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man in the prime of life, active in his profession,- charged with large interests and trusts as a leader at the bar and with the wider responsibilities which are put upon the wise and trusted citizen who does not seek, but is sought for, posts in civic and social life. His special distinction was in his career as a lawyer. In this he rose to the heights. He had eminently a judicial mind and was a thorough student and master of the law. I had the honor to offer him a place on the bench. Had he accepted it, it is in my mind beyond question that he would have been promoted to the supreme judicial court and would later have served and died as its chief. His range of practice was large. He was counsel for some of our largest corporate interests at a time, which I trust may return, when nobody questioned the respectability of employment by a corporation. He was recognized as an especially wise and safe adviser in chambers. He was also one of the most busily engaged advocates before juries and the judges. In this arena his example was a liberal education to other practitioners, to not only the younger men but men of his own age and length of professional life. To him and some contemporaries like him are due the better than the old manners of the bar, the more courteous conduct of cases and the transition from the brutal treatment of witnesses and the repulsive bickering between opposing counsel, which at one time were regarded as the mark of the smart and popular lawyer.

His manner was always that of a gentleman. He was straightforward, earnest, and honest. His preparation was complete both in the law and in the facts. There was no subterfuge or trick or sharp practice. His adversary's rights were safe in his hands, but his adversary's defence must be well guarded and strong in order to escape his thoroughness and fidelity to his cause. No client ever had more loyal or painstaking counsel. As a natural result, he ranked high in the small group of not only the leading but the best lawyers in every sense of the word.

He was for years president of the Bar Association. His name was a synonym for the ideals of his profession. Alas, that in that profession, so vital an element in the complicated relations of life, its brightest ornaments are so soon forgotten, and that, if you or I were to name even at a bar meeting any one of the leaders of the bar fifty years ago, whose fame was

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then on everybody's lips, whose arguments attracted great crowds, and the scintillations of whose wit were quoted like household words, it would be to most of our hearers as unknown and as unmeaning as if it were a name on a selectman's door plate in the North End of Boston a century ago!

And I recall the picture of Solomon Lincoln as we saw him in his seventh decade, sitting in this room, one of our fellow members. And yet I do not recall him more freshly than before, for memory is an annihilator of time as the electric current is of space. Under its magic the mind's eye sees all the past in one photograph with the present, still living and fresh and now and here. So the figure before me is still one and the same, the youthful classmate, the mature and active lawyer, the veteran retiring from the battle front to these cloisters of historic quiet and occupation-seeking leisure. In these latter days bodily infirmities had sapped his physical strength, though leaving unimpaired the attractive face, the genial manner, the conversational cordiality and interest. In these latter years, too, he had let go the former absorbing hold of professional duties. Partly in search of health, largely in pursuit of more varied and cosmopolitan knowledge of men and the world, he had travelled extensively through Europe, in Egypt (in which he specially delighted), and through our own West and Pacific coast.

Even in his most active professional days his life was not narrow, and he did not fail to render the service due from the good citizen. He never gave himself to a political career in the way of holding political office; and yet few men were more vitally interested in the political questions and exactions of the day. He had very decided convictions in this respect. He was not a hanger on the fence. He was an unusually devoted and loyal party man, a stanch Republican, and argued his party's case strenuously and sometimes with intense

earnestness.

He served on the staff of Governor Talbot, to whom he was also a wise and influential counsellor. It is not for me to give the detailed statistics of the places he filled, or indeed of his general career; but I cannot refrain, in sight of these shelves rich with historic treasures, from referring to his long service as one of the trustees of the Boston Public Library. He was president of the Unitarian Club, thereby expressing his sym

pathy with the liberal religious faith in which he was born and reared, and with its steadily liberalizing and more and more free, untrammelled thought. He was for many terms president of the Board of Overseers of Harvard College, in which, after his graduation therefrom, he had been an instructor.

In the social life of Boston he was a charm and a contributor. Many a circle recalls his rare combination of sound sense, large culture, and happy humor. At our Jacobite Club, a club of some of his classmates named for its founder, our former member here, John Codman Ropes, clarum nomen, - he was delightful in his reminiscences of college life. He reinvested them with the old phrases and tones, notably those of dear old Dr. Walker, president of the college in our time. And not only his reminiscences, but his comments on current men and things, and his part in the lively discussions which of course always arose on current men and things, were marked by that singular directness and good sense and wholesome view which were characteristic of him.

