Barnstaple he was reverenced as a God. One winter,
when the Supreme Court held a special session at Barnstaple
for the trial of a capital case, Judge Merrick, who was one
of the Judges, came out of the Court-house just at nightfall,
when the whole surface of the earth was covered with ice and
slush, slipped and fell heavily, breaking three of his ribs.
He was taken up and carried to his room at the hotel, and
lay on the sofa waiting for the doctor to come. While the
Judge lay, groaning and in agony, the old janitor of the court-
house, who had helped pick him up, wiped off the wet from
his clothes and said to him, "Judge Merrick, how thankful
you must be it was not the Chief Justice!" Poor Merrick could
not help laughing, though his broken ribs were lacerating
his flesh.

Next to Chief Justice Shaw in public esteem, when I came
to the Bar in December, 1849, was Mr. Justice Wilde. He
was nearly eighty years old, and began to show some signs
of failing powers. But those signs do not appear in his
recorded opinions. He was a type of the old common-lawyer
in appearance and manner and character. He would have been
a fit associate for Lord Coke, and would never have given
way to him. I suppose he was never excelled as a real-property
lawyer in this country. He had the antiquated pronunciation
of the last century, a venerable gray head and wrinkled countenance,
with heavy gray eyebrows. He seemed to the general public
to be nothing but a walking abridgment. Still, he was a very
well-informed man, and had represented a district of what
is now the State of Maine in Congress with great distinction.
A friend of mine went rather late to church at King's Chapel
one Sunday when the congregation had got some way in the service,
and was shown into the pew immediately in front of old Judge
Wilde. The Judge was just uttering in a distinct, clear tone,
"Lord, teach me Thy statoots." It was the only petition he
needed to have granted to make him a complete Judge. Of
the Lord's common law he was a thorough master.

He was no respecter of persons. He delivered his judgments
with an unmoved air, as if he had footed up a column of figures
and were announcing the result. When I was in the Law School,
Mr. Webster was retained to argue an important real estate
case before Judge Wilde in Suffolk County. Mr. Webster was
making what would have been a powerful argument on a question
of land-title but for a statute passed since t