myself with a brief outline of his professional career, and some imperfect estimate of his powers and standing among the lawyers of his time.

Mr. Christie was born at Antrim, N. H., on the 15th of October, 1790. He had no adventitious aids in youth. He la bored on a farm in his earlier years, and, without wealth, or powerful friends, or patronage to lean upon, after surmounting the obstacles usually encountered by farmers' sons in our agricultural towns, he entered Dartmouth College, and was graduated there in 1815, at the head of a class of men of eminence, of which he was the last surviving member. He studied law three years in the office of James Walker of Peterborough, began the practice in York, Me., practiced there and at South Berwick till 1823, when he removed to this city, where he ever after resided. He entered upon professional practice here with characteristic energy, pursued it with singular zeal and assiduity, and rapidly rose in the estimation of the bench, the bar, and the public. He was contemporary of Jeremiah Mason, Jeremiah Smith, Daniel Webster, Ichabod Bartlett, and George Sullivan - being about twenty-five years the junior of Smith and Mason, and but few years younger than the others. In the early years of his professional life those great men not infrequently appeared in the trial of causes in this county,and the old court house still stands here among us, which witnessed the stirring struggles of these intellectual gladiators, and whose walls resounded to the voices of their eloquence. With these high examples before him, and these high rivalries and contentions to stimulate him, he "must," in the language of Mr, Webster, "have been unintelligent indeed not to have learned something from the constant displays of that power which he had so much occasion to see and to feel." That he did learn much from that great intercourse and contention of kindred minds -the trophies of Miltiades disturbing his sleep-there is abundant evidence in the rapid and sure strides, no step backward, with which he came up and forward, even among such rivals, to a high professional eminence. There are many

He had but little relish for public life, and never sought political office, although he had political principles and convictions of the most decided character, and took a deep and lively interest in all great public questions. He was, however, elected to the Legislature as early as 1826, and during the next forty years he was returned to that body from the town and city of Dover, on eleven different occasions. This was about the entire extent of his holding public office. But, since he never refused the summons of the public to any duty, and was more than once a candidate for high station, it may perhaps fairly be said that his exclusion from the higher walks of official life was mainly due to the fact that during nearly his whole life he was not in accord with the political sentiments which controlled the State in which he lived. Many regrets have been expressed that the doors of preferment were thus closed upon a man, who, serving his country in any conspicuous sphere, would have advanced its honor, secured its prosperity, elevated its dignity, enlightened its mind, purified its morality, and lifted its policy to a higher plane of statesmanship. But certain I am that this enforced exclusion from the councils of the nation cost Mr. Christie no pangs of regret—and that never for one moment did it occur to him to secure that recognition which his great abilities merited by any subserviency to sentiments and methods which his reason and conscience did not accept. It was ever his aim, never forgotten-and his rule, never violated-to preserve his personal rectitude, as the richest treasure any man can possess.

It would seem to be superfluous to speak of the intellectual greatness of Mr. Christie before a tribunal which has been so often charmed and enlightened by the displays of his power. But, unfortunately, so modest was the great man whose loss we now deplore, so reserved, so careless of his achievements and fame, so content with circumscribing his professional employments almost within the limits of the small county in which he dwelt, and never, that I am aware of, going beyond his own State in a professional capacity; and so fleeting indeed are the records and impressions of the nisi prius trials in which he principally gathered in his fame, so transitory even the remembrances of these conflicts and struggles which rapidly pass out of contemporary memory and are gone forever, that it would seem desirable, if it might be, for the Court and the bar to place on record somewhere some suitable memorial of the intellectual power of such a man as Mr. Christie,—something which might rescue some of his striking traits of character from the oblivion that so soon shrouds the fame of the practicing lawyer, and inform the future generations of our people, and especially his successors at the bar, that a great man has fallen here and now. I trust, therefore, that your Honor, and my brothers of the bar who are to follow me in this tribute of respect to his memory, will commemorate his remarkable gifts and services in language of enduring and permanent value, leaving "something so written to after times, as they should not willingly let it die."

