46

so-called personal liberty laws of a very stringent character were passed in many, if not in most of the States north of the Mason and Dixon line, in a determined effort to effectually block the operation of the fugitive-slave law, and which came so near nullifying the federal constitution that they showed, as nothing else could have done, the extent to which sectional feeling had progressed, and that the fugitive-slave law could be executed over the extreme and strenuous opposition of the people of the North, only. This was the period of righting a great wrong of centuries standing. Just at this time indignation at the signing by the President of the Kansas-Nebraska bill, and at the action of the United States authorities in Boston in the Burns case, added fuel to the flame of righteous indignation. Judge Loring may not have participated in the high-handed proceedings of the Federal authorities, but the proof introduced before him was so clumsily presented and so technically defective, that he was abundantly justified in setting Burns at liberty, if he had chosen to do so.17 Aside from the matter of Judge Loring's proper or improper action in the Burns case, it must be admitted that he did wrong in holding at one and the same time, under such a state of public feeling, the position of United States commissioner and Judge of Probate; and it cannot properly be said that the legislature, in acting favorably upon the petition sent them in March, 1855, demanding the removal of the Judge of Probate from office, exceeded their power in "divorcing" the two offices from one and the same person. The public indignation was wrought up to such a pitch over the details of the Burns case that the people re

45 18 The American Nation: A History, pp. 283-285; VII Wiley's The United States, p. 330, et seq. 46 The proceedings in the Anthony Burns Case, an escaped slave, tried in Boston, in May, 1854, were unquestionably highhanded on the part of the federal authorities, who were determined to win at any cost, and are said to have expended $40,

47

000 in the case. 1 Rhodes' History of the United States, p. 504, et seq.

47 Id., p. 504; VII Wiley's The United States, p. 332 and authorities there cited; Wilson's Rise and Fall of the Slave Power, pp. 435, 436.

48 1 C. F. Adams' Life of R. H. Dana, p. 343.

lentlessly hunted down and procured the dismissal from office of every person interested in or in any way connected with the restoration to slavery of the man Burns.49

The arrest of the State judges for refusal to enforce the XIVth amendment to the Federal constitution occurred in that unsettled period following the rebellion, when the South was filled with and oppressed by blatant and unprincipled carpet-baggers; when the bitterness of the great struggle thralled North and South alike; at a time when the XIVth amendment had not been passed upon and construed and its full scope and import fixed and determined. Those judges who refused to dismiss, as under the magic ægis of the XIVth amendment, cases against negroes who were charged with the violation of state laws, such as carrying concealed weapons, illicit traffic in spirituous liquors, miscegenation and the like, acted in a very proper manner, and any interference by Federal authorities was an outrage; those judges who denied to negroes the full rights secured by the amendment, such as their civil rights, the right to take an oath and give testimony in a cause in a court of justice, acted wrongly and richly merited due punishment in a proper proceeding for that purpose. It is the high function of a judge to execute valid laws and constitutional provisions faithfully and impartially; if his conscientious scruples, or his blind partisan prejudices, will not permit him to do this-he should at once resign, or else be summarily removed.

LOS ANGELES, CAL.

49 1 Rhodes' Hist. U. S., p. 505.

JAMES M. Kerr.

THE LAWYER FRIENDS OF CHARLES LAMB.

No other figure in English literature is so closely associated with law and lawyers as Charles Lamb. He was born in the stronghold of English lawyers-the Temple. The Temple Register contains the following entry of that fact: "Charles Lamb, born 10th February, 1775, baptised 10th March, following by Rev. Mr. Jeffs." Lamb's father was a lawyer's clerk. The boy's early recollections were all of lawyers and their courts. The companions of his maturer years included many lawyers, Montagu, Baron Field, Procter, Hone and Martin Burney, among others. Moreover, the best contemporary view of Lamb and his circle is found in the diary of another lawyer friend, Henry Crabb Robinson. And, finally, it was Lamb's fortune to have for his literary executor and biographer a lawyer of first-rate ability, Thomas Noon Talfourd. In fact, the men of law seem to have taken the fact that fortune fixed Lamb's birthplace in their sanctuary as a good omen and claimed him for their own.

