IN the year 1836 the writer entered the Law School at Cambridge, and saw for the first time Judge Story, whose pupil he was for some two years to be. Rarely has the physiognomy of a distinguished man, whose looks we had previously pictured to ourself, contrasted so strikingly as in this instance with our ideal. Instead of a man “severe and stern to view,” with an awe-inspiring countenance in every hue and lineament of which justice was legibly written, and whose whole demeanor manifested a fearful amount of stiffness, starch, and dignity, — in short, an incarnation of law, bristling all over with technicalities and subtleties, — a walking Coke upon Littleton, — we saw before us a sunny, smiling face which bespoke a heart full of kindness, and listened to a voice whose musical tones imparted interest to everything it communicated, whether dry subtleties of the law, or reminiscences of the “giants of those days” when he was a practitioner at the bar, and of which he was so eloquent a panegyrist.
Further acquaintance deepened our first impression; we found that he was the counsellor, guide, philosopher, and friend of all his pupils; that, without the slightest forfeiture of self-respect, he could chat, jest, and laugh with all; and that if he never looked the Supreme Court judge, or assumed the airs of a Sir Oracle, it was simply 98 because he had a real dignity, an inward greatness of soul, which rendered it needless that he should protect himself from intrusion by an chevaux-de-frise of formalities, — still less by the frizzled, artificial locks, black robes, and portentous seals of a British judge, who, without the insignia of his office, would almost despise himself. Overflowing as the Judge was with legal lore, which bubbled up as from a perennial fountain, he made no display of learning; in this matter, as in the other, he never led one to suspect the absence of the reality by his over-preciseness and niceness about the shadow. His pupil did not pass many hours in his presence before he learned, too, that the same fertile mind that could illumine the depths of constitutional law, and solve the knottiest and most puzzling problems of commercial jurisprudence, could also enliven the monotony of recitation by a keen witticism or a sparkling pun. Though thirty years and more have elapsed since the time of which we speak, we can yet see him in fancy as plainly as we see his portrait hanging before us. It is two o’clock P. M.; he walks briskly into the recitation-room, his face wreathed with smiles, and, laying down his white hat, takes his seat at the table, puts on his spectacles, and with a semi-quizzical look inquires, as he glances about the room:
“Where do I begin to-day? Ah! Mr. L——, I believe you dodged out yesterday just before I reached you: so we’ll begin with you.”
This sally provokes a laugh in which the Judge joins as heartily as the students; and then begins perhaps an examination in “Long on Sales,” a brief treatise, which suggests the remark that “Long is short, and short 99 because he is Long; a writer who can condense into a small book what others would spin out into volumes.
Probably no two teachers of equal ability were ever associated, who were more unlike in the constitution of their minds, and who conducted a recitation in modes more dissimilar, than Judge Story and Professor Greenleaf. The latter, the beau ideal of a lawyer in his physique, was severe and searching in the class-room, probing the student to the quick, accepting no half-answers, or vague, general statements for accurate replies, showing no mercy to laziness; and when he commented on the text, it was always in the fewest and pithiest words that would convey his ideas. Language in his mouth seemed to have produced a sumptuary law, forbidding that it should in any case overstep the limits of the thought. Indolent students, who had skimmed over the lesson, dreaded his scrutiny, for they knew that an examination by him was a literal weighing of their knowledge — that they could impose on him by no shams. Judge Story’s forte, on the other hand, was in lecturing, not in questioning; in communicating information, not in ascertaining the exact sum of the pupil’s knowledge. In most cases his questions were put in such a way as to suggest the answer; for example. Having stated two modes of legal proceeding under certain circumstances, he would ask the student — “Would you adopt the former course, or would you rather adopt the latter?” “I would rather adopt the latter,” the student would reply, who perhaps had not looked at the lesson. “You are right,” would be the comment of the kind-hearted Dane Professor; “Lord Mansfield himself could not have answered more correctly.” Whether he was 100 too good-natured to put the student on the rack, or thought the time might be more profitably spent, we know not; but no one feared to recite because he was utterly ignorant of the lesson.