Mr. Christie did not reach his ultimate greatness, as some men do, at a bound, but his was a steady growth, and laborious ascent to the table lands of the law. Through a long series of arduous exertions, he "ever great and greater grew," until for years before his death I think the front rank, and the leadership-primus inter primos-of the front rank in the profession of the law was accorded to him by the universal voice of the profession and the bench in New Hampshire. So various and so large were his powers and his attainments that it is difficult to make a critical analysis or

estimate of his capacity. Mr. Webster said the characteristics of Mr. Mason's mind were real greatness, strength, and sagacity. I have often thought this concise summary to be equally true of and applicable to Mr. Christie. He was certainly a man of extraordinary endowments, and these had been wonderfully cultivated, improved, invigorated and strengthened by the untiring industry of a long life given to the law with a singleness of heart and purpose, which disarmed the jealousy of that proverbially jealous mistress. He had prodigious industry, and could work terribly. He had indomitable will and tenacity of purpose. He had good sense and sound judgment. He had a vast and exact memory. He had a logical and capacious understanding. In volume of intellect, in ability to grasp a legal proposition, or grapple with a problem or an argument-in pure and simple brain power-he certainly had no superior if any equal in New Hampshire in these later years of his life, and I doubt if in the annals of our illustrious jurisprudence, or in the list of our great forensic names, he was ever surpassed.

He was not quick of apprehension-he was cautious, wary, and slow to advise. He never promoted litigation, but often discouraged it by refusing to give any guarantees of success. He observed the precept of old Polonius, to

"Beware

of entrance to a quarrel; but, being in, Bear't that the opposed may beware of thee."

When once engaged he was laborious to the last degree, and never came to the trial of a case without the most thorough, pains-taking and exhaustive preparation. He spared no time or laborhe turned the night into the day-he shrunk from no diligence or exhaustionhe studied his cases over and over, and through and through, and looked at them in every possible aspect—and when he came to the trial, his thorough understanding of his case, its weakness as well as its strength, his anticipation of every possible position of his adversary, and his complete devotion to his cause and his client, made him the most formidable antagonist any man could en

counter. Entering the lists on some occasions with some of the leaders of the American bar, they found him a foeman worthy of their steel, and in the encounters which ensued he was never vanquished. Though so apparently timid and hesitating at the outset, he had immense combativeness, and used to say that he loved the smell of battle. When once launched upon a trial, he was a great ship of the line moving into action and bearing down, black and frowning, upon his adversary, with all sails set, decks cleared, and every gun shotted to the muzzle. At such times he was a spectacle of grandeur, and I appeal to your Honor, and every/gentleman of the bar who has ever been put to the trying test of being his antagonist, that when he seated himself for the struggle, you always saluted him with homage, and felt that though he might be out-mancuvered or worsted by dexterity and adroitness in avoiding a close encounter, it were a hopeless struggle for any adversary who should come within range of his terrific broadside.

Mr. Christie was less eloquent than many men in the ordinary acceptation of that term. But as an advocate before juries,and before the full bench upon great questions he was, nevertheless, great and almost invincible. He had not great readiness, or fullness, or felicity of speechhe did not command a very copious vocabulary-but he had words enough to express the most vigorous thoughts and the most accurate shades of meaning. His great strength lay rather in his skillful presentation of strong points, and his logical and sinewy argument, simple, direct, ordinarily unadorned by any imagery, and free from any flights of fancy. He took no circuitous routes, but pressed straight home to his object with a pace so steady and strong and sustained that it could not fail to bring him to the goal. He had great power of sarcasm and invective, and had a keen sense of the ludicrous, which seemed to me to be a late outgrowth of his mind, and to grow keener and sharper as he grew older. Many anecdotes might be told illustrative of this quality, but the bench and the bar remember

vividly, I am sure, some of his later efforts on occasions of importance, when this mighty man would not only lift the Court, and jury, and spectators, up to his clear and luminous view of the law and the justice of his case, but amused and sometimes convulsed all who heard him by his quaint humor, by curious turns of expression, and grotesque comparisons and illustrations, of the wit of which he seemed to be sublimely unconscious. But he never put himself on parade. These were all tributary to the stream of his argument and his purpose, and flowed in and along the channel of his reason and logic, like flowers on the bosom of the Mississippi.

