Page:Samuel F. Batchelder - Bits of Harvard History (1924).pdf/263

 acres could be turned into available cash. By 1815 the College had succeeded in realizing from them about $7500. On the strength of this fund the Corporation, selecting the first alternative of the gift (the “professor of Physick and Anatomy” having been provided for in the recently formed Medical School), established the Royall Professorship of Law, and appointed as the first incumbent Isaac Parker, Chief Justice of Massachusetts.

Parker, whose place in the history of the Law School is of exceptional interest, was a graduate of the class of 1786. If ever a man appreciated the difficulties of a legal education it was he, for by his own exertions he had climbed from the bottom to the top of the juridical ladder. Born in Boston of humble parentage, he had in his childhood endured all the privations of the Revolutionary era. At the age of fourteen he entered Harvard, so poor that, but for the kindness of friends, he would have left in the middle of his course and apprenticed himself to an apothecary. Picking up somehow the elements of law, he opened a modest office in the remote hamlet of Castine. Later he removed to Portland, and by indefatigable industry and grit forced his way into the front ranks of the profession. Twenty years after graduating he gave up a large and lucrative practice to accept a place on the bench of the Supreme Judicial