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The Green Bag.

have been for the old lawyer to have lived to this his eighty-ninth year, in order to add to his library the encyclopaedias and treatises that are from time to time advertised or reviewed in the GREEN Bag. In 1857 Mr. Noyes removed from a delightful residence he already occupied, solely in order to secure a Fifth Avenue mansion that had annexed to it a three-story library rear building, in which he could store his bibliopole treasures. This was before the Law Institute, of which he was long a manager, and that passed memo rial resolutions after his death, had assumed its present large proportion of volumes; or before the club-house of the Bar Association had been erected for the housing of its varied and exhaustive library. Mr. Noyes threw open his new library-house freely to his brethren, and even encouraged the youngest of the profession to avail them selves of its use. He often also extended its hospitalities to the holding of references during winter evenings. These acts, added to his amenities in court, tended to make him the idol of the Bar that in his later career he became. No practitioner ever heard an asperity debited to his professional or social account; for although often unduly assailed by an adversary, his remarkable selfcontrol never played his temper false. This self-control was so strong that, while await ing a call in court or during a recess, he could close his eyes, cease thought, and in dulge in the brief luxury of a nap. Another of the professional successes of Mr. Noyes resulted in what is known to the Bradford Surrogate reports as the Rose Will case, involving the doctrine of resulting trusts. To this day his briefs in the various appeals of that case are turned to by lawyers as imparting lucid learning to the abstruseness of the subject-matter. The great Huntington cause celcbre is perpetuated in the volume devoted to an ac count of the celebrated trial of a Wall-Street forger, at which Mr. Noyes acted as special attorney-general in successfully resisting a

defense of " moral insanity," that the counsel of the accused euphuistically gave as a name to a depravity which destroyed a realization of the difference in ethics between meum and tuum. It is a trial that is also com memorated in many recent treatises upon insanity. The trial was remarkable for the appearance, as experts in behalf of the de fense and its theory, of two great metropolitan physicians— Gilman and Parker. The latter had been adroitly selected by James T. Brady, counsel for Huntington, because he was the family physician of Mr. Noyes. But the latter, with rare delicacy of treatment, mastered friendship for the occasion, and his cross-examination of both experts covered their theories with successful ridicule. When the New York and New Haven Railway Company organized, Mr. Noyes was appointed standing counsel at the metropolitan termination of the road; and when the remarkable bond forgeries of its first president, Robert Schuyler, reached discovery, it became his duty to obtain in dictments against the absconding official (who, however, died in exile), and to defend or prosecute a series of actions, legal and equitable, that resulted from the fraud. The controversies resulted in the trial of an ac tion, intended to embrace all the mooted questions, which became popularly known in New York and New England legal circles as "the Omnibus suit," and consumed fortytwo days in the hearing. Arrayed against Mr. Noyes as leader for the Railway in the cause celcbre, appeared some three hundred lawyers in all, and with him were only the Messrs. Tracy and Comstock as associates, the latter of whom had been first a reporter and then a judge of the Court of Appeals. The magnitude of that legal controversy can be gathered from an inspection of the fifteen bound volumes of the cases and bills of exceptions and appeal records, and the dozen volumes of briefs and arguments that are to be found in all great law-libraries, and forming beacon lights and guides regarding