PRELECTION. Lexington, Nov. 27th, 1838. Sir--We, the undersigned, having been appointed by the Law Class of Transylvania University, a committee to wait upon your honor, respectfully request a copy of your Introductory Lecture for publication, believing it to be a just and able eulogy on the life and public services of the late Hon. John Boyle. Respectfully, your ob't servants, WILLIAM T. BARBOUR, HON. GEORGE ROBERTSON, Committee. Lexington, Nov. 28th, 1838. Gentlemen-Thanking you and the Law Class for your kind sentiments, I commit to your discretion and disposal the Introductory Lecture, a copy of which you have requested for publication. Yours, respectfully, ERTSO G. ROBERTSON. Messrs. Barbour, Carradine, Robards, Singleton. ADDRESS. It is the sacred duty of every generation to preserve faithful memorials of the character and conduct of its distinguished men. The memory of the illustrious dead should never be lost in the oblivion of time. Biography is the soul of history. The maxims and motives and destinies of prominent men, as exemplified, from age to age, in the moral drama of our race, constitute the elements of historic philosophy, and impart to the annals of mankind their only practical utility. When, and only when, illustrated by the life of an eminent man, virtue or vice, knowledge or ignorance, thus personified, is seen and felt as the efficient lever of the moral world. The lives of conspicuous men help to characterise their day and country, and, like sign boards on the high-ways and the bye-ways through the wilderness of human affairs, tell the bewildered pilgrim where he is going, what way he should go, and the weal or the woe of his journey's end. enlightened liberty that the lives of the virtuous great who have lived and are buried in our own America, would exhibit the most attractive models of the virtues which made them and our country great, and which alone will ever ennoble and bless the nations and countries of the earth. from the Pilgrim Band of Plymoth Rock to The Anglo-American Heroes and Statesmen, that more illustrious group signalized in our memorable revolution, stand out in bold relief on the column of history; and the humbler, but not less noble pioneers and hunters of Kentucky, and the primitive founders of the great social fabric of this blooming valley of the West, have left behind them monuments more enduring than storied urns or animated busts. But the personal history of most of these nobles of their race is yet told only by the tongue of tradition. And the story of the deeds of many of them is, even now among ourselves, listened to as romance. Our own favored Commonwealth, though young in years, is venerable in deeds. Kentucky has been the theater of marvelous events and of distinguished talents. Here, with trembling hand, the gifted Burns points to the ruin and despair which lie in ambush on the broad and voluptuous turnpike on which his noble genius was driven to destruction-here sits the cold bust of the captive Though not more than 68 years have run Napoleon, scowling on the iron railway, where since the first track of civilization was made the steam-car of unrighteous ambition, explo-in her dark and bloody wilderness, yet she ding with a tremendous crash, shivered all his gigantic hopes and projects of power-and here, too, stands the god-like statue of our Washington, consecrating the straight and narrow pathway of virtue, which leads the honest man to everlasting happiness, and the pure patriot to immortal renown-and here, every where, we see exemplifications of the vanity of worldly riches, the wretchedness of selfish ambition, the usefulness of industry, and charity, and self-denial, and blissfullness of cultivated faculties, and of moderation in all our desires and enjoyments. The lessons, thus only to be usefully taught, are practical truths echoed from the tombs of buried generations in the mother tongue of all mankind. has already had her age of chivalry, her age of reason and religion, liberty and law. She has her battle-fields as memorable, and almost as eventful as those of Marathon or Waterloo and she has had heroes, orators, jurists and lawgivers who would have been conspicuous in any age or country. But neither biography nor general history has done justice to their memories. Most of that class of them, whose lives were peaceful and whose triumphs were merely civic, have been permitted to slumber under our feet without either recorded eulogy or biographic memorial. The memory of the Nicholases, the Breckinridges, the Browns, and the Murrays, the Allans and the Hugheses, the Talbotts and the Bledsoes, the Daviesses and the Hardins, the McKees and the Andersons, the Todds, the Trimbles and the Boyles, of whom, in their day, Kentucky was justly proud, should not longer remain thus unhonored and unsung. Influenced by a strong sense of personal and public obligation, we will now attempt to sketch a brief outline of one of these our depar Greece, and Rome, and France, and England, have honored their dead and contributed to the stock of useful knowledge among men by graphic memoirs of their conspicuous Philosophers, Heroes, Statesmen, and Bards. And Plutarch's parallel Biographies of Greeks and Romans, and Johnson's Lives of the British Poets-scholastic as the one, and garrulous asted great. the other must be admitted to be-are among the most valuable of the repositories of practical wisdom. But it is in our age of rectified reason and Among the honored names of Kentucky, John Boyle, once Chief Justice of the State, in deservedly conspicuous. Modest and unpreItending, his sterling merit alone elevated him from humble obscurity to high places of public trust which he filled without reproach, and to a still more enviable place in public confidence and esteem which but few men ever attained, and none ever more deserved. Though his whole career was peaceful and unaspiring, his life, "take it all in all," domestic and