Lives of Distinguished North Carolinians, with Illustrations and Speeches

by Unknown

While I can make no positive averment, I am very confident in the opinion that during the time that Judges Badger, Cameron, and Ruffin presided on the Superior and County Court bench, no case tried before them ever occupied more than a single day.

Mr. Browne, as appears from the graveyard record, died at the age of sixty-seven. Mr. Badger had entered upon his seventy-second, and Judge Cameron his seventy-sixth year. Chief Justice Ruffin, in the possession of unimpaired intellectual strength, is an octogenarian.

In 1806, five years after the conviction of Glasgow, the great case of Lord Granville's heirs versus Governor Davie and others, which threatened a more extensive confiscation than that menaced in our time, was argued before the Federal Court in this city by Gaston and Harris for the plaintiffs, and Cameron, Woods, and Baker for the State of North Carolina. Potter, District Judge, charged the jury; Marshall, Chief Justice, from personal considerations, peremptorily declining to sit upon the trial.

Marshall is the only Revolutionary Titan I have ever seen. With fair opportunities to judge of him as he appeared upon the bench, and in social intercourse sixteen years afterwards, I can pronounce with emphasis, that I never expect to look upon his like again.

I sometimes feel apprehensive that I will become old myself before a great while, when my memory recurs to the time when Chief Justice Ruffin was one of the promising young men of my day. In 1822, when a student in Chief Justice Taylor's office, occupied by Mr. Gaston during the sessions of the Federal and Supreme Courts, Ithiel Town, the architect who planned the present capitol and who had an important suit pending in the Federal Court against the Clarendon Bridge Company, inquired of Mr. Gaston whether Mr. Ruffin would be acceptable to him as associate counsel. He replied: "No one more so; Mr. Ruffin is a very promising young man, and if he lives ten years longer will be at the head of the profession." The prediction was fully verified at an earlier date.

Rarely since the completion of the Pentateuch has full historic justice been meted out to woman. The character of the great father of the human race is not more fully and clearly delineated by Moses than that of its beautiful mother. The termagant Sarah received quite as much attention as the father of the faithful. Hagar is the heroine of an episode, the most beautiful in the annals of history, with the single exception of the narrative of the maternal tenderness of Naomi, and the filial love and devotion of Ruth, the fascinating little widow, whose charms dissolved the obdurate celibacy of the sage, opulent and stately Boaz. The crafty and managing Rebecca is finely contrasted with the confiding Isaac; and the beautiful Rachel, from the moment that Jacob gave his first kiss "and lifted up his voice and wept," as a bride, and a mother with Joseph at her side in his little coat of many colors and his stainless virtue, constitutes in life and in death, the most charming picture on the historical canvas of any age or country.

Why are not similar pictures presented in modern times? Moses was inspired. Subjects are not wanting worthy of historic inspiration. Has an abler monarch than Elizabeth, or a more estimable sovereign than Victoria ever given character and strength and grace to the British throne? Was "the man of destiny" superior to Josephine? Is the Empress of France inferior to Napoleon III.?

We are told that the heroic Wolfe while passing down the St. Lawrence on his way to "glory and the grave," closed the recitation of the inimitable "elegy" with the remark that he would gladly exchange all the renown he had acquired or hoped to achieve for the fame of the authorship of those verses, and yet Gray makes no reference to the spot where all the mothers of the hamlet sleep.

I have recently wandered through your cemetery, pausing and lingering here and there, at the tombs of familiar acquaintances and intimate friends, and realized the truth, that if I could summon the departed around me, I would stand in the midst of more numerous friends than I meet at the present day in the crowded streets of your living city.

I trust I shall be suspected of no want of gallantry to the living if I venture to intimate that among the nymphs that illuminate the page of memory and imagination, I find pictures of beauty and grace and refinement quite equal to the best specimens of modern times, or even, in poetic hallucination, "some brighter days than modern days, some fairer maids than living maids."