Levi Lincoln-State governments - Address - Courts of sessions - County- attorneys - Republican measures-Militia law — University,. . . .192 International law-Decrees and orders - Case of the Chesapeake - Impress- ment-Right of search - Proclamations- Canvass for president, CHAPTER I. PROFESSIONAL LIFE. THE life of a lawyer in full practice is necessarily one of ceaseless toil, and, where the nature is not selfish or hardened, one also of constant anxiety. The well-being, the fame and fortune of his client in his keeping, he moves on, in his honorable career, under a heavy burthen. With his heart peculiarly sensitive to all the various shades of human suffering and calamity, which constitute the field of his daily experience, investigations of legal questions, requiring analysis as patient, and reflection as profound, as any in metaphysics or theology, are to be calmly prosecuted, often on the very verge of an embittered forensic discussion, the more formidable from his inability to anticipate the precise period of its approach. Numerous rules and principles, a boundless range of precedents, and nice distinctions in pleading and evidence, must be continually present to his mind, and his faculties kept fresh and energetic for conflict, ready for attack, or to parry, according to the position assumed by his subtle antagonists. Burke well called the law the noblest of sciences, quickening and invigorating the understanding more than all other learning put together. His early life had been occupied with its study; but he had never been so identified with the bar as to give his opinion a professional bias. Indeed, when we consider the vast amount of knowledge, and many noble qualities of our nature, in perfect training, essential to the performance of the higher professional duties, we are disposed to concede full praise to those, who, by arduous discipline, qualify themselves to render to society services of such indispensable importance to its welfare. In return the community has been always disposed to recognize the practical tendencies of legal culture to open and liberalize the mind, and, wherever the system of government has been based upon principles of human freedom, placed especial confidence, in all matters of political interest or public concernment, in their legal advisers. The system of law prevailing in this commonwealth at the time of its reörganization, eighty years ago, materially differed from that of the present day. From the mother country we had inherited various principles and rules of practice, transmitted from a remote and less enlightened period of history, and originating in a condition of society very dissimilar from any existing in America. We are prone to consider the progress of our own times more rapid and considerable than that of previous eras. In this we are probably mistaken. Among the numberless blessings Providence has permitted human reason to devise, now seemingly as essential to our comfortable existence as the air we breathe, it is not easy to trace the exact order of their original germination or development; yet their regular succession has not been the less constant, because not at all times perceptible. There have been epochs in the history of nations when, in several respects, civilization has been retrograde; but, since the Reformation and the general diffusion of knowledge through the press, the march of improvement has been steadily onward. All the sciences have shared in the movement, and, under the benign influence of the great central principle of common sense, the three-fold combination of justice, reason and truth, the law, breaking free from its feudal trammels, has been making more rapid strides towards perfection than at any |