The
Vol. III.
No. 5.
Green
BOSTON.
Bag.
May, 1891.
RUFUS KING. By Jacob D. Cox. IN the death of Rufus King, of Cincinnati, the bar throughout the country will be sensible of a serious loss. Although nearly seventy-four years of age when he died, on the 25th of March, he had continued his active work with uncommon vigor of body and mind down to November last. He had begun his usual course of lectures on the principles of constitutional law at the opening of the term in the Cincinnati Law School with which he had been con nected for many years, but what seemed a temporary illness interrupted his teaching. He and his colleagues still hoped he would soon return to his favorite work, and it was not till within a very few days of his death that it became evident that his life's task was done. Mr. King was an admirable example of the thoroughly equipped lawyer devoted to his profession, and steadily giving himself up to its private practice despite many and frequent temptations to enter public life. Of this class in the profession, very few in any part of the country were better known than he. West of the Alleghany Mountains, none, it is safe to say, who have declined political and judicial honors, have had a more solid professional career, or can more truly be re garded as the type of the highly intellectual, refined, and able lawyer, scrupulously conse crating his hours and his strength to strictly professional work, except as he with equal scrupulousness performed the quiet duties of a private citizen in the various walks of local charities, educational advancement, and dio cesan church work. 28
Mr. King was the grandson of Rufus King, the distinguished federalist statesman of New York in the revolutionary and con stitution-forming period of the national his tory, and inherited some of the most marked mental and moral characteristics of that great man. He had the same broad grasp of fundamental principles in law and in poli tics; the same devotion to true republican ism in government tempered by the same conservatism. He believed with all his heart in the nationality of the federal union, and desired to preserve it by interpreting itsconstitutional powers so as to give it true national strength and vigor. He had the high sense of honor which lifted him above even the temptation to self-seeking, and gave him a standard of public and private honesty which made him an acknowledged model for all about him. Without the slight est assumption or artificiality of conduct, he had a natural and simple dignity of the truest polish and the most excellent taste, because it was the outward exhibition of a modest, a refined, and an earnestly benevolent na ture. With all this, he had the courage of his convictions, and whether as advocate or as citizen, he knew how to meet with vigor and to combat unflinchingly every aggres sion against the right. In every duty and in every place he carried with him the manifest evidence of transparent purity of purpose and chivalrous devotion; and when the charm of his personal manner was added, he ap peared to be what he was, the thorough Chris tian gentleman, as felicitous in the form of action as in the act itself.
