thing else, unless it was his leniency toward Jefferson Davis. (They both went on his bail bond.) He moved on the street, on the few occasions on which I have seen him, with an abstracted air, but with a fine scholarly dignity. An excellent portrait of him accompanies Mr. Bigelow's sketch. Undoubtedly, in the popular estimation, Mr. O'Conor was like an iceberg — lofty, pure, shining to be sure, but cold, inacces sible and unpleasant to run against. On the other hand, his great countryman and an tagonist, Brady, was regarded as a sunlit and smiling eminence, whose sides attracted dwellers and nourished the kindly fruits of the earth. It may well be doubted whether Mr. O'Conor was a lovely and amiable char acter. One may be permitted to doubt that he yearned, like Abou ben Adhem, to be written as " one who loved his fellowmen." One may say, without much fear of contradiction, that he was a natural aris tocrat, and of a somewhat haughty and re served disposition. He did not mingle easily and familiarly with the community, and cared little for their applause and less for their censure. In his last years, seeking retirement and a healthful air, he insulated himself on Nantucket, where nobody could swim out to call on him, and he there led the life of a recluse. He seems to have been possessed, like Mephistopheles, by the spirit of denial. One of his most dis tinguished contemporaries and survivors writes me : "Mr. O'Conor was a very in consistent and eccentric man. He seemed never to have a fixed opinion unless it was adverse to the opinion of the rest of man kind. He championed slavery as a ' benign institution '; he maintained that the Federal executive should consist of several persons; and was ' agin everybody,' as the poor voter, who came to the polls in Bryant's time, proclaimed himself to be." One of the oldest surviving members of the constitu tional convention of 1867-8 writes me: " I never heard that O'Conor was in favor of
anything but human slavery." The former of these gentlemen is a Democrat, the latter is a Republican. On the other hand, Mr. James C. Carter, who knew him as well as anybody knew him, under the beneficent rule nil nisi, etc., while admitting that Mr. O'Conor stood in popular repute as I have stated above, contended that he assumed an austerity that was not natural to him. This somewhat remarkable explanation is made as follows : " In his professional life, in his office, or in the courts where he was most frequently met, he was wont to surround himself with a forbidding and mysterious air, and appeared severe, austere, repellant. Many took this as a manifestation of his real character, whereas in truth it was but one of the instrumentalities of his art by which he often bewildered and confounded his adversaries. At the same time, in the circle of his friends, in his or their homes, he was like the gentlest of men, warm, friendly, generous, magnanimous." Mr. Frederick R. Coudert, also, on the same post mortem occasion, after narrating how Mr. O'Conor severely scolded a little shoeblack who in truded on him in his office, and how soon after he sought him out in the street and gave him a new outfit from a neighboring clothing-shop, observes: "Ifthis.was meant as an atonement for his impatience, it was a royal atonement. But it was rather a mani festation of his true nature — the other scene was a simulacrum — a false pretense. For there were false pretenses in Mr. O'Conor, and all who knew him knew that he was full of false pretenses of that kind." And Mr. Coudert seems to intimate that the scene in the office was enacted for the benefit of the clerks. Thus Mr. O'Conor is made to have assumed a failing instead of a virtue, and run counter to Hamlet's advice to his mother, and to the general conduct of man kind. It must be confessed that if these latter gentlemen are right, this was a very unusual, unamiable and unpleasant form of hypocrisy, and considering the unwavering