public, exhibits a beautiful model of an honest man, a just citizen, a patriotic statesman, and an enlightened jurist. The example of such a man is worthy of imitation by all men living or to come and the memorials of such a life must be interesting to all good men, and peculiarly profitable to the young who desire to be useful he married in 1797, about the commencement of his professional career. His wife's estate did not equal in value $1,000, and his own patrimony was himself alone, just as he was. With these humble means he bought an outlot in Lancaster, Garrard county, on which, in 1798, he built a small log house, with only two rooms, in which, not only himself, but three other gentlemen, who successively followed him as a national representative, and one of whom also succeeded him in the Chief-Justiceship of Kentucky, began the sober business of conjugal life. There he lived happily and practiced law successfully until 1802, when, and honored. being unanimously called to the House of John Boyle's genealogy cannot be traced Representatives of the United States, he settled through a long line of ancestry. He inherited on a farm of 125 acres, near Lancaster, where no ancestral honors, nor fortune, nor memorial. he continued to reside until 1811, when he Like most of the first race of illustrious Ken- moved to a tract of land in the same county, a tuckians, descended from a sound but humble part of which had been recently given to him stock, he was the carver of his own fortune, by his father, and where he lived, in cabins, and the ennobler of his own name. His only until 1814, when he bought and removed to patrimony was a vigorous constitution, a sound the tract in Mercer on which his wife had head, a pure heart, and a simple, but virtuous been reared, and where he continued to reside education. He was born October 28th, 1774, in Virginia, at a place called "Castle Woods," on Clinch River, in the (then) county of Bottetourt, now Russell or Tazewell; and in the year 1779 was brought to Whitley's Station in Kentucky, by his father, who immigrated in that year to try his fortune in the wild woods of the west and who, like the mass of early adventurers, reared in the old school of provincial simplicity and backwoods equality, was a plain, blunt man of independent spirit. The father first "settled" in Madison county, but afterwards moved to the county of Garrard, where he lived on a small estate until his death. Of the early history of the son, we have heard nothing signal or peculiar. In his days of pupilage, a collegiate education was not at tainable in Kentucky. And those who, like him, were poor, were compelled to be content with such scholastic instruction as might be derived from private tutors and voluntary country schools. until his death. Here let us pause a moment, and, from the eminence to which the people spontaneously clevated the isolated and unambitious Boyle, let us look back on the humble pathway which led him so soon to the enviable place he occupied in the affections of those who knew him first, and best, and not one of whom ever faltered in his confidence and esteem. Without the adventitious influence of wealth, or family, or accident, and without any of the artifices of vulgar ambition or selfish pretension, he was, as soon as known, honored with the universal homage of that kind of cordial respect which nothing but intrinsic and unobtrusive merit can ever command, and which alone can be either gratifying or honorable to a man of good taste and elevated mind. It was his general intelligence, his undoubted probity, his child-like candor, his scrupulous honor and undeviating rectitude, which alone extorted-what neither money, nor office, nor flattery, nor duplicity, can ever secure-the Emulous of such usefulness and fame as can sincere esteem of all who knew him. And so be secured only by moral and intellectual ex- conspicuous and attractive was his unostentacellence, he eagerly availed himself of all the tious worth, that, though he rather shunned means within his reach for improving his mind than courted official discinction, it sought him and cultivating proper principles and habits. and called him from his native obscurity and After acquiring an elementary English educa- the cherished privacy of domestic enjoyment. tion, he learned the rudiments of the Greek His education was unsophisticated and pracand Latin languages and of the most useful of tical. He learned things instead of names, the sciences, in Madison county, under the tu- principles of moral truth and inductive philos telage of the Rev. Samuel Finley, a Presbyte-phy instead of theoretic systems and scholasrian clergyman of exemplary piety and patritic dogmatisms. His country education prearchal simplicity. With this humble prepa- served and fortified all his useful faculties, ration, having chosen the Law for his profes- physical and moral-his taste was never persional pursuit, he read Blackstone's Commen-verted by false fashion-his purity was never taries and a few other elementary and practical contaminated by the examples or seduced by books under the direction of Thomas T. Davis, the temptations of demoralizing associations. then a member of Congress, whom he succee- Blessed with a robust constitution, his habituded, and who resided in the county of Mercer, al industry and "temperance in all things" in the neighborhood of Jeremiah Tilford, a plain, pious and frugal farmer, with whom the pupil boarded, and one of whose daughters, (Elizabeth,) a beautiful and excellent woman, preserved his organic soundness and promoted the health and vigor of his body and his mind. What he knew to be right he always practised -and that which he felt to be wrong he inva riably avoided. In his pursuit after kowledge | bered by patrimonial trash, started the journey his sole objects were truth and utility. In his of life alone and on foot-his own mind his social intercourse he was chaste, modest and only guide, his