FRANKLIN MACVEIGH.

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tion, since over and above all was the natural gift and the special training.

One of the striking effects of Dr. Dwight's great gift—and the only one I shall have space to mention-was an unfailing power to make every man in his class a genuine student. Every one yielded to the spell whatever may have been his previous training or habits. If he had idled in college, he at once quit his idle ways; if he came to study law as a pastime, he quickly found himself unexpectedly earnest; if he was aiming at an ornamental profession, he fell immediately into habits of serious work. We could not be discriminated, whatever the variety of purpose with which we entered the school.

It would not be easy to too much admire this interesting power, nor to overestimate the importance of one who could so strongly affect and influence large numbers of the intellectual young men of his time. There have been in the last five years very few American positions of such exceeding influence as Dr. Dwight's chair in the Columbia Law School; and it is right to add that few Americans have withdrawn from positions of great influence accompanied by as much active affection as will eagerly follow Dr. Dwight into his regretted retirement.

CHICAGO, ILL., April 27, 1891.

Tribute of James Richards.

Professor Dwight's title to lasting fame will rest upon his pre-eminence as a teacher of law. He has been a Judge of our highest Court; an advocate engaged in weightiest cases; foremost as a citizen in political reforms and in opposing mischievous legislation; but it is as Professor of Municipal Law in the Columbia Law School for nearly a third of a century that he is best known and distinguished amongst us. For many years he was the Law School.

He built up, upon his own methods, a School of Law not second to any in prosperity and to be a graduate of which was ever after a matter of pride and a help to success.

Professor Dwight's methods in teaching are worth considering; he impressed every student with the feeling that he was his genuine friend, and whenever he meets one of his pupils, old or new, he meets a man who greets him not only with his hand but with his heart. His students, he assumed, were in the school to learn law and not "eating terms," hence, he had no system of grading recitations, and there was no roll-call.

He never mortified a student; if an answer were manifestly wrong, he would say: "Would you not rather say it is so and so."

Sometimes he would put to every student in turn the same supposed case and ask him his opinion upon it, and after each had answered, give the true solution. This afforded an opportunity to the clever ones to make a little proper display. We learned very much, too, by the questions which we asked of him in the class-room and which he, like another Socrates, freely encouraged.

In the moot courts, held each Friday, he presided, and, after the argument, the vote of the class was taken. A week later he rendered his decision.

The secret of Professor Dwight's success lies in the fact that there is no sham about him. He is thoroughly equipped. A biographer of Charles James Fox said of the latter that he was successful as a parliamentary debater because he first so clearly presented the subject to his own mind that he could not fail in the utmost clearness to others. Professor Dwight knows and he can explain what he knows.

NEW YORK, May 7, 1891.

GEORGE W. VAN SICLEN.

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Tribute of George W. Van Siclen.

Secretary bolland Trust Company.

With inborn sweet gentleness almost womanly, with manly firmness, with consideration for the feelings of others and a kindly interest in their affairs, with native dignity of bearing, with gentle humor and quick but harmless wit, a born teacher, touching upon and training the best qualities of mind of all his pupils, teaching them to think for themselves and where to look for and to find the learning with which his own mind overflowed, a man of honor, without a word inculcating honorable conduct and practice, religious without obtruding upon the sect or faith of any, a cultivated Christian gentleman, Theodore W. Dwight takes with him into retirement from active life, and will take with him into the grave, and into that happy land where all who have known him will hope to join him, the love of over four thousand strong studious minds, who in the past thirty years have felt the lasting effects of his genial power as the earth's latent forces feel the beneficent power of the sun to develop them.

NEW YORK, April 21, 1891.

Tribute of William C. Witter.

"Many are the thyrsus-bearers but few are the mystics." In the days of the Academic Grove and Porch, when the philosopher and the educator in the highest sense were one, the immortal educator seeing, as it is related in the Phædo, how few were the true philosophers, is made to utter the words above quoted.

During the past half century this country has been favored with two great educators, who were men of the true philosophy, educators in the highest sense the earlier, Francis Wayland, whose individuality and scholarship lifted a seat of learning at Providence, Rhode Island, into a repute enjoyed even to-day by few of the colleges of the land; the later, Theodore Dwight Woolsey, whose personality and learning broadened and firmly fixed the University at New Haven in the high position it still enjoys; and now in somewhat later years has appeared a third educator, Theodore Woolsey Dwight, whose distinguished personal character and intellectual equipment have raised the level of legal scholarship and of moral purpose in this metropolitan State of New York, while at the same time he has created and maintained by the sheer force of his almost unaided ability and personal influence a great centre of legal instruction. Large as is the public debt to each of these eminent instructors of modern days for their lasting contributions, respectively, to the science of moral philosophy, of international law, and of applied jurisprudence yet, after all, the quality which in each of them takes precedence above every other endowment, and shines with a lustre brighter than that shed by any kind of mere learning, is the inspiring and ennobling personal character which has illuminated their pathway. "Men appear from time to time," says Emerson, "who receive with more purity and fulness these high communications. The highest of these not so much give particular knowledge as they elevate by sentiment and by their habitual grandeur of view." This commendation is pre-eminently applicable to Professor Dwight. Without ever a word or any demeanor of profession, but always as himself an inquirer after truth, he has imparted to that title new meaning, in the deliberate estimation not of boys or youths, but of men already impressed with the significance of living to some

WILLIAM C. WITTER.

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purpose. It is not law that he has taught so much as justice. If the student has not discerned how a rule or axiom has its foundation somewhere in the distinctions of absolute right and wrong, new light is thrown upon the subject, new illustrations drawn from an exhaustless treasury of wisdom, the ideal distinction is sketched, till it has seemed that the speaker was in touch with the very fountains of equity. It is not so much details of legal learning that he has sought to impart as a breadth of view proceeding from a breadth of character built upon the very reason of things and with which few are endowed. When any responding cord has existed in the student it was certain to be touched. His character is an illuminated and illuminating character. The Columbia College Law School has through his influence been not merely a school for legal learning but a school for character.

Accompanying and shining through his more conspicuous qualities has been ever perceptible the good cheer of a calm, self-contained, contemplative soul exhaling unwearying kindliness and patience which are unobscured in the memories of some who have for a score of years carried his wise and luminous portrait in their hearts. As Crito says to the great instructor, "For men will love you in other places to which you may go and not in Athens only."

The youth, the citizen, the state are alike legatees of his best possessions. Whether upon the bench or at the bar, whether seeking by active effort and more passive example to purify the corrupt civic practices of the day, or pursuing his more especial vocation of the educator, his life commands a sincere admiration. He evidently is persuaded that "above and beyond what we may perceive through the senses there exist ideals which alone are true things."

May it not well be said of him, in the words of his immortal prototype, that he was "attuned to the Dorian mood, which is a harmony of words and deeds"?

NEW YORK, April 11, 1891.