Of the eminent lawyers who have appeared at our bar during the present century, to no one living or dead has greater length of days, crowned by more brilliant success in all walks of life, been accorded, than to the four great men who closed their professional career by the gratuitous, graceful, able, and impartial discharge of the important duties pertaining to the office of justice of the peace. While I can make no positive averment, I am very confident in the opinion that during the time that Judges Badger, Cameron, and Ruffin presided on the Superior and County Court bench, no case tried before them ever occupied more than a single day. Mr. Browne, as appears from the graveyard record, died at the age of sixty-seven. Mr. Badger had entered upon his seventy-second, and Judge Cameron his seventy-sixth year. Chief Justice Ruffin, in the possession of unimpaired intellectual strength, is an octogenarian. In 1806, five years after the conviction of Glasgow, the great case of Lord Granville's heirs _versus_ Governor Davie and others, which threatened a more extensive confiscation than that menaced in our time, was argued before the Federal Court in this city by Gaston and Harris for the plaintiffs, and Cameron, Woods, and Baker for the State of North Carolina. Potter, District Judge, charged the jury; Marshall, Chief Justice, from personal considerations, peremptorily declining to sit upon the trial. Marshall is the only Revolutionary Titan I have ever seen. With fair opportunities to judge of him as he appeared upon the bench, and in social intercourse sixteen years afterwards, I can pronounce with emphasis, that I never expect to look upon his like again. I sometimes feel apprehensive that I will become old myself before a great while, when my memory recurs to the time when Chief Justice Ruffin was one of the promising young men of my day. In 1822, when a student in Chief Justice Taylor's office, occupied by Mr. Gaston during the sessions of the Federal and Supreme Courts, Ithiel Town, the architect who planned the present capitol and who had an important suit pending in the Federal Court against the Clarendon Bridge Company, inquired of Mr. Gaston whether Mr. Ruffin would be acceptable to him as associate counsel. He replied: "No one more so; Mr. Ruffin is a very promising young man, and if he lives ten years longer will be at the head of the profession." The prediction was fully verified at an earlier date.