Page:How to Get Strong (1899).pdf/435

 others, perhaps, had more culture, more learning; none had more legal wisdom.—Gilbert Clark's Sketches of Eminent Lawyers.

In the words of Charles Lamb, descriptive of an old Bencher: "His step was massive and elephantine; his face square as the lion's; his gait peremptory and path-keeping, indivertible from his way as a moving column." A common saying with him was: "The true lawyer is seized of an estate as secure and venerable as an estate in lands; its income, better than rents; its dignity, higher than ancestral acres." "Sublime, moral courage was the most marked characteristic of his nature."

At his death Mr. Evarts said of him: "The great traits, the great elements of his power and his character for a judge, were great breadth of understanding; great solidity of judgment; great severity of temper; and rapid and penetrating perception of legal relations." He himself wrote Judge Dillon, November 16, 1885: "The convincing power of the opinion or decision in a reported case must depend very largely on the force of the reasoning by which it is supported; and of this every lawyer and every Court must of necessity be his and its own judge."

And a glance at his picture will show that he had simply a stalwart body. No dress shows a man's figure like an evening suit. At the reception given by the New York Bar Association to the Presiding Justice, Noah Davis, and Mr. Justice Van Vorst, on their retirement from the Bench, we saw Justice Miller in such a costume. Of about Sullivan's height, we called the attention of a friend at the time to the uncommon depth of chest and massiveness of make of this great jurist, and to the fact that he was built more like Sullivan than almost any other man we ever saw.

At the time of his death the press called attention to the fact that he had, for many years, been in the habit of taking deep, slow breaths, and his capacious chest looked as if that habit must have been born with him. Taller men have sat upon that august tribunal; but none so sturdy for his height as Mr. Justice Miller,