own conduct his only hope; kind--and all his condnet, public and private, and though there was nothing strikingly imwas characterised by scrupulous fidelity, im- posing in the character of his mind or in his partial justice, and an enlightened and liberal manners, but few men on earth ever reached spirit of philanthropy and beneficence. Self-his earthly goal of honor by a straighter or poised he resolutely determined that his des- smoother path. During his short professional tiny should depend on his own conduct. Ob-career, he was eminently just and faithful to servant, studious, and discriminating, what- his clients; and though his elocution was ever he acquired from books, or from men, he neither copious nor graceful, he was extensively made his own by appropriate cogitation or patronized. For this success he was indebted manipulation. And thus, as far as he went in altogether to his intelligence, integrity and the career of knowledge, he reached, as if per fidelity. But with much business-his fees saltem, the end of all learning-practical truth being low, and not well collected-he made and utility. but little money. He acquired, however, that Panoplied in such principles and habitudes, which was far more valuable-the reputation his merit could not be concealed. In a just of an enlightened and "an honest lawyer," and discerning community, such a man is as Translated from the forensic to the political sure of honorable fame as substance is of shad-theater, he declined altogether the practice of ow in the sun-light of day. And have we not the law. In the national legislature he acted here a striking illustration of the importance with the Jeffersonian and then dominant party. of right education and self-dependence? Prop- And though not a speaking member, he was er education is that kind of instruction and vigilant, active and useful, and his disinterdiscipline, moral, mental and physical, which ested patriotism, amiable modesty, unclouded will teach the boy what he should do and intelligence and habitual candor, soon exalted what he should shun, when he becomes a man, him to an enviable reputation. If there be any and prepare him to do well whatever an intel-valid objection to his political course, it is this ligent and upright man should do in all the only-that, agreeing, as he generally did, with relations of social and civil life; and any sys- a party armed with power and flushed with a tem of education which accomplishes either recent and great victory in the downfall of an more or less than this, is so far imperfect, or opposing and previously governing party, he preposterous and pernicious. But, after all, the was more of a partizan than perfect justice or best schoolmasters are a mediocrity of fortune, abstract truth would altogether have approved. and a country society, virtuous but not puritan- But this aberration, which could not have been ical, religious but not fanatical, indpendent but easily avoided, was, in his case, as venial and not rich, frugal but not penurious, free but not slight as it ever was in the case of any other licentious-a society which exemplifies the man who ever lived. He did not "give up to harmony and value of industry and morality, party what was meant for mankind"-nor was republican simplicity and practical equality. he intolerant, proscriptive or factious, or ever Reared in such a school, and practically in- influenced by any selfish or sinister motive. structed in the elements of useful knowledge, And if, when he co-operated with his political a man of good capacity, who enters on the friends, he ever erred, the ardor of his patriotbusiness of life with no other fortune than his ism and the unsuspecting confidence of his own faculties, and no other hope than his own own honest mind induced him to believe, at honest efforts, can scarcely fail to become both the time, that his party was right. But he useful and great. But he who embarks desti-was never charged with insincerity or obliquity tute of such tutilage or freighted with heredi- of motive. And his character was always tary honor or wealth, is in imminent danger of blameless in the view even of those who did being wrecked in his voyage. Fortune and illustrious lineage are, but too often, curses rather than blessings. The industry and selfdenial, which are indispensable to true moral and intellectual greatness, have been but rarely practised without the lash of poverty or the incentive of total self-independence. And the son who cannot make fortune and fame for him- Having no taste for political life, and finding self, will not be apt to increase or even to keep moreover, that the duties of a representative in inherited wealth and reputation, however boun- Congress were incompatible with his domestic teously they may have been showered on his obligations, he had soon resolved to retire from early manhood. Parents should, therefore, be the theater of public affairs and devote himself solicitous to educate their children in such a to his family and his legal profession. But manner as to make them healthful in body such a man as John Boyle cannot always disand mind, and to enable them to be useful and honorable, without extraneous wealth, which is but too apt to paralyze or ensnare the victims of perverted bounty, and indiscriminating af. fection. John Boyle, rightly reared and unincum not concur with him in opinion. If as much could be as truly said of more modern partizans, our country would be blessed with more honor and tranquility than can be admitted to prevail in this our day of comparative intolerance and intellectual prostitution. pose of himself according to his own personal wishes. His constituents re-elected him twice without competition. And we have heard that Mr. Jefferson, who justly appreciated his worth, offered him more than one federal appointment, which either his diffidence or his romantic at tachment to his family aud home induced him Judge should never