The western Democrat. [volume] (Charlotte, N.C.) 1852-1870, 1860-01-31

wit and In halt torrent of ridicue, In which Meth
er the plaintiff or her ragged attorney were forgot
| ten or spared.
The great Prentiss concluded for the defendant
with glow of gorgeous words, brilliant as show
er of falling stars, and with bursts of oratory that
brought the house down in cheers, in which even
the sworn jury themselves joined, notwithstanding
the stern order of the bench. Thus wonderfully
susceptible are Southern people to tie charms of
impassoned eloquence
1t was the strangers turn. He had remained ap-
parently abstracted during all the previous speech
Still, and strait and motionless in his seat, pale
smooth forehead shooting high like mountain
cone of snow, and but for that continued twich
that came and went perpetually in his face, you
would have taken him for mere of marble,
or human form carved in ice. Even his dim,
dreary eyes were invisible beneath those grey,
shaggy eyebrows.
But now at last he rises-before the bar, not
behind it-and so the wondering jury, that
he might touch the foreman with his long, bony
fingers. With eyes half shut and standing rigid
as piller Of iron, his thin lips curled if in
measureless scorn, slightly apart, and then the
sound came forth.
At first it is low and sweet, insinuating itself
into the brain, as an artless tune winding its way
into the deepest recesses of the heart, like the
melody of magic incarnation, while the speaker
proceeds without gesture the least 81 gna Of
excitement, to tear to pieces the argument Of
Ashley, which mets away at his touch as frost
before sunbeam. Every one looked surprised.
His logic was at once brief, and so luminously
clear that the rudest peasant could comprehend it
without effort.
Anon he came to the dazzling wit of the poet
lawyer Pike. Then the curl of his lips grew
sharper, his smooth face began to kinde up; and
his eyes to open-dim and dreamy no longer; but
vivid as lightning, red fire globes, glaring
twin meteors The whole soul was in his eye. In
five minutes Pixies wit seemed like foam of folly,
and his finest satire, horrible profanity, when
compared with the inimitable sallies and exter-
minating sarcasm ofthe stranger, nterspersed with
tests and anecdotes that filled the forum with
laughter.
Then, without so much as bestowing an allusion
upon Prentiss, he turned round short at the
perjured witnesses of Hopkins, tore their testimony
into atoms and hurled into their faces such
invcctives that all trembled as with ague, and two
of them actually fed in dismay from the Court
House.
The excitement of the crowd was becoming
tremendous. Their united life and souls seemed
to hang upon the burning tongue of the stranger.
He inspired them with the power of his own
passion. He saturated them with the poison of
his own malicious feelings. He seemed to have
stolen natures long hidden secret of attraction.
He was .the son to the sea of all thought and
emotion, which rose and fell, and toiled in the
biows he chose. But his greatest triumph
to
His eyes began to glance furtively at the assassin
Hopkins as his lean taper fingers assumed the
same direction He hemmed the wretch with a
decentralization ofstrong evidence and impregnable
argument, cutting off all hope of escape.
He piled up large bastions of insurmountable
facts. He dug beneath the murderer and s.anderers
feet, bitches of dilemmas such sophistry !
could overleap, and no secrets of ingenuity evade;
and thus having as one might say, impounded his
victim, and girt him about like scorpion in
circle of fire, he stripped himself to the work Of
massacre.
Oh then it was vision both glorious and
dreadful to behold the orator. His actions before
graceful as the waves of the golden willow in the
breeze, grew impetuous as the motion of an oak in
a hurricane.
His voice became trumpet filled with wild
whirlpoos, deafening the with the crashes of
power, and yet intermingled all the while with
sweet undersong of the softest cadence
His face was as red as drunkard' 's-his forehead
glowed like a heated furnace, his countenance was
haegard like that of maniac and ever and anon
he flung his long and bony arms on high, as if
graspng after thunderbots.
DE drew picture of murder in such appalling
colors, that in comparison, hell itself might be
considered beautiful. He painted the slanderer
so black that the seemed dark at MONDAY
when shining on such an accursed monster, and
then fixing both portraits the shrinking Hopkins
he fastened them there forever. The agitation of
the audience amounted almost to madness.
All at once the speaker descended from his
perilous height. His voice walled out for the
murdered dead and living-the beautiful Mary
more beautiful every moment as her tears flowed
faster-till all wept and sobbed like children.
He closed by strange cxhortation to the jury,
and through them to the bystanders.-He advised
the panel after they should bring in verdict for
the plaintiff not to offer violence to the defendant,
however richly he might deserve it, in other words
not to lynch the villain, but leave his punishment
with God.
This was the most artful trick of all, and the
best calculated to insure vengeance.
The jury rendered verdict Of twenty thousand
dollars, and the night afterwards Hopkins was
taken out of his bed by ynchers and beaten almost
to death.
As the court adjourned the stranger made
known bis name, and called the attention of the
public with the announcement-JohDI Taylor will
preach this evening at early candle light.
The crowd all turned out, and Taylor's sermon
cqualled if it did not surpass the splendor of his
listened to Clay, Webster and Calhoun-to Dewey,
Tying and Bascom-but never heard anything in
the form of sublime words even remotely approx
mating to the eloquence of John Taylor-massive
as mountain-and wildly rushing as a cataract
of fire. And that is the opinion OF all who have
heard this marvellous man.