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he was appointed by the governor to fill a vacancy on the bench of the Court of Ap peals, and was twice elected to that place by the popular vote, serving thirteen years. At the close of his second term, in 1866, to the general regret, he declined a re-nomination. He was by no means a brilliant man, and was conservative and unprogressive. He was strongly opposed to the great legal reforms

effected by the Consti tution of 1846. In the preface to the last vol ume of his reports he said : " A new system of legal procedure has been introduced, un der the specious name of reform; and in professed obedience to a constitutional pro vision looking only to the modes of practice, all the divisions under which legal rights and remedies had been ar ranged, and the whole nomenclature of legal science, as learned and practised in this court, have been abolished. The ancient simpli city of the common law has been made to HENRY R. give place to a system in which every case is made a special one; and the ancient and established principles of jurisprudence, illus trated and enforced in the series of adjudica tions of which this volume is the concluding portion, can now only be found and applied by approximation and a species of elective affinity, as tedious in its operation as it must be uncertain and fluctuating in its result." This now sounds amusing. But it must be confessed that Judge Denio was not a fac tious opponent of the new system; he gener ally lent his powers to the elucidation of it in a candid manner. The most technical and

illogical exhibition of his intellect is perhaps in White v. Wager, 25 N. Y. 328, where the court held (Wright and Smith, JJ., dissent ing) that under the married women's acts of 1848 and 1849, giving the wife power to convey " as if unmarried," she could not effectually convey directly to the husband, because the acts did not remove the hus band's common-law disability to take directly from her. In other words, a wife cannot convey to her husband, like a single woman, because a single wo man has no husband. But he had a compre hensive, calm, and clear intellect, a strong memory, untiring dili gence, absolute fair ness, and complete independence. His learning was so great that he had a reputa tion in Westminster Hall as well as in every State of the Union. No judge ever more fully possessed public confidence. So strong was this that on his death, an eminent law yer, in pronouncing SELDEN. his eulogy in the Court of Appeals, declared that "counsel would willingly argue their case before him alone, sitting as a court of last resort." A more emphatic and significant tribute was never paid to a deceased judge, and it would form a fitting epitaph. His independence was illustrated by his opinion in the Lemmon case (20 N. Y. 562), in which he applied to our State Mansfield's immortal declaration that no man could breathe the air of England and be a slave. This decision gave temporary offence to the party which elected him, and for a time endangered his re-nomination; but the public confidence in