mies regretted the irresistible charm of his manner and conversation, and that correct sense of what is appropriate to occasion and its object which as an attribute we call good taste. A mood of engrossing thought would often come upon him even while he trod the streets, when his pace would become slow, his head would be bent slowly downward, and with hands joined together behind him, his lips, as he wended his way, would move in apparent concert with the thoughts mov ing in his mind." With such a picture in view we may perfectly recall Hamilton as he stood in the corridor of the court-house awaiting his call to the bar or when trying his first case. It may be digressively interesting to note that the son and namesake, Alexander Ham ilton, Jr., was during the fifties a leading member of the New York bar; and so far as comparison with old prints and personal descriptions could go, was a perfect duplicate in face, size and bearing, of his illustrious sire. At the same time he could be often seen in the court-rooms beside another law yer of note who was known to be a natural son of Aaron Burr, and to resemble the lat ter most exactly, as well as to have inherited all his shrewdness. Both have long since joined the majority. The first case above referred to came for him in the minor court of the city, held by the Mayor, and known as Mayor's Court. It had jurisdiction under the colonial char ter given to the Duke of York's city; and quite anomalously, although an inferior court, it took jurisdiction of actions in ejectment. His client was a Tory merchant who had quitted New York for England in company with so many Tory refugees whom the tra ditional ceremonies of New York's Evacua tion Day annually bring to mind. He was retained against a widow tenant whom the Attorney- General of the day defended. Hamilton's appearance on the side of wealth and power against a woman, as his debut, has in it no hint of romance; but doubtless
his retainer came because the circumstances of the action would infuse unpopularity into a jury-box, and as policy the retainer was best given to an undoubted and favored patriot. There were no reports of cases in that tentative era of courts of law to tell of his suc cess in the action; and only tradition handed down from his compeers,— notably by James Kent through his son William, whom many graduates of Harvard Law School during the professorship of the latter can recall. Sim ilar traditions tell the later generations that Alexander Hamilton did not want for retain ers; and that clients flocked to his modest chambers in Garden Street. His practice was somewhat interrupted by his election to the expiring Continental Congress. But neither his professional nor public duties kept him from an industry with his pen. He early, with John Jay and William Morris, recognized that federal government was on the cards of American destiny; and he be gan to argue in the newspapers for a union of states, not as a confederacy, but in a National Republic. No lawyer, or even law student, needs to be reminded how earnest ly and zealously Hamilton worked to bring about a convention of the states, " to form a more perfect union, establish justice, in sure domestic tranquillity, provide for the common defence and promote the general welfare." Nor to be reminded how, after he had composed and drafted the preamble to the Constitution, from which the foregoing is quoted, and while the instrument was pending for approbation and adoption, he penned the letters that posterity reads in the volume of The Federalist. Respecting that preamble : When once called to ac count for its tautology in the expression "to form a more perfect union," and when asked if perfection itself could bear the com parative word " more," Hamilton retorted by pleading Shakespeare for the necessity sometimes of a double superlative, and quoting the line from the tragedy of Julius Caesar, " most unkindest cut of all."
