excellence of mental discipline described by Lord Byron. Reading had made him a full man, talking a ready man, writing an exact man. The judicial literature of the English tongue may be sought in vain for finer models than are found in the opinions of Judge Black when he sat, and was worthy to sit, as the associate of John Bannister Gibson, on the Supreme Bench of Pennsylvania. In political opinion he was a Democrat, self-inspired and self- taught, for his father was a Whig who had served his State in Congress. He idolized Jefferson and revered Jackson as embodying in their respective characters all the elements of the soundest political philosophy, and all the requisites of the highest political leadership. He believed in the principles of Democracy as he did in a demonstration of Euclid,--all that might be said on the other side was necessarily absurd. He applied to his own political creed the literal teachings of the Bible. If Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob had held slaves without condemnation or rebuke from the Lord of hosts, he believed that Virginia, Carolina, and Georgia might do the same. He found in the case of Onesiums, St. Paul's explicit approval of the Fugutive-slave Law of 1850, and in the cruel case of Passmore Williamson he believed himself to be enforcing the doctrines of the New Testament. Personally unwilling to hold even a beast of burden in oppressive bondage, nothing could induce him to condemn slave-holding in those whose conscience permitted them to practice it. In the Abolitionists he found the chief disturbers of the Republic, and he held New England answerable to posterity and to God for all the heresies which afflicted either Church or State. He had an uncompromising hostility to what are termed New- England ideas, though the tenderest ties of his life were of New- England origin. "The New-Englander individually I greatly affect," he often said, "but, in the mass, I judge them to be stark mad." "I think, too," he would add, "that if you are going to make much of a New-Englander, he should, like Dr. Johnson's Scotchman, be caught young."