er associates.
Whatever the cause, though, Ambrose Spencer never forgave him; nor did
he outlive Samuel Young's criticism of playing politics at the expense
of his old comrades upon the bench.

With the exception of Ambrose Spencer, who was destined to be
remembered for a time by friends and enemies, the old judges of the
Supreme Court may now be said to drop out of state history. Spencer
lived twenty-five years longer, until 1848, serving one term in
Congress, one term as mayor of Albany, and finally rounding out his
long life of eighty-three years as president of the national Whig
convention at Baltimore in 1844; but his political and public
activity, as a factor to be reckoned with, ceased at the age of
fifty-eight. The close of his life was spent in happy quietude among
his books, and in the midst of new-found friends in the church, with
which he united some six or eight years before his death. Jonas Platt
returned to Clinton County, and, for a time, practised his profession
with great acceptance as an advocate; but as a master-politician he,
like Spencer, was out of employment forever. At last, he, too, retired
to a farm, and with composure awaited the end that came in 1834.
William W. Van Ness was destined to go earlier. Not seeking
reappointment to the bench, he settled in New York, with apparently
forty years of life before him, his genius in all the glow of its
maturity marking him for greater political success than he had yet
achieved; yet, within a year, on February 27, 1823, death found him
while he sought health in a Southern State. He was only forty-seven
years old at the time. Disease and not age had thrown him. Born in
1776, he had won for himself the proudest honours of the law, and
written his name high up on the roll of New York statesmen.

Governor Yates had thus far travelled a difficult and dusty road. In
the duty of organising the government, which, under the new
Constitution fell to him, and in making appointments, he received the
censure and was burdened with the resentment of the mortified and
disappointed. His opponents, with the hearty and poorly concealed
approval of Young's friends, made it their business to create a public
opinion against him. They assailed him at all points with ridicule,
with satire, with vituperation, and with personal abuse. They seemed
to lie in wait to find occasion for attacking him, exaggerating his
weaknesses and minimising his strength. But the blunder that bro