and trained to work with ease, assurance, and dispatch. This is perhaps most striking in his immense legal in- genuity. His position brought him daily into contact with the nicest and most puzzling international questions, both of law and morals, from the disposition of his prizes to the disposition of himself, when he surrendered his ves- sel, let her sink under his feet, and after he was picked out of the water by the English yacht, Deerhound, be- took himself to England and safety, instead of to the Kearsarge and a Northern prison. On all these points he is inexhaustible in legal lore, fertile in persuasive argu- ment, and most apt and energetic in making every pos- sible suggestion tell.
Nor would I intimate that in all this abundant dis- cussion he is not sincere, or any less so than the average lawyer. He is, indeed, quick to take advantage of every quibble. But the long legal cases in regard to many of his captures recorded in his log-book — that is, mainly for his own eye — seem to me to indicate a mind much open to conscientious scruples and a feeling that his elaborate argument must convince himself as well as others.
More attractive evidence of Semmes's intellectual power than that furnished by his legal pyrotechnics is his early book about the Mexican War. This is as intel- ligent a narrative of travel as can readily be found. There is not only the wide-open eye of the sympathetic observer; but the comments on the social life of the
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