edge and some estimate can be made of the resources from which his oratory was supplied. His tropes were the corruscations of the glowing axle in rapid motion. His illustrations were drawn from the bright and golden thoughts of Shakespeare and Milton, from the sacred. poetry of Job and David, from the prophetic inspirations of Ezekiel and Isaiah, and from the wisdom of Solomon. It required a person of his precise mental constitution, unaffected piety and cultivated taste to employ this high poetic thought without irreverence; but this was done with such marvelous skill that even hypercriticism could not venture to condemn."

The estimate of Judge Lumpkin on the judicial side has been pronounced by Judge Bleckley, who says that "he discovered, organized and developed those germs of the law which have inherent vitality and which require no artificial aid to enable them to live. He devoted himself to the labor of stripping off whatever might conceal the core of justice. He was by nature a reformer. No man had more veneration; but he refused to squander it on antiquated trifles. In the spoken word he surpassed any other Georgian living or dead I have ever known; and he so blended gentleness with justice that, since he has joined the immortals, he may be idealized as our judicial bishop enthroned in Georgia skies.”

Judge O. A. Lochrane at the State University in 1879 wove into his address before the literary societies an eloquent tribute to Judge Lumpkin with which this sketch may be fittingly closed. Said the brilliant ex-chief justice: "Judge Lumpkin was in all his affections as fragrant as young flowers. Words of sunny kindness were always ripe for utterance upon his lips. His sympathies

were as warm as the loves of the angels. His addresses were thick to the very top with roses, but the solidity of the mountain was found underneath. In his powers of oratory he had few equals; for he lifted himself to a throne of light and grandeur from which he scattered words sweeter than the Arabian myrrh. My memory today fills with the light his first words flashed upon my pathway of life; and if there was but one flower upon the earth I would gather it to lay upon his grave.'

B

CHAPTER XXXVI.

The Supreme Court.

EFORE the Supreme Court of Georgia was organ

ized in 1845 the superior court judges were the ultimate authorities in matters of law and exercised the appellate functions of correction and review. Naturally there were frequent variations between judges each of whom was judicially supreme in the circuit over which he presided; and justice was unavoidably the victim of painful uncertainties. Even when the scales were disturbed by none of the infirmities to which frail human nature is so constantly exposed, the differences in mental constitution between men charged with responsible duties only served to emphasize the danger of conferring coordinate powers upon individuals without due regard to the unifying principle. It frequently happened under the old judiciary system that disputed questions of law were given one interpretation, for instance, in the Eastern circuit and another interpretation in the Western circuit; and such divergencies were calculated to expose property rights in Georgia to perilous hazards.

But two important factors served to diminish somewhat the number of judicial variations. In the first place some of the most distinguished lawyers in the State held from time to time the superior court judgeships, among

the number being William H. Crawford, who became judge of the Northern circuit after he had been minister to France, Congressman and Senator, and had come within the merest fraction of being elected President of the United States. Others who subsequently donned the senatorial toga were Walter T. Colquitt, Augustin S. Clayton, John Macpherson Berrien, Thos. W. Cobb, Wm. C. Dawson, Alfred Iverson, and Robert M. Charlton. Augustus B. Longstreet, the author of "Georgia Scenes," and L. Q. C. Lamar, the father of the late associate justice of the Federal Supreme Court, were likewise included among the able jurists who served the State at this time. In the second place it was the excellent custom of the judges to hold semi-annual conventions for the purpose of discussing vexed questions in the light of the combined wisdom of the whole bench; and while the action of the body was more advisory than binding it was nevertheless productive of good results.

Some of the most delightful chapters in the history of the Georgia bench and bar relate to this early period when the law was administered by the superior court judges. There were few railroads in those primitive days and lawyers and judges rode the circuit together, stopped at the same hotels and frequently slept under the same blankets. It was not easy to lug heavy law-books around the country with the facilities for traveling which then existed. Besides there were fewer law-books published; and lawyers spent more time in arguing principles than in making citations. Nor have the superiors of those lawyers been found in this age of multiplied book-shelves.

Sometimes the circuit-riders fared rather badly at the taverns which they were forced to patronize, especially in

the smaller hamlets and villages remote from the beaten highways of travel. "Most innkeepers," says Judge Garnett Andrews, "learned to have water, clean sheets and scalded bedsteads at the beginning of court week. And some of them learned to have clean towels in the room every morning. But I heard of a case in the Cherokee circuit where the landlady-still in the process of learning-declared that these lawyers must certainly be mighty dirty fellows for not wanting to use the same water and towels after each other, when she bathed her four children in the same water and dried them on the same towel, and God knows they were dirty enough."

Notwithstanding the romantic incidents which seasoned the era of the superior court judges in Georgia the judiciary system which then prevailed was wofully defective. However able the judges themselves might be or however frequently the conventions might be held it remained that the system required surgical heroics. The trouble was constitutional. Moreover the decisions rendered by the superior court judges, who exercised final as well as original jurisdiction, were nowhere preserved except in the Eastern circuit; and even in this exceptional instance it was reserved for the Charlton family to furnish the Hezekiahs. From 1805 to 1811 the reports were made by Thos. U. P. Charlton, Governor James Jackson's biographer, and from 1811 to 1837 by R. M. Charlton.

It might well be supposed that an elementary system of justice which provided for no adequate records and which wholly lacked the virtue of uniformity would be only too readily abandoned for something better, but the