give an opinion until he to decline. But in March, 1809, Mr. Madison, had explored all the consequences, direct and among his first official acts as President, ap- collateral, and had a well considered opinion pointed him, without his solicitation, the first to give. His associates on the bench, and the Governor of Illinois. This being, as it cer- members of his bar always felt for him perfect tainly was, prospectively one of the most im- respect, and manifested towards him a becomportant and lucrative of all federal appoint- ing deference. His reported opinions are ments, and his domestic duties having become equal, in most, if not in all respects, with still more and more importunate, he was in- those of any other Judge, ancient or modern, clined to accept the provincial Governorship- and will associate his name, in after times, and did accept it provisionally. But, on his re- with those of the Hales and the Eldons of turn to his family, he was invited to elect be- England, and the Kents and Marshalls of tween the territorial office and that of a Circuit America. Judge, and also of an Appellate Judge of In politics, also, he was enlightened and Kentucky, both of which latter appointments orthodox. In his more matured and tranquil had been tendered him in anticipation of his season of life, he repudiated some of the theoretirement from Congress. And though the ries of his earlier and more impassioned days salary of Appellate Judge was then only and in American politics, he was, long be$1000, and the duties of the office were pecu- fore his death, neither a centralist, nor a conliarly onerous, yet, his local and personal at- federationist-a democrat nor an aristocrat-tatchments and associations prevailing over but was an honest and liberel republican, nahis ambition and pecuniary interest, he took tional as far as the common interests of the his seat on the Appellate bench of his own people of the United States were concerned, State on the 4th of April, 1809-and Ninian and local, so far as the municipal concerns of Edwards, the then Chief Justice of Kentucky, solicited and obtained the abdicated proconsulship of Illinois. each State were separately and exclusively involved. He was a friend to that kind of liberty and equality which are regulated by intelligence and controlled and preserved by lawand was a foe to demagoguery, ignorance, licentiousness, and jacobinism. The election thus made by Boyle affords ar impressive illustration of the cast of his mind and his affections. Illinois was obviously the better theater for an ambitious or avaricious man. But it was as a jurist that he was most disBut he was neither ambitious nor avaricious. tinguished. And as an illustration of his inHis own domestic happiness and social sympa- fluence, as well as rare modesty and public thies prevailed over every other considsration. spirit on the bench, we may notice the signal And at last, perhaps his decision was as pru- fact that, in his whole judicial career, during dent, as it was patriotic. His judicial career, a portion of which, about 500 causes were for which he was peculiarly fitted, forms an annually decided, he never, but once, disseninteresting epoch in the jurisprudence of the ted from the opinion of the court, and then he west-and he could not have left to his chil-magnanimously abstained from intimating dren a better legacy than the fame he acquired any reason against the judgment of the maas Chief Justice of his own beloved Common- jority, lest he might impair the authority of wealth-to which high and responsible office the decision which, until changed by the court, he was promoted on the 3d of April, 1810, should, as he thought, be deemed the law of and which he continued to hold until the 8th the land. of November, 1896. The only objection to him as a Judge, which When first called to the bench of justice his we ever heard suggested, was that, in the opinlegal learning could not have been either ex-ion of some jurists, he adhered rather more tensive, ready, or very exact. But he pos- rigdly to the ancient precedents and technicalsessed all the elements of a first rate judge, as ities of the common law than was perfectly time and trial demonstrated. He soon became consistent with its progressive improvements a distinguished jurist. His legal knowledge, and its inadaptableness, in some respects, to though never remarkably copious, was clear the genius of American institutions. But this and scientific. Many men had read more books, criticism, though it may, in some slight degree, but none understood better what they read. have been just, should not detract much from His law library contained only the most com- his superior merit as an Appellate Judge. prehensive and approved volumes-and those So far as he misapplied any doctrine of the he studied carefully, could use readily, and un- British common law to cases in this country derstood thoroughly. With the elements of the to which the reason for it in England does common law and the philosophy of pleading, not apply here, he certainly erred. But such he appeared to be perfectly acquainted. a misapplication was rarely, if ever, made by His miscellaneous reading was extensive-him And for not extending or improving the and in mental and moral philosophy and po-American common law, he was not justly oblite litrature, his attainments were eminent. noxious to censure. It is safer and more pruHis colloquial style was plain and unpedantic, dent to err sometimes in the recognition of an but fluent chaste and perspicuous; and his style of writing was pure, graceful and luminous. Though his perceptions were clear and quick, yet he was habitually cautious in forming his judicial opinions. It was his maxim that a established doctrine of the law, than to make innovation by deciding upon principle against the authority of judicial precedents. And though one of the most valuable qualities of the common law is its peculiar malliableness, |