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VOL. V.

No. 7.

BOSTON.

JULY, 1893.

OGDEN HOFFMAN. 1793 — DIED 1856.) By A. OAKEY HALL.

VETERANS of the Bar of New York succeeded by his youngest son, Lindley recall with pride and pleasure that its Murray Hoffman, known to the whole pro bench during the first half of this cen fession as a vice-chancellor, as author of a tury listened often to an American Erskine. treatise on Equity Practice, and as a State That was the appellation given to Ogden reporter. This brother of Ogden Hoffman Hoffman, senior, who, born when the Fed died as a judge of the Superior Court of New eral Constitution was under adoption, died York, to which Louis B. Woodruff, John on the eve of the Civil War that attacked Duer, Thomas J. Oakley, and Joseph S. Bosthat document or defended it. Like Erskine, worth, as associate judges, also bequeathed he had vaulted from the berth of midshipman rich legacies of juridical learning. into the legal army; and like that gifted and Ogden Hoffman won honors at Columbia eloquent Queen's Counsel, whose personal College before adding his degree as coun and professional lustre far exceeded any sellor to the primary one of lawyer fame that may be claimed to belong to him through a novitiate of seven years, — the as an M. P. or a peer or an occupant of then prescribed term of legal study. He the woolsack, Ogden Hoffman's persuasive served that novitiate in his father's offices at powers and uninterrupted success before a period when the memories of Alexander juries became, during a quarter-century, pro Hamilton's eloquence and of Aaron Burr's verbial. Like Erskine, also, he was a com legal ingenuity were fresh in professional parative parliamentary failure when sent memory, and while the exiled Thomas as congressman from New York City to Addis Emmett stood primus inter fares at Washington during Jacksonian political com the New York Bar. plications. But Mr. Hoffman retrieved that From the outset to the close of his career early failure when shortly before his death Ogden Hoffman was regarded as a lawyer the Whigs elected him as attorney-general grounded in the principles of legal science, of the State of New York, and at the very and as never " a mere case lawyer." Gifted last election which that once great party par with handsome and expressive face, graceful ticipated in before the Slavery and Free Soil figure, excellence of gesture, — not only issues engulfed all prior political conditions " suiting the action to the word," but often preceding the strong sentence with that apt in national controversy. He inherited name, fame, and legal skill and forecasting gesture which Webster, Ever from his father, Josiah Ogden Hoffman, who ett, and Choate remarkably used, — musical through several years served as recorder of voice (popularly termed of silver tones), New York City, and next as a judge in a magnetic eyes, rapid utterance in well civil court; and in the same tribunal he was rounded Saxon language, logical conception, 38