only a few years past his majority, he did not hesitate to accept the responsibility. Then came, what alas, so many clever young lawyers miss, opportunity, which he embraced to the full; and at nisi prius, and on appeals, he rapidly rose, eliciting ap provals from clients, juries and judges. District Attorney Blunt became so fond of his official duties that his civil practice fell entirely to the supervision of his junior partner. In a few years, however, the senior, worn out with public work, fell ill and died; when Vanderpoel founded a new firm, which for nearly a quarter century he guided into exceptional eminence and full pecuniary reward. Next, on the retirement of two other later inducted partners, he formed a new firm of Vanderpoel, Green & Cuming: which is the great law firm under contemplation in this sketch. The latter had been only a young office boy for the Blunt & Vanderpoel firm, but his habits of thought, phenomenal judg ment and studious turn of mind in one so young, had enlisted the sympathetic attention of his elders, so that they soon made him the chief law clerk of their office. Hence his association in the new firm came as a per fectly natural event. Robert Stockton Green came also of a legal family. He and his brother Ashbel Green (now best known to the profession as author of a learned treatise upon the doc trine of ultra t1ires) were at the New Jersey bar; and they had been valued Princetonians. He had more graces of oratory than Vander poel, who was persuasive in a more conver sational or colloquial tone with jurors and the Bench, although when deeply interested or exc1ted by topics he could rise into elo quent utterances. Vanderpoel was the most logical of the two. Green was disposed to be what the Bench term " a case lawyer "; the other, while never neglecting fortifica tions from the reports, argued a priori from principles rather than a fortiori from deci sions. .After cracking any litigious nut Van
derpoel would, with a logical pick, separate the skin from the fruit and dig into the very core, extracting all its delicate points. He was a firm disciple of the maxim eadem ratio ibidem lex. So was Cuming — a rigid moralist of the Scotch and Irish Presbyterian Church who always first sought the just side of the litigation in hand. He was fonder of equity; but Vanderpoel and Green were devoted disciples of general common law and its statutory aides-de-eamp. Vander poel was a champion brief-maker and Green was a champion exemplificator of briefs after these were made. Cuming was a delver for both partners and became their "devil" — as London O.C.'s name their junior as sistants. Many an English Lord Chancellor, chief-justice and attorney-general has ex pressed indebtedness to his " devil," who, in time, on his bookish and thought-mining deviltry, himself became eminent. Cuming was executive, painstaking and patient. He knew the value of Longfellow's line in his psalm of life — "still achieving, still pursu ing, learn to labor and to wait." He, like Green, had a more judicial cast of mind than Vanderpoel, who was rather the ag gressive advocate. Green was not a lawyer of detail; Vanderpoel was such, yet his share and also what ought to have been Green's share of detail fell upon Cuming, who, if he had lived in the time of Alex ander, might have untied and not have severed the Gordian knot. Green was im pulsive and would have cut that knot like the impetuous Macedonian. Vanderpoel might have also finally cut it, but he would first have at least endeavored to untie it. Green and Cuming had many literary tastes, but Vanderpoel few. Turn the first two upon the shelves of a great public library, and they would have rummaged into history, fiction, poetry and biography as well as into legal volumes. But Vanderpool, if in it, would have first visited the calfskin and have neglected marble edges, perhaps, en tirely. He lived like Coke surrounded bva
