The Green Bag
526
“To judge of Columbus as a mariner, or Galileo as an astronomer, you must contrast
them with their predecessors, and measure them by the standards of their contemporaries. Pile up on fifty tables in a long ball the books from which Blackstone drew his materials: The Treatises of Glanvil, Bracton, Britton, Fleta——the Mirror of Justices, Fortescue's
De Laudibus Legum Angliaz, Hengham's Sum ma Magna and Summa Parva, Littleton's Tenures, Wright's Tenures, Doctor and Stu dent, Perkins' Profitable Booke, et id omne genus; the Abridgments of Fitzherbert, Brooke, Staunforde, Statham, Rolle, Viner, Comyn and Bacon; the Entries of Lilly, Ras
Kelham, Spelman's Glossary and Les Termes de la Ley; the Special Readings and Moots on Statutes—such as those of Magna Charta, Westminster, Uses, Habeas Corpus and the
Act of Settlement; the Special Aids to Prac tice in the Natura Brevium, Novae Nairationes and Regula Placitandi—5tate Trials in stately folios——these, and many others, constituted the mass-—ingens moles-‘with which Black stone, while still in his thirties, labored for years. Of course he had guides through the wilderness, . . . But he did not content himself with these; he sought the fountains and ex plored tributaries, and from the roaring and turbid mass tumbling through the centuries,
tall, Levinz and Brown; the Reports in folio
carrying
from Aleyn and Dyer all through the alphabet, to Vaughan and Vernon, more than two hun
dooms, Norman grafts, Plantagenet statutes, Roman philosophy, canon and ecclesiastical influences worked into the final stream of the Common Law as diked and dammed by hard-headed and resolute English judges, he distilled a limpid fluid which could be quafied without disgust. The skill with which he precipitated the sediment, and got rid of the nauseating filth, was only equaled by the mental power with which he com pressed so huge a bulk into four small quartos.
dred in number, ‘stout, honest old fellows in
their leathern jackets,‘ accompanied by ‘a flying squadron of thin reports’; the Year Books, Coke's Institutes, Plowden's Commen taries, Finch's Law and Wood's Institutes; the Histories of Sir Matthew Hale and Madox’s Exchequer; the Works of the antiquaries—
Dugdale, Selden, Spelman and Camden; the Statutes at large, edited by Rastall, Pelton, Sergeant Hawkins, Ruffhead and Running ton; the Dictionaries of Blount, Cowell, Jacob,
down
Teutonic
customs,
Saxon
This, then, was his work—transoendent in
its results as well as marvelous in its beauty."
Judge Putnam’s Recollections of Chief Justice Fuller T is certain that no one in Portland, Me., the late Chief Justice Fuller's own city, knew him as well as did Judge William L. Putnam of the United States Circuit Court. He knew him in Bowdoin College, and maintained relations with him when the Chief Justice entered upon the practice of law in Augusta, and corresponded with him when he moved to Chicago; and during his long life of activity in Chicago, before his elevation to the highest position in the gift of the President of the United States, Chief Justice Fuller and Judge Putnam were intimate friends. Consequently, the following reminiscences of Judge Putnam, from a recent interview published in the Portland Daily Press, give a peculiarly intimate portrayal of the late lamented Chief Justice. “Melville
W.
Fuller
loved
Maine," said
Judge Putnam, "and particularly Bowdoin College, from which he was graduated in the
class of 1853. He was especially fond of his classmates, maintaining a close intimacy with them throughout his life, always seeking them out whenever opportunity oflered, and extending his love and affection for them even to their children and their friends. "My friendship for Melville W. Fuller dates back to the beginning of my course in Bowdoin College. He was in the class of 1853, a notable class. I was graduated in 1855, and being a member of the same secret society as the Chief Justice I saw a great deal of him. He was a youth of quiet tastes, reserved of manner, but withal genial and companionable. He was fond of literature and had marked literary tastes, inherited, I may say, from two literary families; for on his mother's side he was a Weston, a grandson of Chief Justice Weston of the Maine Supreme Court, for whom he was named. His father's family were people of great refinement and with marked literary abilities, so that Melville
