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By Irving Browne.
CURRENT TOPICS. David Dudley Field. — The death of this great lawyer and jurist took his family and the world by surprise, although he had passed his eighty-ninth year. He had just returned from a visit in England to his daughter, Lady Musgrave, and a sojourn in Italy, and was apparently full of vigor and his usual high spirits. But a serious attack of the grip two years ago had insidiously sapped his strength, and he fell a victim to pneumonia in a few hours. Except for a slight stoop and a little deafness, and the failing of sight ordinary in persons of his years, Mr. Field seemed in perfect health and strength, and not unlikely to achieve his often declared purpose of living to the age of a hundred years. Our estimate of Mr. Field was fully and honestly expressed in volume third of the Green Bag, page 49, and it is not necessary to reiterate it. In him has passed away the most conspicuous legal figure of the world for the last half century. Undoubtedly he was the best known and most widely celebrated lawyer of that period, at home and abroad. His labors in domestic law reform had made his name the most familiar and his reputation the most com manding in this country, and his achievement in international law and law reform had given him an extensive influence in England, on the continent of Europe, and indeed in almost every part of the world where law is prevalent and respected and where there is any desire to make laws better. Mr. Field was in a great legal practice and had a commanding influence in our courts until he retired, less than ten years ago. In his later years he took only such cases as he desired, and was in constant request as a counsellor where vast financial interests were involved, either of an individual or a corporate character. It is understood that he had accumulated a large fortune in the active practice of his pro fession and by judicious ventures and investments. He had an extremely practical mind, and was a very sagacious man of business, not only as an adviser but in his own affairs — a combination not very often occurring, for lawyers are quite generally, we believe, rather inferior in judgment in their own business matters. Mr. Field by habit, induced by
the necessities of his early years, practiced the New England thrift in small things, while in larger affairs he did not scruple to spend money liberally. He was aware that he had the reputation of being parsimonious and grasping, and several years ago he confided to us a fact which he would not have allowed to be heralded in his life, but which his death allows us to divulge : when Chief-Justice Taney died in penury, and leaving a daughter with out means of support, there was a proposal among the national Bar to make some provision for her, but it moved so sluggishly and seemed so likely to fail, that Mr. Field voluntarily came forward and gave his personal bond to the clerk of the Supreme Court of the United States, conditioned to pay the daughter an annuity of five hundred dollars. This covenant he kept for eighteen years. It must be borne in mind that Mr. Field knew neither the Chief Justice nor the daughter at all, and that he did not at all approve the Chief-Justice's political sentiments, but what he did was for the honor of the Bar and to save the nation from discredit. The act was like him, and the omission to proclaim it was also like him. But he would not submit to imposition because he was a rich man. So when a pair of his old shoes was lost at the Delavan House in Albany, when he was a guest there — they were stolen /rom his door by some drunken assemblymen for a lark — he made the landlord send out and buy him a new pair of four dollar shoes. The landlord subsequently found the missing shoes and sent them to him with a sarcastic note, and Mr. Field returned the new ones, observing that he liked the old ones a great deal better. His stalwart and noble figure, clad in that old gray suit, with that time-honored blue or red necktie — the one gaiety he indulged in dress — and in those old shoes, was one that commanded respect, and there were few indeed fit to stand in those shoes. Mr. Field had a perfectly adequate estimate of his own powers and the value of the exercise of them, and he was not at all modest in his charges. He believed thoroughly in giving the very best of his talents to his clients and then in charging them what he thought they were worth. On one occasion, as he told us, he was employed by a great corporation
