f giving so much space to idle
and often untrustworthy genealogies, and to descriptions of the "elegant
mansions" of Messrs. This and That, would do us the real service of
rescuing from inevitable oblivion the fleeting phases of household
scenery that help us to that biography of a people so much more
interesting than their annals. We would much rather know whether a man
wore homespun, a hundred years ago, than whether he was a descendant of
Rameses I.]

Of Parsons's college experiences we get less than we could desire;
but as he advances in life, we find his mind exercised by the great
political and social problem whose solution was to be the experiment of
Democracy at housekeeping for herself,--we see him influencing State
and even National politics, but always as a man who preferred attaining
the end to being known as the means,--and finally, as Chief Justice,
reforming the loose habits of the bar, intolerant of gabble, and leaving
the permanent impress of his energetic mind and impatient logic on the
Common Law of the country.

We know nothing more striking than the dying speech recorded in the
concluding chapter. At the end of a life so laborious and so useful, the
Judge, himself withdrawing to be judged, murmurs,--"Gentlemen of the
Jury, the facts of the case are in your hands. You will retire and
consider of your verdict." In this volume, the son has submitted the
facts of the case to a jury of posterity. His case will not be injured
by the modesty with which he has stated it. He has claimed less for his
father than one less near to him might have done. We think the verdict
must be, that this was a great man _marooned_ by Destiny on an
out-of-the-way corner of the world, where, however he might exert great
powers, there was no adequate field for that display of them which is
the necessary condition of fame.

Mr. Parsons has done a real service to our history and our letters in
this volume. Accompanying and illustrating his main topic, he has given
us excellent sketches of some other persons less eminent than his
father, sometimes from tradition and sometimes from his own impressions.
We hope in the next edition he will give us a supplementary chapter of
personal anecdotes, of which there is a large number that deserve to be
perpetuated in print, and which otherwise will die with the memories
in which they are now preserved. The strictly professional part of the
biography, illustrating the Chief Justice's more