EMORY WASHBURN. 301 



illness, passed into the other life. Such is the outline of his career ; 

 what work has he left behind him ? 



The work of such a man and teacher it is difficult to trace. It has 

 mingled with the characters and minds of his pupils. Words of sym- 

 pathy and 'wisdom, fitly spoken, have turned the current of many a 

 life from waste to blessing. It is the very presence of his life and 

 character, rather than his intellectual processes, which influences those 

 around such 'a man as Emory Washburn. Yet some things may be 

 definitely said of the result. 



In the school where the great work of his life was done, he was ever so 

 free-hearted in giving his sympathy and counsel to all who, from year to 

 year, needed or sought it ; his usefulness in this respect was so tran- 

 scendent that, by universal consent, he is pronounced the best beloved 

 of all the teachers that school has ever had. His devotion was not to the 

 ideal entity of the Institution, whose being is to live through the cen- 

 turies. That might secure the devotion of more poetic minds. His 

 labor of love was with and for the young men who resorted to it, full 

 of the mingled holies and fears that attend their entrance upon life, com- 

 ing often from the res angusta domi to secure encouragement and aid in 

 the new and brief home where he was always found a father and a friend. 

 Among the teachers of that school who have gone to their rest were 

 Ashmun and Story and Greenleaf and Parker and Sumner ; yet so 

 well known to the living that the name of each is a biography. Of 

 those yet living, his companions in instruction, we may not speak. 

 They, with the thousands of his pupils, will concur in the inscription 

 to his memory, that he was the best beloved of all the teachers of this 

 school of the law. 



But a more specific and definite work he has done for the country 

 at large, for our English-speaking race, for its body of jurists, and 

 the administration of justice. His instructions in the school were 

 chiefly given in the most difficult department of the law, — that 

 of real property; the most difficult to us, because it does not grow 

 out of the convictions or practices, or needs of our age or of our 

 institutions, alone. It comes to us from other ages, from other political 

 and social organizations, from other ideas of right, from other views 

 of the nature and obligations of property, and specially of landed 

 property. Its system of rules is, therefore, comjxjsite and intricate ; 

 and not always reasonable to our minds, or even useful to existing 

 interests. The needs of the present, and a forecast of those of the 

 future, are innovating ui^on it, changing it, not always wisely. A 

 remedy for one evil often admits greater evils into such ,a system of 



