In the written descriptions of him, also, one needs to compare several before he can feel much assurance of the true image. In an anonymous account of him, preserved in Van Santvoord’s “Lives of the Chief Justices,”[52] the reader seems to perceive the humorous exaggerations of an entertaining and practiced writer, but, taken with due allowance, the description may well be preserved.
“As to face and figure,” says this account, “nature had been equally little at pains to stamp, with any princely effigy of what pleases, the virgin gold of which she had composed his head and heart. Except that his countenance was thoughtful and benignant, it had nothing about it that would have commanded a second look. Separately his features were but indifferent, jointly they were no more than commonplace. Then as to stature, shape, and carriage, there was nothing in him that was not the opposite of commanding or prepossessing; he was tall, yet his height was without the look of either strength or lightness, and gave neither dignity nor grace. His body seemed as ill as his mind well compacted; he not only was without proportion, but of members singularly knit, that dangled from each other and looked half dislocated. Habitually he dressed very carelessly; in the garb, I should not dare to say in the mode, of the last century. You would have thought he had on the old clothes of a former generation, not made for him by even some superannuated tailor of the period, but gotten from the wardrobe of some antiquated slop-shop of second-hand raiment. Shapeless as he was, he would probably have defied all fitting, by whatever skill of the shears; judge then how the vestments of an age when, apparently, coats and breeches were cut for nobody in particular, and waistcoats were almost dressing gowns, sat upon him.”
Such a statement should be supplemented by what one of his family said of him: “The descriptions of his dress are greatly exaggerated; he was regardless of style and fashion, but all those who knew him best testified to the extreme neatness of his attire.”[53]
The year 1831 was a sad one for Marshall. The greatest apprehensions were felt for his health. “Wirt,” says John Quincy Adams in his diary, on February 13, 1831, “spoke to me, also, in deep concern and alarm at the state of Chief Justice Marshall’s health.” In the autumn he went to Philadelphia to undergo the torture of the operation of lithotomy, before the days of ether. It was the last operation performed by the distinguished surgeon, Dr. Physick. Another eminent surgeon, who assisted him, Dr. Randall, has given an account of this occasion, in which he says:--