The manner of the judge, when lecturing, was that of an enthusiast rather than that of a professional teacher. The recitation, — if recitation it could be called, where the professor was questioned on many days nearly as often as the student, — was not confined to the textbook; but everything that could throw light upon the subject tin hand, — all the limitations or modifications of the principles laid down by the author, — were fully stated, and illustrated by numerous apt examples. The book was merely the starting-point, whence excursions were made into all the cognate provinces of the law from which the opima spolia of a keen and searching intellect and a capacious memory could be gathered. His readiness of invention, as his son has remarked in the biography of his father, was particularly exhibited in the facility and exhaustless ingenuity with which he supplied fictitious cases to illustrate a principle, and shaped the circumstances so as to expose and make prominent the various exceptions to which it was subject. Often his illustrations were drawn from incidents of the day, and the listless student whose ears had been pricked up by some amusing tale or anecdote, found that all this was but the gilding of the pill, and that he had been cheated into swallowing a large doses of legal wisdom. Thus “he attracted the mind along instead of driving it. Alive himself, he made the law alive. His lectures were not bundles of dried fagots, but of budding scions. Like the Chinese juggler, he planted the seed, and made it grow before the eyes of his pupils into a tree.”
101Few men have ever been less subject to moods. He had no fits of enthusiasm. Of those alternations of mental sunshine and gloom, — of buoyancy and depression, — to which most men, and especially men of genius, are subject, he seemed to know nothing. Nor did he, even when most overwhelmed with work, manifest any sense of weariness. After having tried a tedious and intricate case in the United States Court Room in Boston, he was as fresh, elastic, and vivacious in the recitation room as if he had taken a mountain walk or some other bracing exercise. He had that rare gift, the faculty of communicating, and loved, above all things else, to communicate knowledge. The one ruling passion of his mind was what a French writer calls “un gout dominant d’instruire et documenter quelqu’un. Few men with equal stores of learning have had a more perfect command of their acquisitions. All his knowledge, whether gathered from musty black-letter folios or from modern octavos, was at the tip of his tongue. He had no unsmelted gold or bullion, but kept his intellectual riches in the form of current coin, as negotiable as it was valuable. His extraordinary fluency, his vast acquirements, his sympathy with the young, and especially his personal magnetism, eminently fitted him to be a teacher. To smooth the pathway of the legal learner, to give him a clue by which to thread the labyrinths of jurisprudence, to hold a torch by which to light his way through its dark passages, — above all, to kindle in his breast some of his own ever-burning enthusiasm, — was to the Judge a constant joy. We doubt if ever a dull hour was known in his lecture-room. His perennial liveliness; his frankness and abandon; his “winning smile, that 102 played lambent as heat-lightning around his varying countenance”; his bubbling humor; his contagious, merry, and irresistible laugh; his exhaustless fund of incident and anecdote, with which he never failed to give piquancy and zest to the driest and most crabbed themes, — all won not only the attention, but the love, of his pupils, and he who could have yawned amid such stimulants to attention, must have been dull indeed. Only a dunce or a beatified intelligence could listen uninterested to such a teacher.
So prodigal was he of his intellectual riches, so lavish of his learning, wit, and anecdote, that the fear of every new-comer was, that he would exhaust himself; but the apprehension was soon allayed; the stream never ceased, but went pouring on its sparkling waters with undiminished volume, till the hearer felt that he was in the condition described by Robert Hall when speaking during his lunacy of the conversation of Mackintosh, — “It seemed like the Euphrates pouring into a teacup.” Of all the themes which Judge Story loved to discuss, the constitutional history of the country was the favorite. When lecturing upon this subject, on which he never was weary of expiating, and all the smallest details as well as the grand facts of which were at the tip of his tongue, his enthusiasm and eloquence were at the height. Especially fond was he at such times of describing the great men of other days, — the Marshalls, Pinkneys, Dexters, Martins, and other giants of the law, — whom he had known and associated with; and of holding up their characters, their Herculean industry, their integrity, and other virtues, as models to be imitated. With breathless interest we listened as he spoke of the principles of the Constitution, — the 103 views of the great men by whom it was drawn, — of the dangers to which the country was exposed, — of the anxiety with which the experiment of a republican government was watched across the sea, — and closed with an exhortation to us to labor for the promotion of justice, to liberalize and expand the law, to scorn all trickery and chicanery in its practice, and to deem no victory worth winning if won by the arts of the trickster and the pettifogger.
