"Luther R. Marsh.
"In 1845, on Mr. Webster's retirement from business to return to the Senate of the United States, I took this sign off from our office door, 44 Wall Street, New York, where it had been during our partnership."
When Webster was dying in 1852, Henry J. Raymond, the gifted editor of the New York Times, wrote:
"My Dear Marsh:—We hear from Marshfield that Mr. Webster cannot live through the day. I want from you, if it is possible, for to-morrow morning, an article—of what kind you know a good deal better than I can tell you. . . . No man in this city certainly can do it so well. Nine o'clock this evening, or even ten, will be early enough to have it here.
"Yours as ever,
"H. J. Raymond."
The article, occupying over four columns, was there on time. Mr. Marsh, that afternoon, upon a moment's notice, at a single stroke, threw off an estimate of Webster's genius and achievements that never was excelled later, even in the glowing, studied periods of Everett, Winthrop, and Curtis.
When in 1869, Henry J. Raymond died, Mr. Marsh was invited to become his successor, but he declined the honor fearing that the position, though congenial to his tastes, would be too exacting in its demands. When we consider that at this time Mr. Marsh was besieged by clients and immersed in cases; when we consider, too, that a busy lawyer is the last one to whom a publisher would naturally turn (for there is no class of men in whom the truly literary instinct combined with the gift of literary expression is so rare as among successful lawyers), this recognition of the unique literary distinction which Mr. Marsh had attained, even while engaged in the fiercest legal contests with such hard-headed lawyers as David Dudley Field, John Van Buren, Charles O'Conor, James T. Brady, John K. Porter and Judge Comstock is most impressive and conclusive. But in his forensic contests the lawyer dominated the litterateur. Any opponent who thought that because of Mr. Marsh's finished, faultless, elegant literary style he would escape hard blows and sturdy onslaughts soon learned his mistake. He was, at about the time he received this offer from the Times, in the very zenith of his powers and his fame. Mr. Hunt, then the superintendent of public schools in Massachusetts, thus wrote in 1873, of a trial he had just attended, in which Mr. Marsh was opposed to Joseph H. Choate:
"I shall never forget the spectacle of that trial; from the opening to the close, it was the most perfect thing I ever saw. Having entered upon the study of law in the late William Pitt Fessenden's office; having seen many able lawyers conduct cases in court—Fessenden and Evans in Maine, Rufus Choate and other great lawyers in Boston, and, in the South, Yancey and others—allow me to say that I never saw anything to be compared with the ease, dignity and power with which Mr. Marsh managed everything."