At the time that Story accepted the Dane Professorship in the Law-school in Cambridge he had already achieved the labor of a lifetime. A lucrative business at the bar, was quitted for a seat upon the bench of the Supreme Court of the United States. He began his political life as a democrat and stanch supporter of Jefferson, when there were not many such in Massachusetts; but in later life he became a whig. The natural effect of a judicial station upon a mind like his, was to make him cautious and conservative; and he finally seemed a little distrustful of even the party with which he was associated. In the convention of 1820, which formed the existing constitution of Massachusetts, he took an active part with such men as Webster, Parker, Quincy and Prescott, and many of our important mercantile statutes and bankrupt laws were drawn by him, nearly, or quite in the form in which they were finally passed by Congress. He had been for about eighteen years an associate Justice of the Supreme Court, when, without resigning that position, he assumed the almost equally onerous duties of a Professor of Law. This new field of activity was entered upon with earnestness and zeal, and it is not necessary to state the success with which his efforts were attended. Towards the students his manner was familiar and affectionate. He was fond of designating them as "my boys," and without assuming any superiority, or exacting any formal respect, he participated so far as he was able in their success and failure; and extended beyond the narrow period of the school, far into active life, that interest in their behalf which he had contracted as their teacher. His lectures upon what are commonly considered the dry topics of the law, were delivered with enthusiasm, and illustrated with copious anecdotes from the store-house of his memory and his experience, and filled with episodes which were suggested to his active mind at almost every step. Indeed, if one were disposed to point out his prominent fault as a legal writer, he would probably select that diffuseness of style and copiousness of illustration, which, though it contributes somewhat to fulness and perspicuity, does it nevertheless at the cost of convenient brevity; which can more easily be dispensed with in a poem than in a law-book. But that characteristic which might perhaps be considered as a blemish in his legal treatises, only rendered him better, qualified for a successful oral lecturer. A printed volume admits of the last degree of condensation, because repeated perusals of one page will effect every thing which could be expected from a prolonged discussion over many; and to text-books of law, the student or the practitioner resort principally for a statement of results, with the addition of only so much general reasoning as may render the results intelligible. In an oral lecture on the other hand, as the attention cannot be arrested; or time taken to