The Supreme Court of New Jersey. great industry, untiring energy, and an earnest desire justly and faithfully to per form the duties of his position. His mind was a growing one; it had the power of ex pansion, and he became, before his term of office expired, a sound, excellent judge. He had one faculty, which perhaps he de rived from his German ancestry. He could dig and delve into the mines of legal lore, and he dug and delved for his own satisfaction, and to aid himself in arriving at a proper conclusion. During the first year or two while on the bench, he wrote very few opinion*; but after he fairly felt himself at home he began to assume the full responsibility of his office. He did not always agree with his brethren, and when he did disagree he did not hesitate to put himself on the record, even though he stood alone. He had one faculty in which he had very few, if any, superiors, and that was the power of marshalling the facts of a cause, of grouping them to gether, and presenting them to a jury with very great power. His style was plain, unvarnished, with few graces of ora tory, and not elegant diction; but he over powered the judgment of his hearer, and forced conviction by his masterly skill in this direction. This faculty enabled him, while on the bench in the trial of causes before him at the Circuit, to enlist the at tention of jurors, and enable them to per ceive the salient, governing facts in the case. He remained on the bench for one term, and at the expiration of his office re moved to Minnesota, where he died. George H. Brown was so short a time on the bench that but little can be said of him as a judge. During his term of office he was suffering from the effects of an insidious and deadly disease, which prevented him from displaying to the full his capabilities for filling the position for which he was fully equipped. He was born in 1810, in Somerville, the county-seat of Somerset County. His father, the Rev. Isaac V. Brown, D.D., was a clergy
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man and a teacher, the principal of a large and flourishing school at Lawrenceville. He was prepared for college under his father's immediate personal supervision, and gradu ated from Princeton in 1828, when only eighteen years of age, and then assisted his father in his academy. But he was deter mined to be a lawyer, and two years after graduation became a student in the office of Thomas A. Hartwell, a practising attorney at Somerville. Desirous of obtaining the very best legal education that the country offered, he left Mr. Hartwell's office and entered the Law School Department of Yale College, where he remained a sufficient length of time to fit himself for examination for license as an attorney-at-law in 1835. In 1838 he was licensed as a counsellor, after he had been engaged in the practice of the profession at Somerville for three years. He remained in that place the rest of his life engaged in his profession, until he was appointed an Associate Justice in 1861. The opportuni ties for a successful practitioner at Somer ville were not large; but Mr. Brown from the very first secured the best clientage in the county, and was soon found among those who led the bar. Before his appoint ment as Justice he had received many honors, political and otherwise, at the hands of his fellow-citizens. Although quite a young man at the time of the Constitutional Convention, he was considered worthy of a place in that conservative body; and when the Constitution, the work of that Conven tion, was adopted, Mr. Brown was the first Senator from Somerset, under the new Constitution, elected in a county where the majority of voters was politically opposed to him, and which a preceding Legislature had weighted with territory containing a vote which it was presumed would prevent the election of any candidate of Mr. Brown's political belief. In 1850 he became a member,of Con gress, but was not returned at the expiration of his term. He did not relinquish his practice while in Congress, but retained as
