138 court of appeals of maryland

which custom assigned. Wirt, in his later days,
complained that although he had long ago given
up all superfluous rhetoric, he still found an au-
dience of ladies whenever he was to speak in
court.¹² The majority of lawyers seem to have
had no such scruples about irrelevancies, and ap-
parently it may be said of much of the argument
produced by these long time allowances that its
relation, to the session of the court was about that
of music to meals, and it was not always moving
music. Judge Mason¹³ says of McMahon's argu-
ment in Young v. Frost,¹⁴ in which Judge Mason
himself sat, that:

Though his argument was powerful and perhaps conclusive,
it was so magnificently decorated by the figures of fancy that
the members of the court, not familiar with his style, found
themselves so much dazzled and bewildered by his eloquence
that they lost sight of his logic and argument—it was so at least
with one.

And Judge Mason does not leave off his testimony
with that.

Often in the Court of Appeals, with but three weary, worn-
down auditors upon the bench, who had been listening day in
and day out for months to long, tedious arguments, and who
had become almost insensible to flowers of fancy or the beau-
ties of elocution in the dry details of legal argument; with a
languid, listless clerk or two whose ears by constant listening
for a quarter of a century had become dead to all beauties of
thought or language, and who generally, by habit, selected such
occasions of oratorical displays before the court as the fittest
time to snatch unobserved their daily nap; with these often as
his only audience, he would yet pour forth such streams or
rather torrents of forensic eloquence as would have charmed
admiring Senates and lashed to frenzy a sympathizing populace.

12. Kennedy, II, 304.

13. Life of McMahon, 100.

14. 1 Maryland Reports, 377.