He was not a brilliant man in the pyrotechnic sense or perhaps in a less resplendent sense, but he was all aglow with the steady and unflickering flame of a mind that always blazed clear. He was not an eloquent advocate in the sense of the thundering orator or scintillating rhetorician, but his speech was convincing and went straight to the heart of the issue. He never put himself in the lime-light of a popular figure, but he was an unfailing influence for good and wholesome things, and the world was better for his part in it. He was singularly free from anything smacking of sensationalism or claptrap. Some good men offend you by the apparent consciousness on their own part of their virtues and of the favor they bestow upon you in giving you an opportunity to observe them. There was nothing of this sort in Lincoln. One of the quaint rural philosophers of my boyhood in Maine - an inglorious but not mute Shakespeare rather than Milton-used to say of any person whom he regarded as a man of worth, "He was born right." Lincoln in his commendable career and example was simply giving unconscious expression to the natural qualities of his mind and heart.

His home, his domestic life, that great living-room of his, with its wealth of books, its rare pictures on the wall, and its notable collection of photographs gathered during native and

foreign travel and illustrative of European, Egyptian, oriental, and insular scenes, and reproducing distant clime, landscape, costume, and building, — all these and that hospitable table, around which it has been the delight of so many to sit in converse and comradeship, attest the memory of a private life radiant, liberal, refined, without a stain, the outcome of a pure heart and clean hands.

A native of Hingham, he inherited the flavor of that ancient town and community, and was a Puritan with the Puritan's virtues and none of the Puritan's narrowness. His ancestors of his own famous name of Lincoln were among its very first settlers. His father was its leading citizen, historian of the town, and the son came naturally by historical tastes which attracted him to this Society. The father delivered the oration at the celebration of the two hundredth anniversary of the incorporation of the town; the son at that of the celebration of the two hundred and fiftieth.

It was an all-round life, the full corn in the ear. It certainly was a fortunate and blessed life in its birth, its education, its work, its fruition. Some of you were present in the room to which I have referred, when the last tributes were paid to him. There he lay at rest, embowered in flowers, silent but still with us. The funeral service, the best ordered perhaps because the simplest I ever attended, was in keeping with the man. A room full of friends gathered, not in a chilling temple but around him in his home, into the windows of which the sunlight streamed. A fitting prayer from the lips of his pastor, so impressive in figure and voice and octogenarian years, so fertile and versatile, a living statue, in the flesh, of the Massachusetts Minute-man of our time, Edward Everett Hale; and then a few verses, recited by the younger associate minister, from the "Eternal Goodness" of Whittier, the one poet who has best and most enduringly embodied the spiritual and household heart of New England. Simplicity and sincerity were the best eulogy of the man, because they were the man himself.

I join, Mr. President, gratefully in the tribute which you and all here pay to the memory of this our beloved fellow member.

BARRETT WENDELL followed with a tribute to Professor Masson:

On the 15th of August, 1871, a stated meeting of this Society was held, postponed from the 10th in order to celebrate the one hundredth anniversary of the birthday of Sir Walter Scott, formerly an Honorary Member. At this meeting" David Masson, A.M., of Edinburgh, author of the new Life of Milton, was elected a Corresponding Member." Few chances could have been happier than that which thus associates Masson, in our records, at once with the greatest master of Scottish letters and with his own most surely enduring work.

At that time he was nearly fifty years old. Born at AberIdeen, on the 2d of December, 1822, and educated first at Marischal College there, and later at Edinburgh, under Dr. Chalmers, he had already had a wide and varied career, as editor of the "Free Kirk Banner" at Aberdeen, as a literary associate of the Chamberses in Edinburgh, as a general man of letters in London, where his sympathy with liberty had made him for a while Secretary of the "Friends of Italy," as the successor of Arthur Hugh Clough in the chair of English literature. at University College, London, and as the first editor of " Macmillan's Magazine," an excellent periodical which came to its end in the very year when he died. For six years before his election to this Society he had been the successor of Sir William Edmonstoune Aytoun in the chair of Rhetoric and English Literature at the University of Edinburgh.

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Yet the new Life of Milton," in recognition of which he was elected here, had by no means reached completion. The first volume had appeared in 1859; the second had only just come out in 1871. The work was not fully finished until 1880. Meanwhile, in March, 1875, when he is recorded not as A.M. but as LL.D., his name had been transferred from our Corresponding to our Honorary list. Since the death of Froude, in October, 1894, he stood at the head of this list.

Few if any of the present members of the Society have personally known him. To us he was an eminent man of letters. He was the author of many works of which we had no very clear impression,- among them essays on a wide variety of subjects, and authoritative books on Chatterton and on Drummond of Hawthornden; and what associated him somewhat more closely with New England - he was the editor of the standard edition of the works of Thomas De Quincey, whose writings, if I mistake not, had first been collected by our

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