And the man who more than any other in Massachusetts was to perfect their work, who stands beside the great Marshall in the history of American jurisprudence, and by the wise decisions of a temperate mind established the flow of justice through the channel of the common law, was also a native of Great Marshes. There, in 1781, when the work of the earlier patriots was accomplished, Lemuel Shaw was born. Slowly, irresistibly, by sheer force of worth and capacity, he advanced to fame. He was graduated from Harvard, he entered the law, and for twenty-six years practised his profession in Boston. At one time and another he served in the General Court, he was firewarden, selectman, a member of the school committee, and of the constitutional convention of 1820; and in 1830, when he was appointed chief justice of the Supreme Judicial Court, his sane inheritance, his tempered judgment, his wide experience of law and of men, had forged a mind perfectly adapted to his opportunity. In his thirty years upon the bench he enriched incalculably the sparse records of the common law. In the opinion of a fellow jurist, “The distinguishing characteristic of his judicial work was the application of the general principles of law, by a virile and learned mind, with a statesman’s breadth of vision and amplitude of wisdom to the novel conditions presented by a rapidly changing civilization.” The Pilgrims had brought here and practised the Anglo-Saxon conception of such freedom as is commensurate with justice to all. “They brought along with them their national genius,” wrote Saint John de Crèvecœur in his “Letters from an American Farmer,” in 1782, “to which they principally owe what liberty they enjoy, and what substance they possess.” It was the great American jurists who developed and adapted that conception of justice for the due guidance of the new nation. Shaw lived in Boston, but, unlike James Otis, he never gave up his hold upon his native town. He loved the village roads and Great Marshes and the sea. And, curiously, as if again the magic of the sea’s charm persisted in the fortunes of its children, Shaw’s daughter married Herman Melville, the author of “Typee” and “Omoo.” Shaw was fond of children, and used to drive his little granddaughter about Boston in his old chaise; there is a story of his being caught by a visitor at a game of bear with the children. But he could be stern enough on the bench; and a sharp practitioner, complaining of his severity, was tartly reminded by a fellow lawyer that “while we have jackals and hyenas at the bar, we want the old lion on the bench with one blow of his huge paw to bring their scalps about their eyes.”