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Some Virginia Lawyers of the Past and Present.

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lawyers. In England they were an old royalist family and in Virginia they lived, as did all the " Virginia Cavaliers," in a style of elegance and profusion, and dispensed a lavish hospitality which has been unexcelled John Ambler, Esq.,

in any country or any age. The first John Barrister-at-Law, Representative in the Assembly Randolph was the king's attorney-general for Jamestown, and Collector of the District of for the colony of Virginia, and was knighted. York River in this Province. In the relative and social duties, as a son, Wirt describes him as " a gentleman of the brother and friend, few most courtly elegance equalled and none ex of person and man celled him. He was ners, a polished wit early distinguished by and a profound law his love of letters, which yer." He was sent to he improved at Cam England in July, bridge and the Temple, 1 732, to lay a com and well knew how to plaint before the adorn a manly sense Crown from the Vir with all the elegance of ginia planters against language. To an ex an Act of Parliament tensive knowledge of men and things he which prohibited the joined the noblest sen exportation of strip timents of liberty, and ped tobacco and, in in his own example held 1 75 3, was sent by the up to the world the Assembly to protest most striking picture of against the fee of three the amiableness of re dollars and sixty ligion. cents for the seal at tached to each land Of the present grant. The Assembly generation of those paid him two thous in whose veins flows and pounds for his ser the grand old Amb EDMUND PENDLETON vices. He was ever ler blood was the late discreet and dignified, lamented Dr. James M. Ambler, U. S. N.,the hero surgeon of the and a man of excellent judgment. He was ill-fated Arctic steamer " Jeannette," who speaker of the Virginia House of Burgesses, gave his life, when he might have saved it, and treasurer of the colony. When he died because, as he said when De Long offered to he was interred in the chapel of William and allow him to push on with those who went to Mary College, and borne there, by his own seek for aid, it was the doctor's duty to stay request, " by six honest, industrious, poor housekeepers from Bruton Parish," and with his freezing, starving men. With un failing courage he closed the eyes of his last twenty pounds were divided among them. companion and then, without a murmur, but He was an Isham on his mother's side, an with a prayer on his lips, sat down in the ancient English family. He studied law at desolate stillness of that terrible frozen land Gray's Inn and the Temple, and soon became distinguished at the bar. to meet death alone. The Randolph family is noted for its Peyton Randolph, first president of the graveyard around the church in James town. The following inscription was copied from his tombstone, of which no vestige now remains, in 1820: —