text:  What is become of the eloquence of the bar? Why is it that flowery orators find no grist coming to their mills? How came it that at Westminster Hall Charles Philips missed his market? What is the reason that if you step into the Queen's Bench or Common Pleas or Exchequer you will hear no such thing as a speech--behold no such animal as an orator--only a shrewd plain hard-working steady man called an attorney-general or a sergeant or a leading counsel quietly talking over a matter of law with the judge or a matter of fact with the jury like men of business as they are and shunning as they would a rattlesnake all clap-trap arguments figures flowers and the obsolete embroidery of rhetoric? The days of romantic eloquence are fled--the great constitutional questions that called forth "thoughts that breathe and words that burn " from men like Erskine are _determined_