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will not pretend to be more ignorant than the rest of mankind;" "a man does not court and marry a woman for the mere pleasure of paying for her board and washing;" "the law abhors an inconvenience;" "in taking a wife a man does not put himself under an overseer;" "false teeth furnished a wife are necessaries for which the husband is liable if he allows her to wear them;" "a venereal disease is individual property;" "it is im possible to divide an annual rent of six cents between seventy-five persons;" "courts may refrain from obiter dicta, because 'sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof.'" Would that all decisions were touched with humor! And congratulations to Mr. Milburn who possesses an office boy capable of extracting from the reports the wit of 1'ileckley, C. J.. and his fellow humorists on the Bench! LITERARY NOTES.
The best literary traditions of the Bar are maintained by Adrian H. Joline, of the Xew York Bar, in The Diversions of a BookLover (Harper and Brothers). Mr. Joline chats, in most charming fashion, of books and authors, with a wealth of literary knowledge which reminds one of the elder Disraeli. Would that more of our leaders at the Bar indulged their literary bent, as Mr. Joline has done to such good purpose! In his case Scholarship is, indeed, the "Handmaiden of the Lawyer." It is a pleasure to add that the make-up of the book is in the best of taste. For the American lawyer, as well as for his English brother, the recently published Reminiscences of Sir Henry Hawkins, Lord Brampton, edited by Richard Harris, K. C. (Longmans, Green and Company), are with out question the most interesting volumes •vhich have come from the press during the last twelve-month. Called to the Bar of the Middle Temple in 1843, appointed in 1876 to the Bench, from which he retired ir 1898,—a man of the world, brilliant in intellect, an untiring worker at his p-'-fession, the shrewdest cross-examiner of his time, one of the ablest judges or the TJench,
—Sir Henry Hawkins for half a century has been a very important figure at the Bar and on the Bench; and it was inevitable that his Reminiscences, well told and crammed as they are with legal anecdotes, should be of absorbing interest.—Of wholly different character, but of especial importance to the American lawyer, is Henry Flandcr's Life of John Marshall (T. and J. W. Johnson and Company), which has been reprinted from his Lives of the Chief Justices. It is a full and satisfactory account of the great Chief Justice, though it lacks the charm of Pro fessor Thayer's shorter Life. A reproduc tion of the well-known Inman portrait of Marshall is used as the frontispiece in this reprint.—The admirable Life of John A. Andrew, by Henry Greenleaf Pearson (Houghton, Miffiin and Company), deals chiefly with the four years, 1861-1865, when Andrew was the War Governor of Massa chusetts. Of his strictly professional work there is little to be said, but his services to the anti-slavery cause before the war and to the Commonwealth and the Federal Gov ernment during the war owed much of tbeir effectiveness to his legal training. —Three excellent biographies lie before us, William Hickling Prescott, by Rollo Ogden, Francis Parkman, by Henry Dwight Sedgwick (both in the "American Men of Letters" series, Houghton, Mifflin and Company), and John Greenleaf IVhittier, by Thomas Yentwortli Higginson ("English Men of Letters," The Macmillan Company). With these may be placed the volume containing the scholarly address, William Ellcry Channing, His Mes sage from the Spirit, delivered by Paul Revere Frothingham shortly before the un veiling of Channing's statue in Boston.— Of intense human interest is The Stor of My Life, by Helen Keller, with her Letters (1887-1901), and a Supplementary Account of her Life and Education, by John Albert Macy (Doubleday, Page and Company). In Mr. Macy's excellent account of Miss Keller's personality, speech, education and literary style, one is especially impressed with the extraordinary ability and patience of Miss Keller's teacher, Miss Sullivan. In speaking of the difference between Helen
