and has occasionally appeared as counsel before the Supreme Court.
James Valentine Campbell was born at Buffalo, Feb. 25, 1823, but he was brought to Michigan when three years old. His father, Henry Munroe Campbell, had been a county judge in New York, and held the same position afterwards in Michigan. The son was graduated in 1841 from the now extinct St. Paul's College at Flushing, L. I., when Dr. Muhlenberg was president of it. At twenty-one he was admitted to the bar, and practised in partnership with Walker and Douglass, the chancery and law re porters heretofore mentioned. But Camp bell has the credit of having done much of the work on Walker's Chancery Report. He was at various times in the Detroit Board of Education, and in 1848 was president of the Young Men's Society when that organization, with its library, was the chief engine of culture in Detroit. Thirty-five years later he was president of the Public Library Commission. He was intimately connected with the government of the University of Michigan, in earlier years, as secretary of its faculty; and when the law school was opened through his exertions in 1858, he became Marshall professor of law, and continued to hold that post for twenty-five years That same year he began his judicial career, which never closed until the morning of March 26, 1890, when, while sitting in his library awaiting breakfast, the great change came so silently and suddenly upon him that those who were with him in the same room did not at first perceive it. Like Chief-Justice Jay he was a devoted churchman, and his sagacity solved many an ecclesiastical perplexity. When he died a great store of local knowledge was sealed up, for there was no man living, probably, so well acquainted with the personal and political history and antiquities of Detroit. In 1876 he published a history of Michigan, which is occasionally referred to in this article; and at the State's semicentennial in 1886 he produced the sketch of his judicial history to which reference is also made. He was an easy, rapid, fluent, and forcible speaker, and the speed with which he wrote his opinions was the wonder of his colleagues. Like General Grant, whom he knew and appreciated, he was absolutely free from any impurities or profanities in speech, — they were offensive to him. But he could characterize a man in graphic phrase, as when he once said of the General him self, that " a dog could n't wag his tail in a crowd but Grant would see him; " or of a certain tedious lawyer, that "he would dance all day long in a peck measure;" or of an official who kept to himself the distribution of several appointments, that "wanted to say grace over the whole barrel of pork;" or of a certain statesman, that "he was an old granny, and So-and-so was the right kind of a man to write his biography." His classic face, his venerable appearance (for he was gray before he was thirty), his purity of life and speech, his overflowing knowledge, and his strict religious observance were apt to lead people to idealize him in a sentimental sort of way that did not do justice to his firmness of purpose, his keen perception of the rascalities of the world, and the merciless severity he could show to any kind of meanness. It was discovered at an early date that he was abundantly able to hold his own; as when, while at the bar, his adversary, Levi Bishop, was once begging for a postponement on account of the absence of eminent counsel, Alex. D. Fraser, "whom we regard," he said, "as our right bower. I suppose," the speaker quizzically added, "that my Sunday-school friend will hardly know what that means." "I have always understood," retorted Campbell, "that it meant the greatest knave in the pack." The humor that was clearly apparent in his conversation, his after-dinner speeches, and his unofficial writings was not of the kind that stung, however, nor was it boisterously merry, but sparkling and delicate.
Thomas McIntyre Cooley, who is the son of a farmer, was born at Attica, N. Y., Jan.
