46 LIFE OF 



not be remembered merely as aa upright and able 

 Judge, who has maintaiued the dignity of his profes- 

 sion and office, but as one who has stamped his pe- 

 culiar principles and modes of thought upon the code, 

 and who has imparted to it as much of the philosophi- 

 cal cast of his own mind, as could with safety be car- 

 ried into a science, that is as well a science of authority, 

 as it is of principles. 



In the department of Penal law he was relieved by 

 his office from frequent labours, although he annually 

 presided in a Court of Oyer and Terminer for Phila- 

 delphia county. His knowledge of this branch of 

 the law was extensive and accurate; his judgment in 

 it, as in every other, was admirable. His own ex- 

 emption from moral infirmity, might be supposed to 

 have made him severe in his reckonings with the 

 guilty; but it is the quality of rninds as pure as his, 

 to look with compassion upon those who have fallen 

 from virtue. He could not but pronounce the sentence 

 of the law upon such as were condemned to hear 

 it; but the calmness, the dignity, the impartiality, 

 with which he ordered their trials, the deep attention 

 which he gave to such as involved life, and the touch- 

 ing manner of his last office to the convicted, demon- 

 strated his sense of the peculiar responsibility, which 

 belonged to this part of his functions. In civil con- 

 troversies, such excepted, as by some feature of injus- 

 tice demanded a notice of the parties, he reduced the 

 issue pretty much to an abstract form, and solved it 

 as if it had been an Algebraic problem. But in cri- 



