court, confessed in Johnsonian sentences his lenient temper towards these "stolen pleasures,"—his willingness that debtors should snatch the "few moments of liberty which, although soured by constant perturbation and alarm, are, notwithstanding, deemed fit subjects for judicial animadversion." His rhetoric was rather agreeably florid when he declared the law establishing "jail liberties" to be a concession for humane purposes made by the inflexible spirit which authorized imprisonment for debt. He strongly intimated his sympathy to be with "the exertions of men of intelligence, reflection, and philanthropy to mitigate its rigor; of men who viewed it as a practice fundamentally wrong, a practice which forces their fellow-creatures from society, from their friends, and their agonized families into the dreary walls of a prison; which compels them to leave all those fascinating endearments to become an inmate with vermin;" and all this, not for crime or frauds, "but for the misfortune of being poor, of being unable to satisfy the all-digesting stomach of some ravenous creditor." The practice was one "confounding virtue and vice, and destroying the distinction between guilt and innocence which should unceasingly be cherished in every well-regulated government." Democrats rejoiced over this passage when Van Buren was a candidate for the presidency. Richard M. Johnson, then his associate upon the Democratic ticket, had successfully led an agitation for the abolition of such imprisonment upon judgments rendered in the federal courts.

Van Buren's professional life terminated with his election as governor in 1828. In 1830, while secretary of state at Washington, he is said to have appeared before the federal supreme court in the great litigation between Astor and the Sailors' Snug Harbor, in which he had been counsel below; but no record is preserved of his argument there. His last well-known argument was before the court of errors at Albany in Varick v. Jackson, a branch of the famous Medcef Eden litigation. This long and highly technical battle was lighted up by the fame and competitions of the counsel. It arose upon the question whether a will of Eden which gave a landed estate to his son Joseph, but if Joseph died without children, then to his surviving brother, Medcef Eden the younger, created for Joseph the old lawyers' delight of an "estate tail." If it were an "estate tail," then the law of 1782, which, in the general tendency of American legislation after the Revolution, was directed against the entailing of property, would have made the first brother, Joseph, the absolute owner, and have defeated the later claim of Medcef. Joseph had failed while in possession of the property. His creditors, accepting the opinion of Alexander Hamilton, then the head of the bar, insisted that he had been the absolute owner, that the provision for his brother Medcef's accession to the property was nugatory as an attempt to entail the estate; and upon this view the creditors sold the lands, which by the rapid growth of the city soon became of large value. Hamilton's opinion for years daunted the younger Medcef and his children from asserting the right which it was morally plain his father had intended for him. Aaron Burr, not less Hamilton's rival at the bar than in the politics of New York, gave a contrary opinion; but after killing Hamilton in 1804 and yielding up the vice-presidency in 1805, his brilliant professional gifts were exiled from New York. On his return in 1812 from years of conspiracy, adventure, and romance, he took up the discredited Medcef Eden claim; and in the judicial test of the question he, and not Hamilton, proved to have been correct. The struggle went on in a number of suits; and when in 1823 the question was to be finally settled in the court of last resort, Burr, fearing, as he himself intimated to the court, lest the profound suspicion under which he rested might obscure and break the force of his legal arguments, or conscious that his past twenty years had dimmed his faculties, called to his aid Van Buren, then United States senator and a chief of the profession. As Van Buren and Burr attended together before the court of errors, they doubtless recalled their meetings in Van Ness's office twenty years before, when Burr, still a splendid though clouded figure in American life, hoped, by Federalist votes added to the Republican secession which he led, to reach the governorship and recover his prestige; those days in which the unknown but promising young countryman had interested a vice-president and enjoyed the latter's skillful and not always insincere flattery. The firm and orderly procedure of Van Buren's life was now well contrasted with the discredited and profligate ability of the returned wanderer. Against this earlier but long deposed, and against this later and regnant chief in the Republican politics of New York, were ranged in these cases David B. Ogden, the famous lawyer of the Federalist ranks, Samuel A. Talcott, and Samuel Jones. In Van Buren's long, masterly, and successful argument there was again an edge to the zeal with which he attacked the opinion of Kent, the Federalist chancellor, who asked the court of errors to overrule its earlier decisions, and the chancellor's own decision as well, and defeat the intention of the elder Medcef Eden.

Van Buren's professional career was most enviable. It lasted twenty-five years. It ended before he was forty-six, when he was in the early ripeness of his powers, but not until a larger and more shining career seemed surely opened before him. He left the bar with a competence fairly earned, which his prudence and skill made grow into an ample fortune, without even malicious suggestion in the scurrility of politics that he had profited out of public offices. In money matters he was more thrifty and cautious than most Americans in public places. His enemies accused him of meanness and parsimony, but apparently without other reason than that he did not practice the careless and useless profusion and luxury which many of his countrymen in political life have thought necessary to indulge even when their own tastes were far simpler. In the course of professional employment he acquired an important estate near Oswego, whose value rapidly enhanced with the rapid growth of western New York and the development of the lake commerce from that port.

The chief interest now found in Van Buren's professional career lies in its relation to his political life. He was the only lawyer of conspicuous and practical and really great professional success who has reached the White House. In the long preparation for the bar, in the many hours of leisure at Kinderhook and Hudson and even Albany permitted by the methods of practice in vogue before there were railways or telegraphs, and when travel was costly and slow and postage a shilling or more, he gained the liberal education more difficult of access to the busier young attorney and counsel of these crowded days. Great lawyers were then fond of illustrations from polite literature; they loved to set off their speeches with quotations from the classics, and to give their style finish and ornament not practicable to the precise, prompt methods which their successors learn in the driving routine of modern American cities. Van Buren did not, however, become a great orator at the bar. His admirer, Butler, upon returning to partnership with him in 1820, wrote indeed to an intimate friend, Jesse Hoyt (destined afterwards to bring grief and scandal upon both the partners), that if he were Van Buren he "would let politics alone," and become, as Van Buren might, the "Erskine of the State." But though his success, had he continued in the profession, would doubtless have been of the very first order, his oratory would never have