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The Green Bag.

threatened wreck of the new, appears abun dantly from the practice reports issued be tween the years 1848 and 1852. His party soon offered him what was called promotion from the Common Pleas to the Bench of the Supreme Court or Court of Appeals, but he refused to quit his own Court. How well he knew its history and its beloved traditions, its attractions and its associations, can be learned by a perusal of his most exhaustive monograph about the Court, that he contributed as the introduc tion to the first volume of E. D. Smith's re ports of Common Pleas cases. So attract ively is that prefatory paper written that its perusal interests the dullest of laymen read ers. Indeed, while three of his subsequent colleagues on the Common Pleas Bench left it to take election in the Supreme Court, he never once thought of quitting the tribunal with which he was first identified, and where he continued until age limit bade him retire. Moreover, he refused nominations for Con gress, and turned a deaf side to many im portunities to lend his popularity and his confidence gained from the public to the aid of his party in a close contention for the office of mayor. He declined to permit his name to be used as a gubernatorial candi date at the time when the nomination finally fell to Grover Cleveland en route to the White^House. It was well known, however, among his political friends, that Judge Daly would have accepted a seat on the Federal Supreme Bench had his party found such opportunity on occurrence of a vacancy; and indeed such promotion was known to be upon the party programme had it be come feasible. Yet perhaps it was a better record on the roll of fame for him that he con tinued two score of years within one sphere through the trials of judicial duty; encoun tering, meantime, the ordeal of five popular elections; one of which — his last one — came unanimously, because he had then left in the minds of all citizens the conviction that he had always administered justice without

fear or favor, caring only for the law and the testimony that he diligently studied. Many causes cclcbres came before him during that long period. The civil ones are to be found in the volumes of the reports of his Court, the major portion of which issued under his own hand and name, fol lowing the custom of many of the earliest English judges, such as Dyer and Saunders. Daly's reports are largely quoted in other States, and Bench and Bar everywhere tes tify to the lucidity of the head notes, and the aptness of arrangement and differentia tion of arguments and opinions to be found within them. These reports attest the su premacy of his learning in the complicated matters of New York municipal law. Judge Daly wrote an opinion on the law of evic tion that stands as an exhaustive treatise on the whole doctrine of eviction and ab solute ouster. This opinion reached the Court of Appeals, and, it was in the sustainment, verbally copied and adopted without credit by the judge who finally adjudged the matter in the name of the Court. An opinion by Judge Daly " in the matter of Snooks " is a treatise on the law and philosophy of surnames; in the case of Cromwell against Stephens, on the law relating to hotels; and in other cases, on the law of trade-marks, replevin, landlord and tenant, telegraphs, telephones, and construction of the limita tions in the statutes of frauds, running back to the Stuart era. His most important cause celcbre was the trial of the Astor Place rioters, who broke up the playing of the great actor, Macready, in 1849. The Recorder, having acted in suppressing the riot, was disqualified from presiding, and Judge Daly was commis sioned in his stead for the Court of Ses sions. His charge to the jury in the riot case stands as an exposition of the whole law relating to riot. The clerk of the Court of Common Pleas is authority for the statement that between