Judge Seawell remarked of him: "Badger is an elementary man," and, continuing in his peculiar and racy style, "he goes to first principles; he finds the corners of his survey and then runs out the boundaries, while others hunt along the lines. The difference between him and myself is, that when I take up a book I read slowly, pausing at the end of each sentence, and when I have reached the bottom of the page I must stop and go back to see whether I fully comprehend the author's meaning, while he reads it off like a novel, and by the time he gets to the bottom of the page or the end of the treatise he has in his mind not only all that the author has taught, but a great deal that the author never knew." Chief Justice Ruffin, yet surviving in honorable retirement from the labors of the profession, whose early appreciation of the faculties of Mr. Badger we have already noticed, and before whom as a Judge of the Supreme Court, he was in full practice for twenty-three years, affirmed to me, since the death of Mr. Badger, that in dialectic skill and argument he excelled any individual with whom he had ever been acquainted, not even excepting Chief Justice Marshall himself, for that he possessed the faculty of imagination and the capacity for illustration which Judge Marshall had not. To his hospitality and kind intercourse with gentlemen of the profession, his liberality and assistance to its junior members (whom his gracious demeanor and familiar manners won, no less than his spirited and intelligent conversation entertained and improved), to his unselfish and genial nature, and an integrity on which no temptation ever brought a stain, the occasion permits time only to allude before closing our view of his professional life. Had he been called to the office of Attorney-General of the United States by General Jackson at the period of his first election (of which Mr. Badger had been an ardent and efficient advocate), as many of his friends entertained expectation, and had continued from that time his practice in the Supreme Court of the United States, it is hazarding but little to say that his fame would have equaled that of any advocate in the history of American jurisprudence. Of Mr. Badger's brief service at the head of the Navy Department--excepting his recommendation of the establishment of a home squadron to patrol the Gulf of Mexico and West Indian seas, as a protection against piracy or any sudden hostile demonstration on our coasts (a measure since adopted)--there is no circumstance demanding especial notice. He had accepted the appointment at the request of President Harrison with reluctance, retained it by the expressed desire of his successor, and resigned it as soon as the breach between Mr. Tyler and the party that elected him was found to be irreparable.