adopted as a national air. Key was an in timate personal and political friend of An drew Jackson, by whom he was appointed United States District Attorney for the Dis trict of Columbia, on the 23d of June, 1833, re-appointed in 1837, and appointed a third time by President Van Buret). His poems were collected and published in 1857. Many of them are of a devotional character; his hymn, "Lord, with glowing heart I would praise Thee," is one of the most popular of the hymnal of the Protestant Episcopal Church, of which he was a zealous member. He died Jan. 12, 1843. Reverdy Johnson was the youngest, but not the least distinguished of the lawyers who flourished in the golden days of the Maryland Bar. Like so many of the eminent men of that time, he was born at Annapolis, but removed to Baltimore soon after passing the bar, and was recognized as a young law yer of unusual promise. In his twenty-fifth year he was elected to the Senate of Mary land, and after being elected for a second term, he resigned in order to devote himself exclusively to his profession. His success was remarkably brilliant, and before he was thirty-five years old, he had made a national reputation. In 1845 he was elected to the United States Senate as a Whig; and in 1 849 President Taylor invited him to a seat in his cabinet as Attorney-General of the' United States. Returning to the bar after the death of General Taylor, his fame as a lawyer greatly increased, and he was retained in many of the most important cases in the
Supreme Court of the United States. In 1863 he resumed his seat in the United States Senate, and in 1868 President Johnson ap pointed him Minister to England, where he negotiated a treaty for the settlement of the Alabama claims. The majority of the Senate, being opposed to President Johnson's policy, refused to confirm the treaty, although Charles Sumner and other Republican Senators acknowledged privately that it secured all our Government had a right to ask, or reason to expect. While abroad Mr. Johnson received much attention from the English bar and people. Lord Clarendon, writing to a friend in America, said: " Mr. Johnson was the only diplomatic representa tive that had ever brought out the tru.e fra ternal feeling of the English people for the United States." Reverdy Johnson was one of the most conspicuous men that Maryland has ever produced, — conspicuous, not only as a lawyer, but as a statesman; and at the time of his death in 1876, he was without a peer at the American bar. It is a remarkable fact that five of the leading lawyers of Maryland have been Attorney-Generals of the United States; namely, William Pinkney. Roger B. Taney, William Wirt, Reverdy Johnson, and John Nelson. The last was pronounced the fiery Templar of modern jurisprudence, whose eloquence, like a torrent, swept every thing before it, and whose versatility of genius made him equally at home in the Cabinet of the nation or the courts of princes.
