lawyer enough to answer that.” In truth, his very doubts, like the doubts of Lord Eldon, and the queries of Plowden, let you at once into the vast reach of his inquiries and attainments. There is not, and there cannot be, a higher tribute to his memory than this, that, while his scrutiny was severely close, he was most cordially beloved by all his pupils. He lived with them upon terms of the most familiar intimacy; and he has sometimes with a delightful modesty and elegance said to me, “I am but the eldest Boy upon the form.” Owing to ill health, he could not be said to have attained either grace of person or ease of action. His voice was feeble; his utterance, though clear, was labored, and his manner, though appropriate, was not inviting. …He felt another disadvantage from the infirmity of a slight deafness, with which he had been long afflicted. His professional success seems truly marvelous. It is as proud an example of genius subduing to its own purposes every obstacle opposed to its career, and working out its own lofty destiny, as could well be presented to the notice of any Ingenuous youth[1]
Professor Ashmun’s mental powers had always been far in advance of his physical. His health seems never to have been good; as a youth he shut himself up among his books; and he had scarcely reached man’s estate before he was seized by that scourge of New England, consumption. With care and change of climate he might have prolonged his life, or even recovered; but he deliberately burned himself out in his beloved teaching. Owing to Story’s absences, he really did much more than half the work of the school; and during the year that the judge was writing his Bailments, he took virtually entire charge. As Sumner records in his epitaph, “Through the slow progress of the disease which consumed his life,
- ↑ Funeral Discourse in the Harvard Chapel, American Jurist, x, 40.
