lution, no parenthesis, no complication. Everything is direct, natural, explicit

"His opinions are moreover remarkable for their common sense and their adaptation to the common understanding.

"But that quality which exalts his judgments the most in the estimation of the public is the ardent love of justice which runs through them all. His appetite for it was keen and constant, and nothing could rouse his kind and courteous temper into resentment more than a deliberate effort to entangle justice in the meshes of chicane. The law was his master; he yielded implicit obedience to its behests. Justice was the object of his affection; he defended her with the devotion of a lover."

From one portion of this eulogy I have always turned with aversion:

"It was his invariable effort," says Mr. Binney, "without regard to his own health, to finish a capital case at one sitting, if any portion of the night would suffice for the object; and one of the declared motives was to terminate as soon as possible that harrowing solicitude, worse even than the worse certainty, which a protracted trial brings to the unhappy prisoner."

The reason is as weak as the practice was bad. "Justice abhors hurry," says Bacon. I can find no exhibition of sympathy in the celerity with which an accusation of murder is disposed of before twelve sleepy jurymen.

"He never pronounced the sentence of death," adds Mr. Binney, "without severe pain. In the first instance it was the occasion of anguish. In this as in other points he bore a strong resemblance to Sir Matthew Hale. His awful reverence of the Great Judge of all mankind and the humility with which he habitually

Filghman

walked in that presence, made him uplift the sword of justice as if it scarcely belonged to man, himself a suppliant, to let it fall on the neck of his fellow-man."

FROM BENCH TO PULPIT

"Thoughts hardly to be packed

Into a narrow act;

Fancies that broke through language and escaped:

All I could never be,

All, men ignored in me,

This I was worth to God, whose wheel the pitcher shaped."
BROWNING, Rabbi Ben Ezra.

RADUATE of the College of Philadelphia

GR

at the age of fifteen! President Judge of the Seventh Judicial District at the age of twenty-nine! Distinguished son of a distinguished father! Such a man is worth looking at for a little while, and such a man was the Honorable Bird Wilson, appointed by Governor McKean to preside over the courts of Chester, Delaware, Montgomery and Bucks.

The father of Bird Wilson was one of the original signers of the Declaration of Independence.

He also sat in the convention called to frame the Constitution of the United States.

Washington declared "that the Convention to frame the Constitution of the United States

was made up of the wisest men in America, and that among the wisest of them was James Wilson."

Bird Wilson inherited his father's talents, and "in due time," as Dr. Turner observed, "made himself equally conspicuous."

There were doubtless some who questioned his qualifications. It was the first known instance in Pennsylvania of the appointment of so young a man. Besides his youth, he lacked experience in the Common Pleas and Sessions. It is questionable if he had ever tried a case before a jury. It is absolutely certain that he had not a single element of the popular orator. But from boyhood he had been studiously inclined, and the fruitage of these studies was early, prolific, and sound. "He was educated and came to the Bar," as Judge Yerkes says, "enveloped in an atmosphere of legal learning.

Philadelphia was then the great center of law and all that pertained to it in America. Besides, all the law courts of the State, and the Supreme and District Courts of the United States were there.

"In the office of his father-first, a leader of the Bar and afterwards a member of the highest