The degree of Doctor of Laws was conferred upon Mr. Christie by his Alma Mater in 1857; and his acknowledged eminence as a jurist is abundantly attested by the offer on two occasions of the Chief Justiceship of this Court-a Court which can boast that a Smith, a Richardson, a Parker, and a Perley have occupied its highest seat. But he declined judicial station, although none can doubt that he would have filled and adorned it with consummate learning, wisdom and integrity. In fact, from all we know of him, we must believe him to have been equal to every possible occasion lawyer might be called upon to meet, and I think it would be the unanimous opinion of the profession that he would have been as great and conspicuous in any forum as he was here.

a

A glance at him showed him to be no ordinary man. His personal appearance was noble and commanding. His imposing dignity, his austere demeanor, "his look, drawing audience," his Jovelike head, and towering brow, singled him out as a king among men. As for myself, whatever the opinion of others may be, I long since concluded that my knowledge of other men had furnished me no measuring lines wherewith to estimate his full intellectual strength and power.

Mr. Christie was bred to the Common Law, and his admiration for that noble science, for its severe methods, its intricate reasonings, and for its august uses and capacities as a means of determin

ing right and enforcing justice in civilized society was unbounded. For many years previous to his death he must have been the greatest living expositor among us of the Common Law of England, which Lord Coke called "the perfection of reason." He did not take kindly to the modern codes of practice, which, in his opinion, degraded the study of the law from a science to a trade, the tools of which any rude and untrained hand might wield. Nor was he in love any the more with the systems of Equity, which during the last fifty years have so much usurped the province and superseded, whether or not they have enlarged, the uses of the Common Law, and supplanted the forms of procedure which had received the sanction of so many generations of great lawyers and judges. He seldom resorted to it in practice, and I have heard him on more than one occasion express his distrust of and impatience with the loose methods of equity procedure by reference to the well known saying of Selden, that "equity is according to the conscience of him that is Chancellor, and as that is larger or narrower, so is equity. Tis all one as if they should make the standard for the measure we call a foot a Chancellor's foot; what an uncertain measure would this be? One Chancellor has a long foot, another a short foot, a third an indifferent foot. "Tis the same in the Chancel lor's conscience."

Of course it was a necessary and inevitable corollary of such views that he should be conservative, and slow to sanction a departure from the settled principles of law and decisions of the Courts. But although stare decisis was his motto, no man was more bold and fearless than he in attacking anything which he was profoundly convinced was wrong, or unsupported by reason. The certainty of the law was to him of inestimable value, but he held firmly to the letter and spirit of the maxim of the great judgment in Coggs vs. Bernard, that "nothing is law that is not reason.

Such a man, so lavishly endowed by nature, so equipped by study and reflection, and filling so large a space in the public eye, could not fail to impress him

self upon the judicial history of his time. An examination of our Reports covering the period of his active professional life, will prove that he has left his mark upon those discussions and adjudications which have fashioned the jurisprudence of our State, and rounded out the body of law here framed in statutes and decisions into harmonious proportions, that command the respect of the profession and of publicists in all parts of America and Europe.

