The Supreme Court of Georgia.

specify others, if he thinks other portions necessary. This gets rid of much chaff in every case, and saves expense to the parties. It is understood that this measure originated with the court. Judge Bleckley is the author of a very useful device to secure a fair statement of the case at the outset of the argument. A rule of court requires the Reporter of the court to prepare an abstract or statement of each case, either party having leave to suggest additions or corrections. Judge Bleckley's disclaimer of learning, "lay or legal," is of a piece with his reason for resignation in 1880. His point of view is the pinnacle which not many so-called learned men ever reach, — the knowledge of the extent of the domain of ignorance. He is one of the few men in Georgia who could hold his own in a discussion of German met aphysics. But this is one of many diver sions which he has resolutely denied himself in a stern devotion to the law, — a devotion which he so well described, because drawn from his own experience, in the beautiful trib ute to Justice Hall, and to which he refers, both in earnest and in jest, in his " Letter

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to Posterity," published elsewhere in this number. What form of self-denial is at once so bitter and heroic as that of the intellectual man who, with capacity and desire to " take all knowledge for his province," calls back his faculties from the universe of thought, study, and speculation which they seem cre ated to explore, and concentrates them on a single line of human activity, because, forsooth, the mind is "chained to a body of death," and the butcher's bill must be paid, and good work on the one task in hand requires the sacrifice? The high reward of such a sacrifice — the thought which reconciles the man of genius with the word of bar and bench — has never been so aptly expressed as by Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes, — " the subtle rapture of a postponed power; " " the intoxicating au thority which controls the future from within by shaping the thoughts and speech of a later time; " "such men are to be honored, not by regiments moving with high heads to martial music, but by a few others, lonely as themselves, walking apart in meditative silence, and dreaming in their turn the dream of spiritual reign."