Vol. X.

No. 8.

BOSTON.

August, 1898.

STEPHEN PAYN NASH, LL.D. By. A. Oakey Hall.

NOT alone the bar of New York City, but the legal profession everywhere, lost from its ranks, by death in June last, a private soldier, who had won a right to be promoted to its very Lieutenant-General ship, and to wear in his coffin, as in his life, medals of common law or of equity law that were struck from the choicest dies. He was Stephen Payn Nash, who, in a busy and honorable life extending over seventy-seven years, shunned the allurements of public life and of worldly honors, in order to live and die as an unassuming lawyer; content with well earned professional fame and the affection ate regard of the proudest or the humblest, who in any wise made his acquaintance. It is so rare to find an ambitionless lawyer who is satisfied to walk only in paths that lead directly toward temples of law and equity, and to never diverge from them; content to always tread therein without attempting to win political honors or to weary of plucking by the path-sides the roses of nisi prius (thorny-stemmed al though these be), that when such a rarity is discovered^ it is meet to gladly chronicle his fame and to sculpture memorials of him on the bright columns that sustain the great Temple of Themis. He was of Connecticut ancestry, but on his father's death, which occurred while Ste phen was yet young, his mother removed to a home midway between Albany and Sara toga Springs, and eventually to the latter vil lage. Young Nash was tutored in the re

nowned Albany Academy, when the famous Romeyn Beck was its principal, and sub sequently at a French college in Lower Canada. He took up the study of law at Saratoga in the office of Esek Cowen — author of that remarkable, yet modestly penned volume entitled " Cowen's Justice of the Peace," a veritable compendium of legal principles and procedures — and in his later life a justice of the Supreme Court of the State of New York, and whose fame as a jurist is kept green by his namesake son, who, as a leading member of the Bar In stitute, acted as pall bearer at the Nash obsequies recently celebrated in Trinity church. During the later years of the thirties and of the early forties when young Nash read law in Saratoga Springs, its village atmos phere was redolent of legal learning, because there resided Chancellor Walworth and Justice Willard of the Supreme Court, to whose chambers came lawyers from all over New York State to make motions and argu ments; thereby giving Saratoga students opportunity to hear memorable legal con tests. While, at the same time, the healing waters of the springs attracted thither great lawyers from every section of the Union whose presence and fame became incentives to the student. In such atmosphere it was that the great New York author, advocate and reporter, Nicholas Hill, pursued his own studies. Between Nash and Hill a profes sional intimacy was there instituted that al 325