But any sketch of Mr. Christie's character would be imperfect and unjust to his memory which should fail to call attention to the high ethical tone of his professional life. He was the very embodiment of a high professional morality. He had a profound reverence for the law, and he would as soon have poisoned his neighbor's spring, as knowingly corrupt the fountains of justice, two atrocities which my Lord Bacon has somewhere, I believe, compared and likened. The same great philosopher and moralist lays it down that "the greatest trust between man and man is the trust of giving counsel;" and the celebrated barrister, Charles Phillips, said that "the moment counsel accepts a brief, every faculty he possesses becomes his client's property. It is an implied contract between him and the man who trusts him." Mr. Christie fully accepted this code of professional obligation, and his surrender of himself and all his powers to his client was as complete and absolute as it could be, consistently with the restraints of truth and honor. When he accepted his brief, whether the case was small or large, his client rich or poor-that client knew that he had secured all there was of him-his large brain-his unrivalled industry-his patience in research-his infinite attention to details-and that nothing which lay in human power would be spared to insure success. The members of this bar will recall memorable instances of this conscientious fidelity to his client and his cause, where he expended the energies of a giant upon causes of slight importance, in which nothing of moment was involved.

He also had a great respect and defer

ence for the bench, and was loftily above the meanness of attempting to influence the Court improperly, or to secure its approval of his views by any other means than the soundness of his argument and the justice of his cause. No man ever more scrupulously kept the oath, and every part of it, which the attorney of the Court takes when he assumes the duties of his office.

He employed his efforts and influence to raise and purify the character of the profession. "ancient as magistracy and necessary as justice;" and no maxim was more insisted upon by him than that which "holds every man a debtor to his profession, from the which as men of course do seek to receive countenance and profit, so ought they of duty to endeavor themselves by way of amends to be a help and ornament thereunto." I know whereof I speak, because personal observation has taught me, that he never prostituted his great powers to improper or even questionable purposes. In those delicate questions of professional duty which arise in every extended practice, he gave the doubt against his own interest. There were classes of cases, especially certain defences, in which, influenced by high views of public morality and policy, he invariably refused to accept a retainer, without, however, imputing anything improper or unprofessional to others who entertained opinions and adopted practices less fastidious in that regard. Nothing would induce him to appear in any capacity which could be construed into an apology for certain offences against the law. In this I am aware that he differed toto cælo from other lawyers not less eminent, and not less honorable, perhaps, than himselfand I only mention it as a certain proof of his high and scrupulous character as an advocate, and that he thought the duties of good citizenship were paramount to every personal consideration. He believed a lawyer's honor was his brightest jewel, and to be kept unsullied, even by the breath of suspicion. He was straightforward, honorable and sincere to the last degree. He had no covert or indirect ways. He had no arts but manly arts; and sooner than any

man I ever knew would I select him as a model to be imitated in this respect.

There is one thing which, at the risk of being tedious, I wish specially to note to-day, and which I feel called upon to say in behalf of the many men who have sat at the feet of this Gamaliel of the law. In the name of all the generations of his students I wish to bear testimony that in the relation of master and pupil he was one of the most instructive, entertaining, kind and indulgent men in the world. In his office the austerity which he wore in public largely disappeared. The bow was unbent, and his treatment of his students, without distinction of persons, was marked by a uniform high courtesy, respect, and familiar unrestraint. He was ever ready to pour out his knowledge, the matured fruits of his experience and labor, in copious streams of delightful talk and reminiscence, in which he brought back vividly before the listener the varied incidents of his long professional career, his contests at the bar, his personal recollections of great men, and the circumstances attending the settlement, one by one, of the main principles of our jurisprudence. At such times, when the springs of his rich and inexhaustible memory were unlocked, he would come nearer to neglecting business and clients than on any other occasion, as he turned aside to linger with the scenes that came trooping from the chambers of the past. No one, I venture to say, who has ever enjoyed the rare privilege of being his pupil will fail to appreciate and endorse what I now say, and to recall some hours thus spent as among the most valuable and best of his life. He treated his young men with a kindly interest, with helpfulness,and indulgence towards weakness, inexperience and ignorance of the law, and followed them through life with an affectionate regard, never hearing any good of them without rejoicing, nor any ill without sorrow and incredulity. These generous offices entitle him, so far as every one of them is concerned, to a lasting remembrance of the heart-to a personal attachment, admiration and veneration which never failed him in life, and is testified to-day by the sincere