Vol. VIII.
No. 8.
BOSTON.
August, i 896.
WILLIAM SAMPSON. By Irving Browne.
THERE are various Sampsons immortal ized in the dictionaries of persons, real and fictitious. There is the servant of Capulet, in " Romeo and Juliet"; and the " Dom inie " of " The Antiquary "; and Deborah, who " fit into the Revolution," like the great judge of Israel; and an American D. D.; but William makes a very small figure in such repositories. It is his own fault. He was a lawyer, and evidently did not furnish his biog raphy and pay for a portrait to accompany it in any biographical dictionary of his day, if indeed such oppressions and impositions had then been invented. To render his re suscitation the more difficult, the only extant records of him easily accessible, to my knowledge, are reprints of two of the rarest of New York law reports. Such is profes sional fame. Even tradition has very little to say about him. He lives in this intangible and ghost-like way, simply because so much wit could not die. Of all legal wits of whom there is any account, he was the brightest, and among all the wits of earth there can never have been his superior. He had wit enough to have set up a dozen " Punches," and to have added a brighter gleam to " Life." Neither Sydney Smith nor Rufus Choate could have discoursed so long and so amusing ly as he did, on at least two occasions, and it is to these two discourses that I now venture to draw the attention of the rising members of the legal profession. He is known by tradition to all the old New York lawyers now living, to some of the middle-aged, and not at all to the young. Even when the roll of the
lawyers who conferred glory on the New York Bar eighty years ago is called on festive occasions, his name is not mentioned. There is no mention of him in any of the histories of the city of New York, nor in Dr. Erancis' celebrated address, " Old New York," before the New York Historical Society. Per haps this is because he appears to have been merely a criminal lawyer, if we may judge from the few extant legal records of him. He was an Irishman, but fame has not been so kind to him as to his contemporary and fellow-countryman, Emmet, and his later fellow-countrymen, O'Conor and Brady. Yet in general culture and legal learning he could have held his own with any of them, and he had more wit than all of them to gether. There is probably not a living law yer who ever saw him. No Bar meeting seems to have been held over the ashes of this Yorick. Mr. Snyder has not embalmed any utterance of his in " Great Speeches of Great Lawyers." It seems to be left to me to drag his memory out of the grave and furbish it up for his neglectful successors. In performing this pious and pleasing office, would that my pen might gather inspiration from his blithe spirit, which irradiates the musty old law pages and confers a glory on the mouldering sheepskin! The chief data of his life, so few as I can discover, are in Appleton's " Biographical Encyclopaedia" and singularly, in Allibone's "Dictionary of Authors." He was born in Ireland in 1763, and died at New York in 1836. He was an exile, tried for complicity 3*3