Few of the old graduates of Dane Law School will forgot the scene that occurred on his return from the winter session of the Supreme Court at Washington. The announcement of his return was sure to fill the lecture-room, and he was welcomed with all the joyousness, and with the hearty grasp of the hand, with which a loving father is welcomed home by his children. How eagerly we gathered around him, and plied him with questions concerning the great cases that had been argued at Washington, and with what kindling enthusiasm would he describe to us the keen contests between the athletes of the bar, as one would have described to a company of squires and pages, — to use the illustration of one of his pupils, R. H. Dana, — a tournament of monarchs and nobles on a field of cloth of gold; how Webster spoke in this case, Legaré, or Clay, or Crittenden, or Choate, in that, and all “the currents of the heady fight.” In vain, at any such times as we have described, did the clock peal or the bell clang the hour of adjournment. On the lecturer went, oblivious of the lapse of time, pouring forth a continuous and sparkling stream of anecdote and reminiscence, or throwing “a light as from a painted window” upon the dark passages of constitutional history, and charming the 104 dullest listener by his eloquence, till the bell for evening prayers announced that now he must cease, and his hearers departed, hoping that he would resume the broken thread of his discourse to-morrow. Some of these anecdotes and reminiscences, as we heard from his lips, with a few others published just after his death in a Boston journal, will make up the rest of this paper.
Judge Story was an intimate friend and warm admirer of William Pinkney, whom, in spite of his dandyisms and affectations, he regarded as one of the ablest and most scholarly lawyers in the country. Mr. Pinkney, said he, dressed always with fastidious elegance, and looked as if the had just come from his dressing-room, and was going to a fashionable party. His coat, of the finest blue, was nicely brushed; his boots shone with the highest polish; his waistcoat, of immaculate whiteness, glittered with gold buttons; he carried in his hand a light cane, with which he played; and his whole appearance was that of a man of fashion rather than that of a profound and laborious lawyer. He was exceedingly ambitious, fond of admiration, and never spoke without an eye to effect. He would spend weeks of hard labor upon a case, and, when it was called up for trial, would beg earnestly to have it postponed on the ground that he had had no time for preparation; and when informed by the Court that it could not be deferred longer, would rise and astonish everybody by a profound and elaborate argument, which he wished to be regarded as an impromptu burst of genius. Another trick of his was to quote from a law-book a passage which he had just previously read and got by heart for the very occasion, and pretending he had not seen it for a long time, but had no doubt of its tenor, to 105 cite it in support of the doctrine he had maintained. The counsel on the other side would perhaps deny the correctness of the citation, when Mr. Pinkney would call for the book, and to the surprise of everybody, would read from it the exact words he had quoted, without the change of a syllable. In spite of these affectations, however, he was a brilliant and powerful lawyer, a fine scholar, and a man of vast resources; and if in the contests of the forum he did not stand confessed as facile princeps, — the victor of every contest, — yet he was admitted by all who witnessed his displays to be surpassed by none of the athletes with whom he was wont to wrestle in the legal arena. Nothing could be more logical or luminous than his reasoning; his very statement of a case was itself an argument.
