Otherwise Branch was the most amiable of men; and why should he not have been, his digestion being good, his income sufficient, his domestic relations admirable, and his reputation for ability growing apace?
No one respected him, no one liked him; but every one admired him as an intellect moving quite unhampered of the restraints of conscience.

In person he was rather handsome, the weasel type of his face being well concealed by fat and by judicious arrangements of mustache and side-whiskers.

By profession he was a lawyer, and had been most successful as adviser to wholesale thieves on depredations bent or in search of immunity for depredations done.

It was incomprehensible to him why he was unpopular with the masses.

It irritated him that they could not appreciate his purely abstract point of view on life; it irritated him because his unpopularity with them meant that there were limits, and very narrow ones, to his ambition.
It was to John Branch that Madam Bowker applied when she decided that Joshua Craig must be driven from Washington.