n and Wm. E.
Channing--to the genius and character of the latter of whom he always bore
the most enthusiastic and hearty testimony. Indeed he contested with
Channing for the highest honor. Channing won it, but always gave the honor
himself to Story; while the latter always declared that the former won the
just meed of his genius and scholarship.

Their graduation was in the summer of 1798: and immediately upon quitting
college Mr. Story commenced the study of the law with Mr. Samuel Sewall,
afterwards Chief Justice in the Supreme Court of Massachusetts. Fourteen
hours a day was over his quantum of study. Although sometimes
disheartened, he never surrendered his determination to master the
elements and details of his new profession.

_Studying_ law in those days was a far different thing from its _reading_
now. Then it was _multum_: now it is _multa_. No copious indexes and
multifarious treatises were counted by thousands: no digests (directories
to the streets, the avenues, the fountains and the temples of the
science), abounded by scores. Libraries were carried about in wheelbarrows
and not in processions of vans, when the inexorable moving day came
around. Learned judges were not then compelled to hold courts in remote
villages (resorting hereby to a _coup de loi_), in order to escape the
_cacoethes loquendi_ of case lawyers and presuming juniors. Legal lore was
builded up like the massive stone and hard grained mortar of the edifices
of that olden time--slowly, carefully, but lastingly; not as are builded
now the brick and stuccoed mansions of the snob and parvenu. Not that
abounding treatises and familiarizing digests forbid the idea of the
perfect lawyer now-a-days: only that to-day the law student in the midst
of a large library stands more in need (when thinking of the _otium_ which
accompanies certain dignity), to utter the ejaculation, "lead us not into
temptation"--the temptation of possessing that knowledge which teaches
where to seek for information, and not the kind which is information of
itself.

In 1801 Mr. Story came to the Salem bar while at the age of twenty-two.
After being three years at practice he married his first wife, who died
within two years afterward, plunging him into the deepest grief. During
his courtship he dabbled (as almost every young lawyer does until he finds
that clients are severe critics) in poetry, and wrote a didactic poem of
two parts in heroic verse, entitled "The Power of