was
twenty-four years old before a large audience in the Representatives
Chamber at Washington which was heard with breathless silence.
Rufus King said it was the best sermon he ever heard, and
Harrison Gray Otis was affected to tears. Benjamin R. Curtis
was admitted to the bar in Boston when he was twenty-two years
old and shortly after was retained in a very important case.
It is said that an old deputy sheriff, who had just heard
Curtis's opening argument, was met in the street and asked
if anything was going on in court. "Going on?" was the reply.
"There's a young chap named Curtis up there has just opened
a case so that all Hell can't close it." I suppose Edward
Everett Hale and James Freeman Clarke were almost as famous
in the pulpit when they were twenty-five or twenty-six years
old as they ever were afterward. I might extend the catalogue
indefinitely. Where is there to be found to-day at the New
England bar or in the New England pulpit a man under thirty
of whom it can be said that his place among the great men
of his profession is assured? It will not do to say in answer
to this that it takes a greater man in this generation to
fill such a place than it took in other days. That is not
true. The men of those generations have left their work behind
them. It does not suffer in comparison with that of their
successors. There was something in the college training of
that day, imperfect as were its instruments, and slender as
were its resources, from which more intellectual strength
in the pupil was begotten than there is in the college training
of the present generation. I will not undertake to account
for it. But I think it was due in large part to the personality
of the instructors. A youth who contemplated with a near
and intimate knowledge the large manhood of Josiah Quincy;
who listened to the eloquence of James Walker, or heard his
expositions of the principal systems of ethics or metaphysics;
or who sat at the feet of Judge Story, as he poured forth
the lessons of jurisprudence in a clear and inexhaustible
stream, caught an inspiration which transfigured the very
soul of the pupil.

Josiah Quincy, "old Quin" as we loved to call him, was a very
simple and a very high character. He was born in Boston,
February 4, 1772, just before the Revolutionary War. It was
said, I have no doubt truly, that the nurse who attended his
mother at his birth went from that house to the wife of Copley,
the pai