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the tones of their voices, and mark the manner with which they announce their decisions; thus we acquire more or less of a personal acquaintanceship with each man, which leads us to inquire into his mental characteristics, and from that time out no longer do the reports of the Supreme Court of the United States remain mere legal abstractions. Having heard an opinion read by Chief Justice Fuller in mild tones, or by Mr. Justice Harlan or Mr. Justice Brewer in deep bass, or Mr. Justice White with energy, or by Mr. Justice Holmes with the intonations of a scholar, these men no longer are mere dim figures to us. They are living legal personalities, and we attach more importance, and are much more inclined to weigh opinions in the scales of our own judgment based on our own knowledge of the men, than if they were total strangers to us.
Now, of course, with regard to the great body of judges at large, that is an impossibility. With regard to those who are dead it is an absolute impossibility. Their faces cannot be seen, their voices will never sound again, and their hands will no longer take up their pens to write judgments which are to stand as expositions of great principles. The next best thing that can be done is to gather the portraits, the auto-graph letters, and the documents of those men. In this way we substitute, through the engraver's art and the multiplications of the issues of the printing press, a body of engraved or written images which impress themselves on the mind, which will lead us thereafter to personify the judgments of a court instead of dealing with them as items under the headings in an encyclopedia, or digest, or dictionary. The extent to which this can be carried is an exceedingly interesting study. I confess that I have ridden the hobby for the past
thirty years. during which I have been engaged in the serious work of collecting all the portraits and many autograph letters and legal documents, illustrative of the history of the profession on both sides of the Atlantic, and at the end of some thirty years of accumulation, I have all the portraits, so far as they can be had, of the Chancellors, the Vice-Chancellors, the Masters of the Rolls, the Chief Barons, the puisne Barons of the Exchequer, the Lord Chief Justices and puisne Justices of the King's Bench, the Chief Justices of the Common Pleas and the Associate Justices, and since the passage of their Practice Act of 1873 and their Judicature Act, as it is called, the Lord Justices of Appeal as well as those who deal with matters of admiralty, of probate and divorce—and in that way it becomes perfectly possible to know what manner of men they were. The collection now numbers some twelve thousand pictures, some of them superb mezzotints, line engravings, stipple or mixed illustrations, and others, finished with the most perfect skill of the engravers, displaying trials and scenes in court. To them I add everything that can be found in the shape of published trials, curious books, early editions, legal documents, autograph letters, until there is in my mind a storehouse of pictures, so that if a name should happen to be mentioned, that man is no longer a mere abstraction. He represents not only a definite human being, but a human being in the right place, in connection with his official position. I could readily fill this room on the one wall with portraits of Lord Mansfield, of Lord Eldon on the other; and of John Marshall, I could not place them all upon this end of the room. That is merely an illustration. When it is found that the art of engraving and the art of
