A Rubaiyat of the Courts. would discuss affairs of party in violation of a rule of his department. (McAuliffe v. Mayor of New Bedford, 155 Mass. 216). He objected that the rule deprived him of free speech. Judge Holmes stated the entire and sufficient answer thus: "The petitioner may have a constitutional right to talk politics, but he has no constitutional right to be a police man." Perhaps judicial traditions demanded the elaboration which followed, but there was nothing more to be said. This fragmentary sketch has omitted all mention of many decisions of the greatest living importance, and all reference to many others in which Judge Holmes has, with
brilliant scholarship, traced the history of particular rules of law from their sources, bursting inflated explanations. But if one is mentioned many must be named, and the limits proper to an article which can at most state only some of the main events of Judge Holmes' life, and suggest some of the main characteristics of his mind, have already been far exceeded. Chief Justice Holmes succeeds Chief Justice Gray. Our loss is the Nation's gain. The bar of Massachusetts will watch with the keenest interest the part which the late Chief Justice of the Commonwealth is henceforth to play in the greater drama of the Nation's life.
A RUBAIYAT OF THE COURTS.' BY H. GERALD CHAPIN. IX. Each month new clients seek your door, you say; Ah, but how "panned out" those of yesterday? Their cases settled, have they settled, too, Or were you forced to wait awhile for pay? XVII. Think, how in musty court rooms pent and drear, Apparently ventilated once per year, Jones, Brown, and Smith, JJ., preside,—then as Commissioners and referees appear. XIX. I sometimes wonder if the Court e'er muses, In re the feelings of the man who loses, Who now within the tavern's portals safe, His Honor's rulings and his law abuses. 1 The legendary friendship between Omar and the Nizam ul Mulk, Wazir to the Sultan Malikshah, is well known to Orientalists. It has remained for an obscure individual like the translator to unearth a tattered ragment of what appears to have been a second Rubaiyat addressed by the illustrious tent maker to his friend, ]who was somewhat of a lawyer in an Oriental way, i.e., a collector of judicial backsheesh. Likewise to reduce the aforesaid quatrains into the vernacular.
