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With unimpaired, or apparently unim naturally inclined to ease and pleasure, he shrank paired physical powers, and with undimmed from no trouble, he declined no toil, that might intellect, Sir Alexander performed to the lead him to the truth. He kept his mind open to last day of his life with efficiency the duties! the very end, and he was always ready to listen to any piece of evidence or weigh any argument that of his high office. On the 20th of Novem ber, 1880, he presided at court as usual, and in his judgment was likely to lead him to do justice. returned to his home in apparent good health. Like other men, he had prejudice and bias of opin ion, which he shared with the rest of mankind. He That same night he died suddenly from an never permitted them, so far as I saw, for a single attack of heart disease. instant to divert him from a single-minded and We cannot better close this short sketch j most earnest pursuit of what he believed to be the of his life, than by quoting briefly from 1 right between the parties. If you had a good a tribute paid to his memory by Lord case, however complicated it might be, however Coleridge : — much prejudice there might appear to be against "I can say, from personal knowledge, that no it, only make Sir Alexander Cockburn understand man who ever was opposed to Sir Alexander Cock- it, and you were perfectly safe in his hands. Now, burn ever complained of the slightest deviation on this is simple, literal truth. No one, I am satisfied, his part from the sternest rules of honor and in can deny it. Yet stand and reflect what high and tegrity. As a judge, his chief and leading char great qualities of head and heart this simple truth acteristic appeared to me to be a sleepless and implies. He died, as he often said in my hearing ardent desire to do justice as between man and he wished to die, in harness, enjoying life and do man to the suitors who came before him. Though ing duty to the very end."
JOHN AUSTIN AND HIS WIFE. By Prof. W. G. Hammond. THERE is very little in legal authorship of that indefinable charm which, from the days of Homer and the author of Job, has attached to the making of books. Al most the first step in literary taste is usually the boy's love of reading about the personal habits of poets and novelists and historians, and all who live by their pen; and in spite of much proof to the contrary, few of us can conquer our early impression that such work is in itself poetic or romantic, and altogether different, in the eyes of the author himself, from the dull drudgery by which other men earn their daily bread. The youthful aspir ant for fame thinks of himself as dashing off an ode or a string of sonnets in much the same poetic fervor with which he reads them; and the lives of authors as usually written, foster the same belief, by painting in brilliant colors all that is spectacular and
striking in the career of their heroes. But none of this romance of literature is found in the arid field of legal authorship. Nothing could be drier or less interesting than a de scription of the labor to which we owe the interminable rows of calf-bound volumes, which have their genesis in no nobler passion than a young lawyer's desire for clients, or a publisher's for money. But once in a while, even in this arid field, the lover of sentiment may find a book whose history is in itself a romance as strik ing as ever produced a poem or a picture. Even in " The Calamities of Authors," or any of the other works which detail the vicissitudes of literary life, we shall hardly find a more surprising story than that of the Lectures on Jurisprudence, which have now made the name of John Austin famous wherever English law is administered or
