important cases in the local courts, in the Court of Errors, the Court of Appeals, and in the Supreme Court of the United States.
As a professional adviser he was pre-eminent. He was profoundly learned in the law. Chancellor Walworth said of him, what can be said of few in these days of Codes and Digests that he was a great lawyer. "He had gone back to the sources and fountains, and had studied and mastered the principles and rules of law. He knew not only what they were, but he knew their origin, their history, and the cases in which they had become shaped, modified and determined. Nothing more delighted him than such studies. He often said that he found far more entertainment in tracing some legal principle back through the Reports of the seventeenth century than in perusing the most attractive work of fiction ever written. Not only the provisions of the leading statutes but their political and legal history were entirely familiar to him. Though he was thoroughly acquainted with every branch of his profession, including constitutional, commercial, and equity law, he had perhaps given most attention to the law of-real estate, or trusts, and of the construction of wills, and felt himself most fully at home in their discussion." His name is identified with the leading cases of this character in the New York Courts during his time, in the learned arguments of which he bore a distinguished part. His "Points" and "Briefs" were models of compact, clear, and close reasoning, and were enriched by full citations of sustaining authorities and decisions. "He argued every question on principle. He was a legal philosopher and reasoner, and was so familiar with the principles that when a case was stated to him he rarely hesitated in pronouncing the law that governed it; and his knowledge of the leading decisions was so ample that he was always prepared to marshal them to his support. He loved the law, and he practiced it not for lucre, or even for fame, but as a science of which he was an ardent votary. He regarded its majesty and sovereignty with reverence. Such was his sense of the duty of administering it in its exact integrity that had he been on the Bench he would have made little of that 'bad law' which is said to spring from 'hard cases,' for he could no more pervert or warp or misrepresent the law than a mathematician could pervert or warp or misrepresent a mathematical demonstration. When on an argument he cited an authority, the Court had no occasion to examine as to the correctness of its presentation. He was
