APPENDIX No. 1.

PRESIDENT'S ADDRESS.

Gentlemen of the Georgia Bar Association:

Expecting that our distinguished countryman, Mr. John G. Carlisle, would address you upon one of the more recondite subjects appertaining to our profession, and knowing that the essays of our members would necessarily be technical in their character, I have ventured to stray somewhat from the beaten track, and to impart to my address, perhaps, a more than customary literary, or even rhetorical flavor. I have therefore chosen as my subject

THE PHILOSOPHY OF LEGAL BIOGRAPHY.

"Man's sociology of nature," says Carlyle, "evinces itself in spite of all that can be said, with abundant evidence by this one fact, were there no other, the unspeakable delight he takes in biography. It is written, 'the proper study of mankind is man,' to which study let us candidly admit he, by true or false methods, applies himself nothing loath. Man is perennially interesting to man; nay, if we look strictly to it there is nothing else interesting. How inexpressibly comfortable to know our fel– low creature; to see into him, understand his goings forth, decipher the whole heart of his mystery; nay not only to see into him, but even to see out of him, to view the world altogether as he views it, so that we can thoroughly construe him, and could almost practically personate him, and do thoroughly discern both what manner of man he is and what manner of thing he has got to work on and live on."

History, it has been said, is the essence of innumerable biographies. But this essence has usually been so compounded as to mingle the elements of which it is composed into one common mass, the ingredients of which are no longer separable or distinguishable.

Macaulay declares that the perfect historian is he in whose work the character and spirit of an age is exhibited in miniature. He considers no anecdote, no peculiarity of manner, no famil1ar sayings as too insignificant for his notice, which are not too insignificant to illustrate the operation of laws of religion and of education and to mark the progress of the human mind. Men will not merely be described, but will be made intimately known to us. The changes of manners will be indicated not merely by a few general phrases or a few extracts from statistical documents, but by appropriate images presented in every line. And he adds if history was thus written we should not have to look for the wars and votes of the Puritans in Clarendon, and for their phraseology in Old Mortality; for one-half of King James in Hume and for the other half in the Fortunes of Nigel.

There can be no question that to the extent to which history retains the characteristics of biography, to that extent will it become the more pointed, instructive and interesting. History has been beautifully defined to be philosophy teaching by examples. But a little reflection will convince that it teaches rather by the example of individuals than by the example of events. Occurrences that would make but a feeble impression upon the great mass of mankind, acquire a personal interest and are interwoven with the feelings and passions when they display and illustrate particular lives. The great events of the world are interpreted by the living actors upon the stage. The hero in the foreground gives life to the picture. The history of ancient patriotism is read in the sacrifice of Codrus and of Curtius. Republican virtue is remembered in the fidelity of Regulus and the integrity of Fabricius. The consolidation of Frankish power is best exhibited in the life of Charlemagne. The heroic endurance of the Netherlands is read in the story of Philip and Alva. The crusades are remembered in the piety of St. Louis and the chivalrous courage of Richard. Not all the eloquent descriptions of Tacitus and Livy can excite the attention and enlist the feelings like the personal narrations of Plutarch. Carlyle asserts that even in the highest works of art our interest is too apt to be strongly or even mainly of a biographic sort.

We are biased by our natures to what is personal or individual. We admire some scene because it recalls a memory. We enjoy a poem because it is reminiscent. We gaze with delight upon a picture because it has an association. Our soul melts to

to a song because it is an echo of our childhood. Among all the excellent papers read by lawyers in New York in February last, upon the occasion of the celebration of the organization of the Supreme Court of the United States, none proved more generally interesting and satisfactory than that of Mr. Thomas J. Semmes upon the personal characteristics of the Chief Justice. It was an able address, but it was not a learned thesis upon some recondite subject. It did not deal with generalities. It peered into individual histories and its biographical character at once gave it audience and secured for it interested attention.

If this insight into personal careers proves so generally entertaining, some scrutiny into the lives of the great men of our profession should not be devoid of interest to us.

Alexander exclaimed upon the good fortune of Achilles, who had a Homer, as the exponent of his virtues. Many of the bright lights of the legal profession have had their lives portrayed by distinguished writers, but as a rule they have afforded us but littleinsight into the most interesting portion of every man's history -that hidden and inner life which solves the mystery of his being and action. "Your modern historical restaurateurs," says. Carlyle, "are indeed little better than high priests of famine that keep choicest dinner sets, only no dinner to serve therein. Yet such is our biographic appetite; we run trying from shop to shop with ever new hope, and unless we could eat the wind, with ever new disappointment." This is particularly true of the biographies of distinguished lawyers. The political eminences they have attained, the great connections they have made, the prominent positions they have fil'ed, the wealth and fame they have acquired, are duly chronicled and listed. But in all this maze of reputation and glory, the true life of the individual floats in a dull nimbus, and we close the book in disappointment that we know so little of the man. The subject is clothed in his robes of office; he is propped and posed for his sit

ting; the very expression of his face is tutored; and in attitude stiff and conventional, and as if wearied of his posturing, he is pictured for posterity. The smile that doubtless sometimes varied his countenance, the free and unstudied motions that marked his abandon, the easy attitudes that came to him when once thrown off his guard, have no presentment. The true portrait is turned against the wall, and only the high stations that he filled are labelled on the back. He gazes at us from his gilded frame, the stiff embodiment of elaborated lines. To enable us to know him truly he should have been taken with a Kodac.

It is, alas! our misfortune that none of the great members of our profession have had a Boswell for a biographer.

How very entertaining it would have proved to us if some industrious searcher after truth, with a microscopic tendency,had done for our profession what the elder Disraeli accomplished for the literary character; if we had revealed to our curiosity those hidden forms of life which move about the bottom, instead of being limited in our vision to the more obstrusive phases of the surface. What we need are the revelations of the deep sea soundings. How little we know of the secret influences that moulded or moved the lives of the great members of our guild. Of the literary character, of the musician and the painter, we know something; of the lawyer much less.

We are told that when Newton was weary in the preparation of the Principia, he took an ivory ball in his hand and closed his tired eyes; with the access of sleep, the muscles relaxed, the ball fell to the ground and roused him from his momentary but refreshing slumber. Mendelssohn relieved the strain of composition by counting the tiles on the house top. Voltaire slept with paper and pen by his side. Rousseau rose during the night and pencilled the momentary suggestions of his fancy. Bacon left us his "sudden thoughts set down for profit." Leorardo da Vinci carried his sketch book in his girdle. Hogarth stopped on the street to catch a character on his thumb nail. How very little knowledge of this character we possess about the lives most interesting to us. In the elaborate biographies of the Lord Chancellors and Chief Justices of England,