the wide legal learning that belong to a highly com petent lawyer. It does not seem to have occurred to the diners, nor to Mr. Warner, that the poetical faculty and keen humor did not interfere with the judicial career of the late Lord Justice Bowen. It does not seem to be necessary to a good judge and a sound lawyer that he should not be able to under stand a joke or write an agreeable and unambiguous style. A competent judge is not necessarily a dull person, although he sometimes is. Judge Finch has retired from the bench, but he is still active in a de partment of grave responsibility — as dean of the Cornell University Law School, in which he will doubtless put his stamp on many a nascent mind seeking a legal training. Wise, like Ulysses, he has sought his early home at Ithaca to spend the evening of his days. As he sits there on those wooded heights and looks over that beautiful cam pus and down upon that smiling lake, let us hope that some fresh poetical figures may come before his mind, and that as Bryant in his manhood in the busy city yearned for the Green River of his youth, so our honored Judge may sing with fruition : — "An image of that calm life appears That won my heart in its greener years." Why Riker was not made Judge. — An attempt was made to insert in the proof of the sketch of Richard Riker, in our April number an explanation of the fact that he never rose to the Supreme Court bench, but tyrannical printers would not allow it. The ex planation is given to the present writer by Chief-Justice Daly, as follows : " When a successor was to be ap pointed to Kent in the Supreme Court, Riker be came a candidate for the office, and relied for getting it on the Clintonians, who controlled the Council of Appointment; but as they had combined with the Federalists to defeat the Democrats, and were unsuc cessful, the office was given to the Federalists, and Judge Piatt was appointed; upon which Riker sep arated at once from DeWitt Clinton, and joined the - Bucktails,' the Tammany party of the day," which, of course, goes to show the superior purity of an ap pointed judiciary to one elected by the popular vote. NOTES OF CASES. Book Agents. — Here is a valiant blow at a public enemy : — "Judge McKinley, of one of the superior courts of California, has recently rendered a decision upon a novel question. He holds that the owner of a public office building, rented to tenants, who use the rooms for offices of lawyers, real estate agents, etc., has a right to exclude book canvassers from the building, and that such a person has no right of action for damages by reason of such exclusion, it appearing that the owner offers to allow him
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to go to any office in the building upon the express request of the occupant. The decision seems to be a sound one. The effort of the landlord is simply to protect his tenants from a well-known species of nuisance. The question of the propriety of his action seems to be a question solely between himself and his tenant. It can scarcely be implied, in his contracts of letting with his various tenants, that he dedicates the building to public use in the same sense in which the public highway is dedicated to such use, — in the sense which allows it to be used by tramps, peddlers, book-agents, and every other kind of people that annoy the occupants of offices and take their time from their work. It would be difficult to state upon what proposition of law the landlord assumes any duty toward a book-agent, by the mere fact of building a large building and renting it out to different occupants, to be used as offices for their own purposes."— Am. Law Keview The Irrigation Case. — Another important case pending under advisement in the United States Supreme Court is that concerning the right of a cor poration to condemn land for irrigation purposes on the Pacific slope. In that part of our country, the Scripture does not hold good that "the rain descendeth on the just and on the unjust," for it does not fall to any considerable extent on either, and both have to depend on dull ditch-water. Judge Dillon has been arguing on one side, and is to be congratulated at least on having a question that is not dry. No doubt. he ransacked and exhausted the history of artificial irrigation, and drew a pleasing picture of those brown limbed and symmetrical Eastern women who water the parching fields by means of a dish, rope, and pliant pole. We think him capable even of gracefully bringing in Woodworfh's old song, "The Old Oaken Bucket." That court has sometimes been induced by such appeals to the emotions to lay down some very bad law, as for example in the Dartmouth College case, where Webster, observing Horace's in junction, himself wept and so made Chief-Justice Marshall weep, by his " Et tu, Brute!" (which, by the bye, Caesar never said). But it would be a harmless victory when a court could be won by simply treating them to cold water. Unlawful Dissection.—In Foley v. Phelps, the New York Supreme Court, appellate division, have recently held that a civil action will lie in favor of a widow for damages for the unlawful dissection of the remains of her husband. The " N. Y. Law Journal" commenting editorially upon it, says : -— "The opinion of Judge Patterson in Foley v. Phelps, printed on the first page to-day, offers an interesting illus tration of the method of the development of jurisprudence by common law methods. It is held that a wife, as such, may recover damages for the unlawful dissection of the remains of her husband. That such a cause of action exists is also held in Larson v. Chase, 47 Minn. 307, cited
