Vol. VIII.
No. 5.
BOSTON.
May, 1896.
NICHOLAS HILL. By Hon. Matthkw Hale. "OUCH is the evanescence of a great lawO yer's fame, that some of your readers may not have heard of Nicholas Hill." So Mr. Grosvenor P. Lowrey wrote in his article on John K. Porter, in the Green Bag for August, 1892. Mr. Lowrcy's remark is doubtless true. Xo better illustration of the " evanescence of a great lawyer's fame" can be found than the case of Nicholas Hill. When he died less than forty years ago (May 1, 1859), he was generally considered as the first lawyer in the State of New York. In the language of the committee of the Bar of the City of New York which prepared a memorial of his life and services, " It is not too much to say that by the common consent of the Bar, Mr. Hill stood foremost among the first." .Mr. Justice Nelson, then of the Supreme Court of the United States, who presided at the Bar meeting held in New York City on the occasion of his death, said: "I have known Mr. Hill ever since he came into the profession, and have witnessed his advance in distinction until he had reached and stood in the very front 'rank of the Bar of New York." Mr. Charles O'Conor said at the same meeting, " When summoned from earth, though he had only attained his fifty-third year, he held confessedly the first place at our Bar." Similar words were spoken and written by many of his contemporaries who knew him well, and were acquainted not only with his professional, but with his private life; and still it may well be doubted whether even in this, the city where the
greater part of his professional work was done, and where he died, a majority of the younger members of the legal profession, if not quite in the condition described by Mr. Lowrey, are not without anything but the vaguest impressions of his professional standing and labors. His full-length portrait hangs in the State Capitol, with those of Abraham Van Vechten, Daniel Cad)' and others. Seven volumes of reports bear wit ness to his industry, acuteness and learning, as do also his reported briefs in many of the cases which he argued in the highest courts of the State. But the memory of the great lawyer has faded away. But few are left who knew him personally; and but little information respecting him is accessible to the public, or even to the ordinary profes sional reader. His character, labors, and services to the profession were such, how ever, as to justify an attempt on the part of the writer to revive his memory in this generation, in the hope that others having more time and better opportunities for col lecting facts, may perform more thoroughly and fully the biographical work which his eminence as a lawyer would seem to war rant and require. Nicholas Hill, the son of Rev. Nicholas Hill, was born in Florida, Montgomery County, New York, in the year 1805. His great-grandfather, Adam Hill, was born in the County of Derry, Ireland, and died at Schenectady, New York, December 10, 1764. Nicholas Hill, Senior, was the eldest son of Henry Hill, who was the son of Adam Hill. He seems to have been a remarkable .85
