Joseph Story. tendered to Tancy the Marshall succession. Reference to files of Whig party-newspapers of Boston and other cities ofthat time show what a political storm Tancy's nomination raised. It was urged that the appointment was purely a political reward, and that — as was indeed the case then — Roger B. Taney had not, even while Jacksonian AttorneyGeneral, displayed any conspicuous legal ability. But as,all lawyers know, Taney dur ing his twenty-eight years of service amply vindicated his skill in jurisprudence, and to that extent vindicated the policy of a politi cal appointment to a judgeship. Judge Story, to judge from his family letters of the period, did not take to heart the loss of the chief-justiceship, and he and Taney became conspicuous for comradeship and friendship. But the incident sharpened his ambition of authorship, and in time, amid harassing ju dicial duties and delighted occupation as in structor in the Law School (which he and Greenleaf had now raised from bankruptcy to great scholastic and pecuniary success), Story successively presented his students and the general legal public with his com mentaries on Bailments, on Agency, on Com mercial Paper, on Equity Jurisprudence and on the Federal Constitution. In intellectual industry and tenacity of authorship Story fairly rivalled Sir Walter Scott : beside whose pen ever stood the demon of paralysis, jave lin in hand, ready to strike, and also the grim demon of debt urging to incessant literary toil. But Story, although his income was far smaller as judge and as professor than his great abilities entitled him to receive, had no such pressure upon him as had Scott. His labors were eminently labors of love. Whatever debts of distinction he owed to his " jealous mistress " of the law he abun dantly discharged by his treatises — which were " not for a day, but for all time." His work on Bailments at once superseded the editions of Sir William Jones and his editors. That on Negotiable Paper destroyed the prior value of all other authors on the same
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subject. While his Equity and Constitutional Commentaries left nothing for subsequent writers to illuminate. The literary skill of all Story's treatises equals their proofs of ac curate research and learning. Marshall and he remain the great scholars of the Federal Bench, approached only in average legal estimation by the scholastic ability of Ben jamin R. Curtis and Horace Gray. What a chasm of succinct expression lies between the diction of Coke and Fearne and that of Story. Mental toil told heavily upon Judge Story. At forty he began to present the appearance of an aged man, so far as pol ished skull and telltale furrows on the face concerned physical appearance. But the querulousness of age, its diminution of men tal vigor and its loss of physical vigor were ever absent. I had not enjoyed a sight of him until, as a law student, I confronted him at his professorial desk. I recall that I be came so impressed with his majestic presence, his genial face, his musical voice and his delightful method of conversational tutor ship on that occasion, that I lost attention to that first lecture in contemplating the great jurist and in musing upon my knowl edge of what he had achieved. I had taken to his house a letter of commendatory intro duction from Theodore Frelinghuysen, the Chancellor of my alumnus university, and nothing could exceed the cordiality of the Story welcome in his study at his beautiful cottage residence; and yet such interviews from and with students must have become monotonous, and perhaps irksome. Such in dividual admiration could be always seen por trayed upon the faces of my fellow class mates as they were surveyed in the act of listening and gazing upon Story's saint-like face. To paraphrase the line of a well known hymn, Story, as a lecturer, " was his own in terpreter and he will make it plain." His comments were interspersed with such ap propriate anecdotes as was the habit of. Ab raham Lincoln. When he presided at the moot courts which he had established for the