In the Elia essay on the Old Benchers of the Inner Temple, Lamb himself says, "I was born and passed the first seven years of my life in the Temple." Association with the Temple, however, did not end there. In 1782 Lamb entered Christ's Hospital, where he became a Blue-coat boy and a schoolmate of Coleridge. But the Temple, nearby, was still the paternal home, and there Lamb spent his frequent vacations and holidays. In 1791, on the recommendation of Samuel Salt, a lawyer of the Temple, he became a clerk in the South Sea House. A year later he was called home by the death of Salt, who was his father's employer, and soon thereafter, probably in 1793, the Lambs removed from the Temple. Eight years later, Charles and his sister, Mary, returned to the Temple for a stay of six

teen years. First, they were established at 16 Mitre Court Building, and later, in 1809, at No. 4 Inner Temple Lane, where Lamb, as he wrote to Manning, "meant to live and die." He added in his characteristic fashion, "Our place of final destination-I don't mean the grave, but No. 4 Inner Temple Lane-looks out upon a gloomy churchyardlike court, called Hare Court, with three trees and a pump in it. Do you know it? I was born near it, and used to drink from that pump when I was a Rechabite of six years old." The pump was not the least of Lamb's possessions; for the "water was excellent cold with brandy, and not very insipid without." But Lamb was disappointed in his plan to spend the remainder of his life at No. 4 Inner Temple Lane. He and his sister left that residence in the autumn of 1817, and the Temple knew them no more.

In May, 1809, Lamb wrote Coleridge that life in Inner Temple Lane was "like living in a garden." Lamb's biographer, Talfourd, suggests that "The years which Lamb passed in his chambers in Inner Temple Lane were, perhaps, the happiest of his life." It is certain that these years gave the world one of its most graceful and charming essays, "The Old Benchers of the Inner Temple." Nowhere else in the language is there anything so delightfully whimsical about lawyers and their foibles. In Peter Pierson, Samuel Salt, Thomas Coventry, Barton, Twopenny, Mingay, and the rest, Lamb has held the mirror up to the lawyers for all time.

"Peter Pierson was a benevolent, but not a prepossessing man. He had that in his face which you could not term unhappiness; it rather implied an incapacity of being happy. . . . Contemporary with these, but subordinate, was Daines Barrington-another oddity-he walked burley and square, in imitation, I think, of Coventry-howbeit he attained not to the dignity of his prototype. Nevertheless, he did pretty well, upon the strength of being a tolerable antiquarian, and having a brother, a bishop. . . . Next to him was old Barton, a jolly negation, who took upon him the ordering of bills of fare for the parliament chamber where the benchers dine-much to the easement of his less epicurean brethren. . . . Then Read and Twopenny-Read good humored and personable Twopenny, good humored, but thin, and felicitous in jests upon his own figure. If Twopenny was thin, Wharry was attenuated

and fleeting. Many must remember him (for he was rather of later date) and his singular gait, which was performed by three steps and a jump regularly succeeding. The steps were little efforts like that of a child beginning to walk; the jump comparatively vigorous, as a foot to an inch. Where he learned this figure, or what occasioned it, I could never discover. It was neither graceful in itself, nor seemed to answer the purpose any better than common walking. . . . Jackson-the omniscient Jackson, he was called-was of this period. He had the reputation of possessing more multifarous knowledge than any man of his time. He was the Friar Bacon of the less literate portions of the Temple. . . . I had almost forgotten Mingay with the iron hand-but he was somewhat later. He had lost his right hand by some accident, and supplied it with a grappling-hook, which he wielded with a tolerable adroitness. I detected the substitute before I was old enough to reason whether it was artificial or not. I remember the astonishment it raised in me. . . . Baron Maseres, who walks (or did till very lately) in the costume of the reign of George the Second, closes my imperfect recollections of the Old Benchers of the Inner Temple.

"Fantastic forms, whither are you fled? Or, if the like of you exists, why exist they no more for me? . . . Why make ye so sorry a figure in my relation, who made up to me to my childish eyes-the mythology of the Temple?"

Two of the Old Benchers, Samuel Salt and Thomas Coventry, make a larger figure in Lamb's life than the rest. Salt was called to the bench in 1782 and died ten years later. John Lamb, the father, was his clerk and confidential servant for forty-five years. Mrs. Lamb was his housekeeper. Salt occupied two sets of chambers-one for the Lambs-in Crown Office Row, forming a substantial dwelling house and office. It was there that Charles Lamb was born. Lamb has described the peculiarly intimate relations that existed between his father, the Lovel of the "Old Benchers," and Salt in the following language: "Lovel took care of everything. He was at once his clerk, his good servant, his dresser, his friend, his 'flapper,' his guide, stop-watch, auditor, treasurer. Salt did nothing without consulting Lovel, or failed in anything without expecting and fearing his admonishing."

The picture of Salt is one that most lawyers will linger over with keen delight: "Salt had a reputation of being a very clever man, and of excellent discernment in the chamher practice of the law. I suspect his knowledge did not