hy, but rather dull and tame conservative gentlemen, or
stay away, as we preferred. A few of the young men, of whom
I was one, conspired to get possession of the Lyceum. They
turned out in force for the election of officers, chose me
President, and we got Wendell Phillips and Theodore Parker
and Ralph Waldo Emerson and other shining lights of a newer
philosophy, much to the indignation of the old Whig magnates.
But the lectures were very successful, and at the end of my
Presidency, which lasted two or three years, we had an ample
balance in our treasury.

If I were to give an account of my professional life for
twenty years, I must make another book. It was full of interest
and romance. The client in those days used to lay bare his
soul to his lawyer. Many of the cases were full of romantic
interest. The lawyer followed them as he followed the plot
of an exciting novel, from the time the plaintiff first opened
his door and told his story till the time when he heard the
sweetest of all sounds to a lawyer, the voice of the foreman
saying: "The jury find for the plaintiff." Next to the "yes,"
of a woman, that is the sweetest sound, I think, that can
fall on human ears.

I used to have eighteen or twenty law cases at the fall term
each year. The judges gave their opinions orally in open
Court, and the old judges like Shaw and Metcalf, used to enliven
an opinion with anecdotes or quaint phrases, which lent great
interest to the scene. If Walter Scott could have known and
told the story of the life of an old Massachusetts lawyer
from the close of the Revolution down to the beginning of
the Rebellion, there is nothing in the great Scotch novels
which would have surpassed it for romance and for humor.

I think I may fairly claim that I had a good deal to do with
developing the equity system in the courts of Massachusetts,
and with developing the admirable Insolvency system of Massachusetts,
which is substantially an equity system, from which the United
States Bankruptcy statutes have been so largely copied.

The great mass of the people of Massachusetts, Whigs and Democrats
as well as Republicans, were loyal and patriotic and full
of zeal when the war broke out. A very few of the old Whigs
and Democrats, who were called "Hunkers" or "Copperheads,"
sympathized with the Rebellion, or if they did not, were so
possessed with hatred for the men who were putting it down
that they could find nothing to approve, but o