Among the giants of the bar with whom Mr. Pinkney was accustomed to grapple, continued the Judge, was the Irish exile, Thomas Addis Emmet. “I shall never forget the first case in which these two men were pitted against each other, and tested each other’s mettle. It was a case of prize law, and Mr. Pinkney, being perfect master of that branch of law, in which his antagonist was but slightly versed, and having the advantage moreover of being at home in the arena to which Mr. Emmet was a stranger, gained an easy victory, and not content with that, was somewhat haughty and overbearing in his manner, as he was too apt to be when he lacked a foeman worthy of his steel. Stung by this contemptuous treatment, Mr. Emmet determined to supply his own defects, and, for the next three or four months, devoted himself almost exclusively to the study of that department of the law in which he had been unable to cope with the great Marylander. At the 106 end of that time he was employed as counsel in opposition to Mr. Pinkney, in the famous case of the “Nereide,” on the decision of which depended the ownership of a large and very valuable cargo. The speech of Mr. Emmet on this occasion was a masterpiece of argument, learning, and eloquence, and placed him by universal consent in the very front rank of American lawyers. In his eloquent exordium he spoke of the embarrassment of his situation, the novelty of the forum, and the deep interest which the public took in the cause. He spoke in glowing terms of the genius and accomplishments of his opponent, whose fame had extended beyond the Atlantic; and then, in language the most delicate and touching, he alluded to the contrast presented by his own life to this brilliant career, — to the circumstances which had exiled him from his country, — and to the treatment he had received from Mr. Pinkney at the previous trial. All this was said with an air so modest and in terms so full of pathos, that his audience, including the veteran attorneys and gray-headed judges of the Supreme Court, were moved to tears. He then proceeded to his argument, which exhibited a profound knowledge and a firm grasp of the law applicable to the case, and by its powerful logic excited the admiration of both bar and court. Upon his sitting down Mr. Pinkney at once arose and prefaced his argument, — which, I need not say, was worthy of his abilities and fame, — with an apology for his former unkind treatment of Mr. Emmet, couched in the most elegant and polished language, surpassing even the latter in pathos, and breathing sentiments so noble and magnanimous, that again the entire assembly, — lawyers, court, and spectators, — were moved to tears, which this time fell more plenteously ‘than from Arabian trees their medicinal gums.’ When the 117 Court adjourned, I asked the author of this masterly and eloquent speech if he would not write out the substance of it, so far as he could recall it, — for of course I could not expect him to give me the exact words of an exordium thus extemporized, — and let me have a copy. ‘Come with me to dinner,’ was the reply, ‘and we’ll talk about the matter.’ I dined with him, and after we had risen from the table, he drew from a drawer a large roll of manuscript, elegantly written, — for he wrote a beautiful hand, — and containing his entire speech word for word as he had delivered it, not only the argument, but the impromptu exordium which had so charmed and affected all who heard it! The truth was, that, with the divining instinct of genius, he had guessed correctly at the course which his adversary would pursue, and carefully prepared himself accordingly.”
The case was decided adversely to Mr. Pinkney’s client, Judge Story dissenting from the opinion of the other members of the Court. Scarcely, however, had the decision been made, when intelligence came across the Atlantic that Lord Stowell, the head of the Admiralty Court of England, one of the highest authorities in maritime law, had, in a case involving precisely the same principles of prize law as that of the “Nereide,” made a decision directly the opposite to that of the United States Supreme Court. With the mention of this fact, so gratifying to his pride of opinion, Judge Story triumphantly closed his narration.
At another time Judge Story told the following anecdote of Samuel Dexter, Fisher Ames, and Chief Justice Marshall. “Mr. Dexter was a remarkable man, — a man whom, to use Burke’s language, if you should meet and talk with him a few minutes on a rainy day under a shed, you would at 108 once pronounce a great man. The first time I met him I knew not who he was, and stared in wonderment. Yet his was rather a brilliant mind than a truly great one. Mr. Dexter was once in company with Fisher Ames and Chief Justice Marshall, when the latter began a conversation, or rather a monologue, which lasted some three hours. On their way homeward, Ames and Dexter vied with each other in extolling the learning and mental grasp of their host. After a brief walk, Ames said: ‘To tell the truth, Dexter, I have not understood a word of his argument for half an hour.’ ‘And I,’ as frankly responded Dexter, ‘have been out of my depth for an hour and a half.’ ”
Judge Story was an ardent admirer of Albert Gallatin, whom he ranked as the peer of Alexander Hamilton. Both of these gentlemen, he observed, were foreigners, and they landed on our shores about the same time. “When, as Secretary of the Treasury under Mr. Jefferson, Mr. Gallatin succeeded to Mr. Hamilton, he made no changes, though the latter belonged to the opposing party. Unlike the Italian on whose tombstone was inscribed the significant epitaph, ‘I was well, I wished to be better, and I am here,’ he did not try to improve upon that which was good. When Mr. Gallatin was a member of Congress, he said to me one day: ‘We have plenty of eloquence upon the floor, — aye, and too much! It is the hard-working committee-man who is needed; the man who rarely speaks, but who can apply himself to hard, dry, yet important statistical labor. Figures of this kind are far weightier and more useful than figures of speech.’ If this was true in the days of Mr. Gallatin, what is the fact now?”
