were, beyond all competition, the most brilliant that graced the work.

Among his papers in this periodical, those on classical subjects were marked with a richness and breadth of scholarship, which cer tainly no performances of their sort in this country have at all equalled. His defence of ancient learning against one of those (Mr. Thomas Grimké) who urged its banishment from education and the substitution of a less Pagan erudition in its place, was the first of these, and argued with as much dialectic force as classic enthusiasm. Papers equally elegant and erudite on Dunlop's "History of Roman Literature," on Featherstonhaugh's translation of Cicero "De Republica," on "the Public Economy of Athens," followed; and afterwards found

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