Compare with this the like simple felicity and exactness of expression in his last reported utterance in court, when he was closing his great career as Chief Justice of the United States, forty-nine years later. He is refusing a motion for delay: “The court has taken into its serious and anxious consideration the motion made on the part of the government to continue the cause of Mitchel _v._ The United States to the next term. Though the hope of deciding causes to the mutual satisfaction of parties would be chimerical, that of convincing them that the case has been fully and fairly considered, that due attention has been given to the arguments of counsel, and that the best judgment of the court has been exercised on the case, may be sometimes indulged. Even this is not always attainable. In the excitement produced by ardent controversy, gentlemen view the same object through such different media that minds not unfrequently receive therefrom precisely opposite impressions. The court, however, must see with its own eyes, and exercise its own judgment guided by its own reason.... The opinion of the court will be delivered.”[11]
At first, he had brought from the army, and from his home on the frontier, simple and rustic ways which surprised some persons at Richmond, whose conception of greatness was associated with very different models of dress and behavior. “He was one morning strolling,” we are told, “through the streets of Richmond, attired in a plain linen roundabout and shorts, with his hat under his arm, from which he was eating cherries, when he stopped in the porch of the Eagle Hotel, indulged in a little pleasantry with the landlord, and then passed on.” A gentleman from the country was present, who had a case coming on before the Court of Appeals, and was referred by the landlord to Marshall as the best lawyer to employ. But “the careless, languid air” of Marshall had so prejudiced the man that he refused to employ him. The clerk, when this client entered the court-room, also recommended Marshall, but the other would have none of him. A venerable-looking lawyer, with powdered wig and in black cloth, soon entered, and the gentleman engaged him. In the first case that came up, this man and Marshall spoke on opposite sides. The gentleman listened, saw his mistake, and secured Marshall at once; frankly telling him the whole story, and adding that while he had come with one hundred dollars to pay his lawyer, he had but five dollars left. Marshall good-naturedly took this, and helped in the case. In the Virginia Federal Convention of 1788, at the age of thirty-three, he is described, rising after Monroe had spoken, as “a tall young man, slovenly dressed in loose summer apparel.... His manners, like those of Monroe, were in strange contrast with those of Edmund Randolph or of Grayson.”