The haste and recklessness with which laws are made and repealed in this country, was a frequent topic of the 109 Judge’s denunciation. He once asked an eminent gentleman from Tennessee why the legislature of that State did not meet annually, as did the legislature of other States. The reply was, “that the laws might have at least a trial before they were repealed,” — a sarcasm not more pointed than just.
Judge Story accounted for the provision in the United States Constitution requiring that a person be thirty-five years of age to render him eligible to the office of Senator, by the fact that the framers of that instrument were very distrustful of young men. “He is not yet fifty years old,” was an argument which annihilated a canvasser’s pretensions. “Some of the ablest statesmen, however, that the world has seen, were young men; for example, Fox, and Pitt, who at twenty-three was by far the ablest man in Parliament. I am aware that I go counter to the judgment of many when I pronounce William Pitt an incomparably greater man than his father, Lord Chatham, a man who was often strangely inconsistent. You all remember his eloquent denunciation of the lord who recommended the employment of the Indians against the Americans in the war of the Revolution; and yet the man from whose lips fell this burst of indignation filed in the British Cabinet a letter in his own handwriting advising the very measure which, when urged by another, he characterizes as infamous!”
Judge Story was a profound admirer of Chief Justice Marshall, and could rarely hear his name mentioned without digressing to panegyrize his learning and intellectual power. “Marshall’s favorite expression, said he, was ‘It is admitted.’ So resistless was his logic, that it was a common remark of the bar, that if you once admitted his 110 premises, it was all over with you. You were forced to his conclusions; and the only safety, therefore, was in denying everything he asserted. Daniel Webster once said to me, — ‘When Judge Marshall says, it is admitted, sir, I am preparing for a bomb to burst over my head, and demolish all my points.’ ”
“Some years ago,” remarked the Judge, “I saw a book advertised, entitled ‘New views of the Constitution.’ I was startled. What right has a man to announce new views upon this subject? Speculations upon our government are dangerous, and should be frowned upon. That great statesman, Edmund Burke, has wisely and sententiously said, — ‘Governments are practical things, not toys for speculists to play with.’ And yet governments must often change, to meet the demands of the times. I have been in public life nearly forty years, and have seen great changes in the country. Men may flatter themselves that now, at least, all is settled; but no! our laws are written upon the sands of time, and the winds of popular opinion gradually efface them; new layers are to be made, and your old writing renewed or changed.”
The following statement was made by the Judge to illustrate the extreme difficulty of framing statutes so as to avoid all ambiguity in their language. Being once employed by Congress to draft an important law, he spent six months in trying to perfect its phraseology, so that its sense would be clear beyond the shadow of a doubt, and not the smallest loophole could be found for a lawyer to creep through. And yet, in less than a year afterward, after having heard the arguments of two able attorneys, he was utterly unable, in a suit which came before him as a Judge of the Supreme Court, to decide upon the statute’s meaning.
111Being asked one day whether John Tyler was President or Acting President of the United States at the demise of President Harrison, Judge Story replied: “A nice question, gentlemen, and hard to solve. The question was debated in Cabinet meeting; but, on Mr. Webster’s opinion, Mr. Tyler was addressed as President. On one occasion, when Chief Justice Taney, of the Supreme Court was ill, I took his place as Chief Justice, and was thus addressed. At first I felt nervous; but soon becoming used to it, I found it, like public money to new members of Congress, not bad to take.’ And this feeling was probably the feeling of Mr. Tyler.”
