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tender, generous, sympathetic, good. He was especially considerate of young men, — literally eager to help them forward by kindly and encouraging words. If one did anything worthy of praise, he would take great pains to contrive some indirect method by which he might make known his appreciation. His courteous and patient dealing even with those who made preposterous claims upon his good offices showed the thorough kind ness of his nature, while at the same time his candor — "the sweet fresh air of our Harvard conferred upon him the degree moral life " — prevented him from permitting of LL.D. in 1886. President Eliot saluted the applicant to entertain the hope of hav him on that occasion as follows : " Lawyer, ing his support when he was not free to give it. His purity of life, purpose, and conduct Scholar, Senator, Administrator, Teacher." The romance of his early life proved the was never questioned; not even did slander happiness of his later years. His first attach cast any temporary film upon his reputation. ment was for Miss Henrietta Dean, of Conscience was his guide. He was a patriot. Mac0n, who did not look with disfavor on It was a peculiarity that for many years he his suit; but parental objections intervened. wore in an inside vest-pocket a small copy Lamar's first wife was a daughter of Augustus of the Constitution. This was buried with B. Longstreet, author of the inimitable him. "Georgia Scenes." Miss Dean married The influences surrounding Lamar in early Gen. William S. Holt. Lamar lost his wife life were deeply religious. His training at during his term in Congress. Mrs. Holt home and at college was distinctly evangeli had been a widow for many years, when in cal. Almost all his public utterances show 1886 Lamar met her again, and they were in their religious cast the impress of this married Jan. 5, 1887. training. Robert Browning intimates in one In December, 1892, failing health compelled of his poems that in this age we have our Lamar to give up work. He came to Mac0n choice to live " the life of doubt diversified with his wife, and seemed to be making im by faith," or "life of faith diversified by provement. But " the feet of the avenging' doubt." Another poet, equally reverent, gods are shod with wool." On the night of declares : — Jan. 23, 1893, he was suddenly attacked with "Doubts to the world's child heart unknown illness, and died within an hour. Question us now from star and stone : His obsequies at Macon, on January 28, The letters of the sacred book were attended by Chief-Justice Fuller and Glimmer and swim beneath our look." Mrs. Fuller, and by Mr. Justice Blatchford, Mr. Justice Brown, and Mr. Justice Brewer, Lamar had many vacillations — perhaps also by the Clerk and Marshal of the court. once a total lapse — from the early faith Thus far this sketch has dealt with the ex which he " drank in with his mother's milk;" ternal facts of Lamar's career. But charac but in his later life it came back to him with ter is more than achievement. To be and sustaining power. to know are greater things than to get and The imperishability of non-sentient life to have. What of his spirit, of the inner he expressed in a verse which is perhaps life? " As a man thinketh in his heart, so his best contribution to the judicial an is he." Lamar was warm-hearted, impulsive, thology : — attempt to assassinate Mr. Justice Field, he insisted that before jurisdiction of the crime of murder could be withdrawn from the tribunals of the State where the act was perpetrated, into the Federal Courts, it was necessary to show some law, some statute, some act of Congress, which could be pleaded as an authoritative justification for the prisoner's act, and that no implied power existed in the President, or' one of his subordinates, to substitute an order or direction of his own, no matter how lofty the motive or commendable the result."
