His reputation was greatly advanced and extended by the manner in which he acquitted himself in this office. The wants, however, of an increasing family and an unfortunate involvement by suretyship forbade his continuance in a situation of no better income than the salary which was its compensation. He resigned to the Legislature of 1818, and immediately returned to the practice. Mr. Ruffin had kept up habits of close study of his profession before his promotion to the bench, and he eagerly availed himself of the leisure afforded by the vacations of the office for the same object. He came back to the bar not only with his health renovated, which had never been very robust, but with a brightness in his learning and an increase of fame which, in the Supreme Court, then recently established on its present basis, and in the Circuit Court of the United States, as well as on the ridings in the State courts, brought to him a practice and an income which has hardly ever been equaled by any other practitioner in North Carolina. For forty-three weeks in the year he had engagements in court, and despite all conditions of the weather or other impediments to traveling in the then state of the country, rarely failed to fulfill them. He held the appointment of Reporter of the decisions of the Supreme Court for one or two terms, but relinquished it on account of the engrossment of his time by his practice; and his labors are embraced in the first volume of Hawks. Mr. Archibald Henderson, Mr. Gaston, Mr. Seawell, Mr. Murphy, Mr. Moses Mordecai, Mr. Gavin Hogg, and Mr. Joseph Wilson, all men of renown, were, with Mr. Ruffin, the chief advocates in the Supreme Court at that period, Mr. Nash and Mr. Badger being then upon the bench; and according to tradition, at no time have the arguments before it been more thorough and exhaustive. The late Governor Swain being, part of this period, a student of the law in the office of Chief Justice Taylor, in a public address at the opening of Tucker Hall, mentions a prediction in his hearing by Mr. Gaston to one of his clients in 1822, that if Mr. Ruffin should live ten years longer he would be at the head of the profession in North Carolina. By the same authority we are informed that only a year or two later Judge Henderson declared that he had then attained this position of eminence.