uninterrupted study completes a law education. By this rule I shall finish mine in March next, and shall in that month be admitted to the bar in this county. In this part of the country there are too many lawyers in proportion to the law business. This disproportion has occasioned many low practices (among some lawyers) in a profession which I expected was worthy of the esteem and respect of society. On this account I shall seek some quarter where the prospects of the profession are more promising than with us. From some observations made by you on the floor of Congress, I have been induced to wish a settlement in the State of Delaware. The circumstances, prospects, and encouragements of the profession in that State are the objects of my inquiries. I would request you, sir, to give me some information relative to these points by sending me an answer to this letter. You will thus assist a man to set out in life and confer a favor which may cost you little trouble, but which may do me great service, and which a grateful mind shall never forget.

"This request is made on the score of universal philanthropy. Compliance will lay an obligation on one from whom there is small prospect of return, and can have no reward but the reflection that you have increased the happiness of a brother of the human race, and added one to the number of those who bless God for giving you existence. "I am, sir, with respect, yours,

"WILLARD HALL."

"The gentlemanly and favorable answer of Mr. Bayard,❞— so afterwards wrote Judge Hall of this incident," induced

me to make choice of this State for prosecuting my profession." Let us pause in our narrative to acknowledge, even though at so late a day, the service rendered to our State by the encouraging reply of Mr. Bayard to this stranger, a service certainly not the least in all its consequences among those for which his name has been so greatly honored. Judge Hall always held his memory in grateful remembrance. Writing of him on one occasion, he thus testified his own appreciation of Mr. Bayard's high character: "His was not," writes the judge, "a noisy fame; but no man's was more solid. Those who knew him held him in the highest estimation,-a man of elevated principle and commanding intellectual power." . . . "Of the bar of his State he was the pride, and most justly; he was an ornament of that of the nation."

Admitted to the bar in New Hampshire in March, 1803, with no delay he left his father's house in Westford, April 7th, and, travelling the whole distance on horseback, he reached Wilmington, Delaware, on the 16th of the same month. Finding Mr. Bayard absent from home, in attendance upon the spring sessions of the court in Georgetown, he pursued his journey to that place, where he presented himself to Mr. Bayard, and also to Mr. Rodney, with letters of recommendation from the late Harrison Gray Otis, of Boston, and with the certificate of his admission to the bar in New Hampshire. Upon motion of Mr. Bayard, and on a favorable report of his qualifications made after an examination by Mr. Bayard and James P. Wilson, then at the bar in Georgetown (afterwards a distinguished divine in Philadelphia), he was admitted an attorney and counsellor of

that court, and in the following month of May settled at Dover for the practice of his profession.

The bar of this State was at that day adorned with men of commanding ability, held in high confidence of the people, some being of national reputation, whose names were the pride of the State. Among its leaders were James A. Bayard, George Read, Cæsar A. Rodney, Nicholas Van Dyke, and James P. Wilson, with younger men of great promise, such as James Rogers and Louis McLane, Thomas Clayton and Henry M. Ridgely, Thomas Cooper and Peter Robinson. It was among such men he stood,-young, a stranger, without family prestige, without fortune, without experience, without friends, without as yet a name; but bringing to his profession a guaranty for success better than all these, viz., elements of character and professional qualifications such as the necessities of society demanded, and which were certain when discovered to be called into requisition. His success, though slow, was progressive and enduring, bringing in due order and season professional patronage, the respect of the bar, social position, wealth, and honors, and,-what he no less rejoiced in,opening to him wider spheres of usefulness.

As a counsellor at the bar, he became distinguished for his legal learning, sound judgment, and such fidelity to a trust as made the client's interest all his own. In argument, his method was to grasp firmly the governing principles of the case in hand and to present them lucidly and forcibly, compelling conviction. He has been represented by the elder lawyers as being, on occasions, eloquent; yet few, if any, had less of the common arts of oratory. His

eloquence was that of an earnest mind, itself possessed by overmastering convictions, which, when great interests were at stake, expressed themselves without art under the promptings of a refined and cultivated nature, and commanded, as he always sought to do, not so much the applause of his hearers as their assent. In all professional transactions he was singularly painstaking, conscientious in devoting his whole energy to any business, without measuring its importance, and for one trait especially distinguished, viz., a marvellous faculty of being always ready. It was once the remark of the late Chancellor Ridgely, made from the bench, that he had never called a cause of Willard Hall's in which the answer was, "not ready." Qualities such as these could not be long confined, except through his own choice, to the limits of a professional career. Hardly has he ceased to be a stranger and become well settled at the bar, when he is called to stations of public trust. In 1812 he was appointed Secretary of State under Governor Haslett, which office he held during the Governor's term of three years. Soon afterwards, in 1816, he was elected, together with Louis McLane, to represent this State in the Congress of the United States; and he was re-elected to the same station in 1818. Congressional life was distasteful to him; he wearied of it; his energies, though untiring, and his capacities for usefulness, though of the highest order, sought a more congenial exercise in quieter spheres of duty. So, after two terms, he declined. a further service in Congress, and returned to professional life. In 1821 he was again appointed Secretary of State under Governor Collins. In 1822 he was elected a member

of the State Senate; and on the 6th day of May, 1823, on the decease of Judge Fisher, he was appointed by President Monroe District Judge of the United States for Delaware District. Soon after this appointment he removed to Wilmington, where he resided until his decease. He retired from the profession, as he has himself expressed it, "wearied with twenty years' labors and anxieties; toiling, as he had, harder for his clients than they would work for themselves; and feeling more deeply than they felt for their own interests." The appointment was an eminently fit one, whether considered in its bearing upon the man or the office. To him, it brought relief from a profession harassing to a sensitive temperament, with a congenial employment for the future, and much leisure for maturing those plans of larger usefulness which he had already begun to meditate. To the office, the appointment brought a judge combining in a rare degree all the requisites of learning, exalted purity, dignity, and the public confidence.

He held the office of district judge through the exceptionally long term of forty-eight years, retiring from it in December, 1871, in his ninety-first year, with faculties still unimpaired, except that bodily infirmity had disabled him from protracted labor. How he discharged the duties of his high station-with what promptness, diligence, impartiality, ability, and dignity-with what singular affability to the bar and tender consideration for the convenience of every one except himself-need not be described among the people who were so long witnesses of these qualities. His judicial administration was eminently conservative. Though possessing an exquisite sense of justice, and ever