Judge Story was fond of telling that Mr. Webster, on one or two occasions, after grumbling at a legal decision of the former, had afterwards the magnanimity to acknowledge that he was wrong. We are sure that when the Judge himself was in error, he was frank, on discovering it, to avow the fact. One day in the Moot Court, a student, arguing a case before him, said: “My next authority will be one which your Honor will not be disposed to question, — a decision by Mr. Justice Story, of the United States Supreme Court.” “I beg your pardon,” said the Judge, bowing: “but that opinion by Mr. Justice Story is not law.”
It was well observed by Charles Sumner, in his eulogy on Judge Story, that any just estimate of the man and his works must have regard to his three different characters, — as a judge, as an author, and as a teacher. When we look at his books only, we are astonished at his colossal industry; it seems almost incredible that a single mind, in a single life, should have been able to accomplish so much. His written judgments on his own circuit, and his various commentaries, occupy twenty-seven 112 volumes, and his judgments in the Supreme Court of the United States form an important part of thirty-four volumes. Rightly does Mr. Sumner characterize him as the Lope de Vega, or the Walter Scott, of the Common Law. With far more truth might it be said of him than was said by Dryden of one of the greatest British lawyers:
“Our law that did a boundless ocean seem,
Was coasted all and fathomed all by him.”
Besides all his legal labors, he delivered many discourses on literary and scientific subjects, wrote many biographical sketches of his contemporaries, elaborate reviews for the “North American,” drew up learned memorials to Congress, made long speeches in the Massachusetts Legislature, contributed largely to the “Encyclopædia Americana,” prepared Reports on Codification, etc., and drafted some of the most important Acts of Congress. The secret of these vast achievements was ceaseless, methodical industry, frequent changes of labor, and concentration of mind. He economized odd moments, bits and fragments of time, never overworked, and when he worked, concentrated upon the subject all the powers of his intellect. Add to this, that his knowledge did not lie in undigested heaps in his mind, but was thoroughly assimilated, so as to become a part of his mental constitution. His brain was a vast repository of legal facts and principles, each one of which had its cell or pigeon-hole, from which it was always forthcoming the instant it was wanted.
No other American lawyer or jurist has so wide-spread a European fame. His legal works, republished in England, are recognized as of the highest authority in all the courts of that country; and his “Conflict of Laws,” — embodying 113 the essence of all similar works, as well as the fruits of his own deep thinking, — a work of enormous labor, upon a most intricate and perplexing theme, — has been translated into many European languages, and is cited as the most exhaustive discussion of the subject. Yet, — such is fame, — this man whose name had crossed the Atlantic, and was on the lips of the profoundest jurists of the Old World, had comparatively little reputation in his lifetime among his own countrymen. Men immeasurably inferior to him, intellectually and morally, overshadowed him in the public mind. And yet no man was more susceptible to merited praise than he. While he despised flattery, and could detect the last taint of it with the quickness of an instinct, his heart was yet as fresh and tender as a child’s, and he felt neglect as keenly as the bud the frost. Not soon shall we forget the good humor, mingled with a sensibility that could not be concealed, with which he told the following story of himself, illustrating the saying that “a prophet is not without honor, save in his own country”:
“One day I was called suddenly to Boston, to attend to some business matters, and on my way thither I discovered that I had forgotten my pocket-book. It was too late to return, and so when the omnibus halted at the Port (Cambridgeport, half-way between Old Cambridge, the Judge’s residence, and Boston,) I ran hastily into the neighboring bank, and asked to be accommodated with a hundred dollars. The cashier stared at me as if he thought me insane; but I noticed that he particularly scrutinized my feet; and then he coldly informed me that he had not the pleasure of recognizing me. I immediately 114 told him my name, supposing it might have reached, at least, the limits of my own place of residence. He still kept his eyes upon my feet, and finally, as I was about to leave, more chagrined than disappointed, he requested me to step back, adding that he would be pleased to accommodate me. Upon my inquiring the reason of his delay, he replied: ‘Sir, I have never heard your name before, but I know you must be a gentleman from the looks of your boots.’ ” The unction and perfect good humor with which the Judge told this anecdote, and the joyous laugh with which he concluded it, — aside from the absurdity that such a man should be judged of by his material understanding, — were irresistible. We need not add, that his pupils laughed, as Falstaff says, “without interflows,”, — till their faces were “like a wet cloak ill laid up.”
