A Glance at our Colonial Bar. obedience. Unfortunately, all the great events of the Revolution passed while he was in more or less mental darkness. All through the great struggle to which his legal eloquence had led, James Otis was like a blasted pine on the mountains or a stranded wreck in the midst of billows. His spirit finally departed for the realm of un clouded intelligence just as the sunlight of peace burst upon his disenthralled country. This was in May, 1783; when leaning on his cane at a doorway survey ing a brilliant thun dercloud, suddenly a bolt leaped from it — as was said in the funeral sermon over his remains — "like a swift messenger from God summon ing him." Curiously enough in lucid mo ments he had pre viously expressed a wish to die from lightning. These lucid mo ments would often occur. At Harvard he had been a RUFUS notable Latinist, and the fact became im pressed by a Boston incident. Some college students seeing him pass through a Cam bridge street gesticulating as was his wont, poured from a second-story window some water on his head, one of them merrily ex claiming," Pluit tantum, neseio quantum, seis ne tu f" Looking upward, Otis flung his cane through the window above, and "capped" with " Fregi tautum, neseio quantum: seis t1e tu.' " That bore abundant testimony to a lucid interval. It is pleasant for the legal
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profession in contemplating Otis to recall that a lawyer's speech in court was one of the matches that lighted revolutionary flames. Rufus King, after participating in the Rev olutionary struggles as a youngster, studied law with Judge Parsons of Newburyport and in 1780 received a diploma of practice. His very first case was against his preceptor whom he non-suited : thus practically para phrasing the old couplet, To teach his grandson draughts his leisure he'd employ Until at last the old man was beaten by the boy. He achieved distinc tion in Massachu setts as a lawyer, and also in New York city to which he had removed; and his name appears in Johnson's Reports as a contemporary of Kent. His politi cal fame, however, has obscured his legal fame in the eyes of posterity. John Rutledge, who died chief jus KING. tice of the United States in the year that began this century and after only four years of judicial service therein, was a native of Ireland; but with his father came to Charleston while a youth. He studied law afterwards in the Temple at London, and began practice in his adopted city, which he pursued with marked success for fifteen years, when the colonial troubles brought into play for him the maxim, inter anna silent leges, and for a decade he played prominent military and political r61es. At
