While assiduously employed in the affairs of the bank, to which was devoted the year 1829, his services were still demanded by clients in the higher courts, and his reputation at the bar suffered no eclipse. Upon the death of Chief Justice Taylor, in this year, the executive appointment of a successor was conferred on a gentleman of merited eminence in the profession, and of a singularly pure and elevated character; but the sentiment of the majority of the profession, as well as public opinion, had made choice of Mr. Ruffin for the permanent office, and he was elected a Judge of the Supreme Court at the session of the Legislature in the autumn of 1829. In 1833, upon the demise of Chief Justice Henderson, he was elevated to the Chief Justiceship, in which he won that fame which will longest endure because it is incorporated in the judicial literature of the country, and is coextensive with the study and administration of our system of law. Of Mr. Ruffin's arguments at the bar no memorials have been preserved save the imperfect briefs contained in the causes that have been reported. His nature was ardent, his manner of speech earnest and often vehement in tone and gesticulation. Though versed in _belles-lettres_, and with tastes to relish eloquent declamation, it was a field into which he did not often, if at all, adventure. His reliance was upon logic; not upon rhetoric; and even his illustrations were drawn from things practical rather than ideal. Analyzing and thoroughly comprehending his cause, he held it up plainly to the view of others, and with a searching incisive criticism exposed and dissipated the weak points in that of his adversary; and all this in a vigorous, terse and manly English, every word of which told. Few advocates ever equaled him in presenting so much of solid thought in the same number of words, or in disentangling complicated facts or elucidating abstruse learning so as to make the demonstration complete to the minds of his hearers. These capacities he doubtless gained by severe culture, a part of which, as I learned from an early student in his office, resulted from his daily habit of going carefully over the demonstration of a theorem in mathematics. Thus habituated to abstract and exact reasoning, he delighted in the approach to exactness in the reasoning of the law, and no student could more truly say of his professional investigations: _Labor ipse est voluptas_. The accuracy thus attained in his studies gave him great eminence as a pleader in causes both at law and in equity; and the office of framing the pleadings was usually conceded to him by his colleagues in the causes in which they were associated. It also gave him rank among the great counsellors of the time whose opinions were not the result of cramming for an occasion, or a fortunate authority, but the well considered reflections of gifted minds imbued with law as a science. The full development of his forensic