and of the College Fellows, the Judge
assented, and was inaugurated as Dane Professor of Law, with a special
view to Lectures upon the Law of Nations, Commercial and Maritime Law,
Federal Law and Equity--a station which he filled to the day of his
lamented death.

This brief survey of his life presents him then in several public aspects;
as a student, as an advocate, as a statesman, as a judge, and as an
expounder of the great principles of law, which he worshipped with an
idolatry of love.

To speak of his political career would not belong to the scope of our
article. And to sit in judgment upon his judicial career would be our
presumption. Older and abler pens must render their tributes to the extent
and varied richness of his legal lore, which, taking root in principles,
branched into the minutiae of detail, under every sun and in every clime
where law is recognized as a rule of human action. His judicial fame can
never be increased or diminished by individual estimate. The law of
patents, of admiralty and prizes, the jurisprudence of equity, and above
all, his luminous explorations of what were once constitutional
labyrinths, are monuments as indestructible as the Pyramids. If every
trace of their original oneness be lost, they will yet live in the hours
of future judicial days, in professional acts, and in the guiding policy
of a remote posterity. His library of treatises are legal classics; and
the worst defects which flippant carpers and canvassers of their claims to
merit have discovered in their pages, have been their richness of detail
and polish of learning! And no one can deny that as a judge he was the
very example which 'Hobbes' in his 'Leviathan,' carried in mind when he
thus wrote--"the things that make a good judge or good interpreter of the
laws, are first--a right understanding of that principal law of nature
called Equity, which depending not on the reading of other men's writings,
but on the goodness of a man's own natural reason and meditation, is
presumed to be in those most who have had most leisure and the most
inclination to meditate thereon; second--contempt of unnecessary riches and
preferments; third--to be able in judgment to divest himself of all fear,
anger, hatred, love and compassion; fourthly and lastly--patience to hear,
diligent attention in hearing, and memory to retain, digest, and apply
what he hath heard."

Not the least amiable phase of the life of Judge Story, was the attenti