courts when Mr. Field addressed us, and I became so impressed with his perseverance and adroitness coupled with readiness, that I determined if ever I had occasion for a lawyer to employ the young Fields." My relative not very many years afterwards, as a member of the New York Legislature, had occasion to remember David Dudley Field when he began his fusillade on the law mak ers with an early feu de joic of codification. The next occasion when I saw David Dudley Field was when I was a student in the Cambridge Law School in the class of which Rutherford B. Hayes and George Hoadley were fellow members. Judge Story, in his capacity as Federal Circuit Judge, was in the habit of hearing chamber arguments in one of the class-rooms wherein he or Professor Simon Greenleaf (of blessed evidential memory) lectured. And on one of these occasions it was bruited among the students (who were always welcome upon their occurrence) that Boston's famous Rufus Choatc was to be argued against by two New York lawyers. These were soon ascertained to be David Dudley Field and Joseph T. Bosworth, afterwards judge and reporter in the Superior Court. I vividly recall the personal rather than legal impressions that Messrs. Choate and Field made upon me. The great Bostonian was nervoiVs in his utterances, and although the subject-matter was evidently dry and technical he threw great earnestness into his argument, until the veins of his temples seemed to throb with eagerness, while Mr. Field had a coldness and impassiveness — although he was fluently persuasive — that I fancied more or less irritated his emotional adversary. Again I noticed the graceful ness and elasticity and the magnetism in Mr. Field that the first occasion had brought into prominence. After leaving Harvard Law School I entered the New York law office of a con servative aged lawyer who was prosecuting a suit that the brothers Field were defend
ing. My preceptor was very bitter against the elder, and I lisLened to many severe criticisms of David Dudley from his lips. These are worthy of a reference because they voiced the prevailing opinion of the judges and veterans of the New York Bar at that time. The bitterness of my pre ceptor was manifested in remarks of the following purport : " David Dudley* Field wishes to overturn and unsettle the law and legal procedure of the land by a crazy codification, and so overturn our traditions and deprive common law of its elasticity and adaptability to changing circumstances." This was at the time when Mr. Field was bombarding the press and legislators and the members of a forthcoming* constitutional convention with monographs and pamph lets and leaders in newspapers arguing for a simplification of legal pleading and a uniformity of statutory system. In after years, when I came to know Mr. Field famil iarly, the topic of this Bourbonic opposition of veteran judges and practitioners came into our conversation. "I was treated," said Mr. Field, " with opposition such as assailed Romilly when he undertook to ameliorate in England the barbarity of the penal procedures and statutes that consigned poachers and petit larceners to the scaffold; or such as Parker, Phillips, Garrison and Sumner had to withstand when they sought to change and ameliorate the procedure and statutes against slavery; or such as hounded John Quincy Adams on the floor of the House of Representatives when he moved to amend the procedure that barred the right of petition.-" "Were you never discouraged, Mr. Field, in your early struggles for codification?" "Never once. I never attended a prize fight, but I became familiar with some' of the pugilistic lingo; and I took an early fancy to the phrase, ' he was knocked down but he came up smiling in the next round.'" "In short, Mr. Field, whatever was the result of one round in the codiiication prize
