He possessed that fluency of language which veteran Bostonians recall in Rufus Choate. He became, too, the Lucullus among New York lawyers, and his dinners at his Fifth Avenue mansion, assisted by his wife, who had been the widow of an emi nent litterateur, were remarkable for tactful selection of clients and brother lawyers, and for gastronomical excellence. Alas, I never enjoyed any of them," sighed the ghost, ruefully, " but they became the talk of the court-rooms." "Ned Sandford was also my favorite, as he was of the judges, his compeers and jurymen. "Steam-engine in breeches," was a descrip tive name once applied to Daniel Webster, and it also belonged to Sandford — a brother, by the way, of Judge Lewis H. Sandford, and best known by his volumes of reports, mainly on commercial conflicts. Sandford's motto to his students was, If you wish a thing to be very well done, don't impose it on others, do it yourself. He was an indefatigable — drafting his own pleadings, constructing his own briefs, and racing from court to court for attendance upon his cases. It was his incessant toil that broke his physique and sent him abroad for recuperation, returning wherefrom he met his shipwreck. He had a happy faculty of putting everybody at ease. One day, crossing the court square, he encountered a rural lawyer wearing a yel low vest and blue coat with brass buttons, which tradition ascribes to Daniel Webster for costume; observing whom, he ran to him with outstretched hand, exclaiming, ' Good morning, Mr. Webster.' The old lawyer — his name was Alanson Nash — was de lighted, but of course disavowed identity; yet for years, until his death, summer and winter, he continued to wear the Webster costume and imitate the poses of the ' god like Daniel.' "William M. Evarts, about 1850, began to take high rank at the bar — not for oratori cal graces, for he possessed few, but as a great condenser of facts and perfection in
logic; besides being indoctrinated in legal principles, and arguing from those in prefer ence to citing cases. I always followed Evarts into a court-room, for his keenness of reply, his apt repartee and clinching re torts. But in those days Evarts owed much to his partner, Southmayd, an unambitious attorney, who cared for nothing in life but in cessant devotion to law. He would come into court with a far-away look, as if he were communing with the spirit of Bacon. He walked in the street as if wrapped in mental soliloquy. And in his office was never so delighted as when Evarts brought in, or started, some subtle point. He it was who prepared the Evarts briefs, for which he ransacked ancient and modern legal litera ture with the assiduity of the old ' Prodigious ' in ' Guy Mannering.' I mention South mayd as the type of a lawyer who asks no other reward for himself than what is obtained from research and illustrating legal philos ophy through the medium of other brains and tongues, filtering his streams of research. Southmayd was said, in the profession, to have never had miscarry a pleading, a trust deed, or a will. And his admiration for Evarts approached idolatry. Evarts had no attribute of Pecksniff about him, but South mayd, nevertheless, was his Tom Pinch. You doubtless did not know the Evarts of nisi prius and banco, of fifty years ago, as I did, and you will perhaps be surprised to hear me say that he was then in even better legal trim than he was when defending Andy Johnson, or when, subsequently, AttorneyGeneral. Politics has seemed to me to fet ter his logic and lucidity. Many will choose to best remember this Massachusetts man by birth and education, and New Yorker by adoption, as Secretary of State and as sena tor; but as I flit now often past him, broken in health and almost blind, I best think of Evarts as lawyer of half a century ago. Public life did for him what it did to Web ster, it dimmed, but could not injure, his legal fame. His posterity, in estimating
