The singular felicity and aptitude with which he denuded his judgments of all extraneous matter, and expounded the principles of the case in hand, usually citing authority only to uphold what had been demonstrated without it, is the most striking feature of his numerous opinions. His style of writing was elevated and worthy of the themes he discussed. His language was well selected, and exhibited a critical acquaintance with English philology. A marked characteristic in his writings, as it was also in his conversation, was the frequent, dextrous, and strikingly appropriate use he made of the brief words of our language, usually of Saxon derivation. In the autumn of 1852, while in the zenith of his reputation, and not yet pressed with the weight of years, Chief Justice Ruffin resigned his office and retired, as he supposed forever, from the professional employments he had so long and with so much renown pursued. But on the death of his successor and friend, Chief Justice Nash, in December, 1858, he was called by the almost unanimous vote of the General Assembly, then in session, to fill the vacancy, and sat again as a Judge of the Supreme Court until the autumn of 1859, when failing health rendered his labors irksome, and he took his final leave of judicial life. Six years of rest in his rural home had induced nothing of rust or desuetude: he wore the ermine as naturally and gracefully as if he had never been divested of its folds; his judicial arguments at this time evince all that vigor of thought and freshness and copiousness of learning which had prompted an old admirer to say of him that he was a "born lawyer." It is not improbable that this preservation in full panoply was, in some degree, aided by the circumstance that in a desire to be useful in any sphere for which he was fitted, he had accepted the office of a justice of the peace in the county of Alamance, in which he then resided, and had held the County Courts with the lay justices during this period. Though near ten years later, and when he had passed the age of eighty, in a matter of seizure, under the revenue laws, in which he took some interest for a friend, in the Circuit Court of the United States, a branch of practice to which he had not been habituated by experience, I had occasion to observe that he was as ready with his pen in framing the pleadings, without books of authority or precedent, as any proctor in a court of admiralty.