lection; for in the words of his autobiographical
account of this portion of his career, he had lost all relish for
political controversy, and had found that an entire obedience to party
projects required such constant sacrifices of opinion and feeling, that he
preferred to devote himself with singleness of heart to the study of the
law, which was at all times the object of his admiration and almost
exclusive devotion. Public sentiment, however, forced him again into the
State councils at home, where more liberty of professional engagement was
permitted. He was in political life but a brief period again, before, in
his thirty-second year, President Madison pressed his acceptance of a
vacant Associate Justiceship in the Supreme Court of the United States,
which had been declined by Levi Lincoln and by John Quincy Adams, then in
Russia. Although the acceptance involved the surrender of heavy
professional emolument, the high honor, the permanence of the tenure, and
the opportunity of gratifying his juridical studies that he so much loved,
joined in compelling his acquiescence.

"The atrocious crime of being a young man," which had compelled a hatred
of William Pitt the younger, in a former day, was now brought up against
him by many whose party subserviency fairly blushed before his manly
integrity, and by others who envied him his success. But one year at the
Circuit silenced all complaint. And in his thirty-third year he was
acknowledged to be the able jurist whom, at his death in his sixty-sixth
year of age, a whole nation mourned.

Dismissing for the present all consideration of his judicial life, and all
estimate of his ability upon the bench, and passing over nearly twenty
years of his life, we meet him in the possession of his fourth great honor
in life--but an honor which was ever the first prized by him in all his
after career--the appointment of Law Professor in Cambrige Law School.

Mr. Nathan Dane, whose Abridgement of American law in many volumes had
obtained for him the gratitude of the profession at large, and the more
substantial testimonial of pecuniary profit, had determined, about the
fiftieth year of Judge Story's life, to repay the law some of the profits
which its votaries had bestowed upon him, by donating ten thousand dollars
for the establishment of a new professorship. He annexed to his donation,
however, the condition that Judge Story should be the incumbent. To the
great delight of the donor,