We have spoken of Judge Story’s wit. Like Cicero, Burke, Erskine, and many other great lawyers, he loved a keen witticism, and did not consider it beneath his dignity to perpetrate a telling pun. Once at a Phi Beta Kappa dinner, Edward Everett, then Governor of Massachusetts, gave as a toast: “The legal profession: however high its other members may climb, they can never rise higher than one Story.” The shouts of applause which greeted this sally were redoubled when Judge Story jumped up and responded with the following: “Fame follows applause where-ever it (Everett) goes.”
We doubt if any teacher ever loved his pupils more deeply, or was more universally loved by them, than the subject of this article. In the success of his “boys,” as he called them, both at the school and in their after life, he felt a profound interest; their triumphs were his triumphs, 5 and their failures caused him the keenest pain. The tact with which he adapted himself to the various temperaments and idiosyncrasies of his pupils, and the patience with which he bore any one’s dullness, were also remarkable. We remember that one day a somewhat eccentric and outspoken student from Tennessee came to the Judge in the library of the Law School, and holding up an old folio, said; “Judge, what do you understand by this here Rule in Shelley’s Case? I’ve been studying it three days, and can’t make anything of it.” “Shelley’s Case! Shelley’s case!” exclaimed the Judge, with a look of astonishment, as he took the volume and held it up before his eyes, — “Do you expect to understand that in three days? Why, it took me three weeks!”
One of the hobbies of Judge Story was the great blessings conferred on society by Courts of Equity, in remedying the defects of the Common Law. A favorite way of exposing these defects, was to put a case in which the inadequacy of the latter was strikingly apparent, and then naïvely ask the student: “Does it occur to you, Mr. ——, where your remedy in such a case would lie?” The invariable answer, “In a Court of Equity, Sir,” was so often repeated that it always provoked a smile from the students. Like many eminent men, Judge Story had his pet quotations, anecdotes, and maxims, which he never wearied of repeating. Few of his living pupils can have forgotten the favorite Causa proxima, non remota spectatur,” or the oft-cited aphorism of Rochefoucauld, “There is always something in the misfortunes of our best friends which does not displease us, — which must have impressed itself on the Judge’s memory simply because in his nature there was not the slightest tincture of the cynicism which the sentiment expresses.
116When a young lawyer, Judge Story published a volume entitled “Solitude, and other Poems, — a literary venture which he deeply regretted in after life. Most of the pieces were of the kind which “neither men, gods, nor booksellers’ columns can endure,” and the dedication began, —
“Maid of my heart, to thee I string my lyre.”
Of this production few copies are extant, — the author having bought up and destroyed all he could find. There are two copies in Harvard College Library. He also published a Fourth-of-July oration, which contained about the average number of “spread-eagles.” The ease with which he rhymed is well illustrated by the following verses. Chancing to step into the office of the Salem “Register,” just as the first number was bout to be issued, he was asked by the editor to write a motto for that newspaper. Taking a pen, young Story dashed off the following impromptu:
“Here shall the press the people’s rights maintain,
Unawed by influence, and unbribed by gain;
Here patriot truth her glorious precepts draw,
Pledged to religion, liberty, and law.”
During the lifetime of Judge Story, a volume of “Miscellanies,” from his pen was published, containing his literary orations, contributions to reviews, and his beautiful address at the consecration of Mount Auburn Cemetery. There, under the trees that overshadow the lovely dell in which he spoke, lie his remains; and in the chapel, near the entrance to this home of the dead, stands a marble statue of the great jurist, executed by his son, W. W. Story, the sculptor and poet, — an exquisite work of art, in which all the characteristic qualities of the original are idealized, yet most faithfully reproduced and preserved.