assault and battery was tried before him. The usual issues were submitted, i. e., " i . Did defend ant wrongfully assault and beat the plaintiff? 2. What damages did the plaintiff sustain?" The jury; after full consideration, returned as their verdict No, to the first issue, and twenty-five dol lars in response to the second. The judge, in some surprise, asked the foreman if there was not some mistake, as the findings seemed to be incon sistent. "No, your honor," was the reply, "we found that the defendant very properly and justly beat the plaintiff, as he ought to have done under the provocation given, and that he beat him twenty-five dollars' worth. We do not think the punishment he gave the plaintiff was cruel or ex cessive for calling the defendant a d d liar."
About the time of the passage of the Stamp Act, making null and void unstamped instruments, a suit was brought in I.ouisiana, on a plain, verbal contract, satisfactorily proven. The defendant de murred because the contract was not stamped. Plaintiff's counsel insisted upon the impossibility of the thing, but the Court said : "While it might work a hardship, yet law was law, and he should have to sustain the demurrer." It was one of the delights of the late Ixird Cole ridge to profess ignorance of things supposed to be of common knowledge. In a newspaper libel action his lordship, in his most silvery tones asked, "What is ' Truth '? " "It is a newspaper, my l.ud," replied counsel. " Oh! " said his lordship, preserving his simplicity and splendid gravity; "isn't that an entirely new definition?" NOTES.
Luther R. Marsh and Ogden Hoffman were opposed to each other in a murder case, some half century ago. Mr. Marsh is now in his old age one to whom may be applied the lines about Hamlet, — " See what a noble mind is here o'erthrown," — but Ogden Hoffman has been dead nearly half a century. He was a wondrous orator, and anticipating the effect of his eloquence, Mr. Marsh said to the jury, " You will soon listen to one at whose bidding instant creations, mighty em bodiments of thought and argument, sublime con ceptions, glowing analogies, and lively imagery will burst as by miracle from the crystal deep of mind
in overpowering forms of majesty and power." In his address, Mr. Hoffman thus parried : " He has decked me with roses and crowned me with laurel, that he might strike me on the head with a classic and consecrated axe." Judge William Kent was of a most sprightly disposition, even when martyred by the gout. Near him in Ascension Church was the pew of a brother lawyer remarkable for his ponderosity of manner and slow, deliberate speech. In making responses to the service, his voice was always heard last, and generally awkwardly staccato. Leaving the church together one day, Judge Kent observed: " Why is it, in saying the Credo, you 'descend into the place of departed spirits' several seconds after the rest of the congrega tion?" After being legislated off the Circuit liench by a new Constitution creating new judicatures, he was under the new system often constituted a ref eree. Often impatient to leave for his beloved rural residence, he wrote during a hearing, on the brief of one of the counselors : — While these lawyers are giving me " words, words, words," As unto Polonius Hamlet said, I am thinking — aye thinking ever instead Of the sunshine and flowers and singing of birds. The autographic impromptu lines are still treas ured by the possessor. Kx-Chief-Justice Charlf„s P. Daly, of New York, who, technically convicted by the Constitu tion of having lost memory and legal ability because over seventy years of age, is now in active practice as jurisconsult, with head and heart as young as ever, has many comic remin iscences of his forty years' continuous experience on the bench. During that long period he had naturalized ten thousand citizens. He was always punctilious in putting questions to applicants and their witnesses. Asking one of the latter whose eyes brimmed with Hibernian wit whether the applicant was respectable, he answered : " Yery much so, your Honor; he never had a law-suit during the tin years I've wot on him." An appli cant asked if during his residence he had been out of the United States, he answered, " Only onst, your Honor, when I crossed the ferry into New Jersey."
