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As in all incipient enterprises, the first need was the sinews of war-money, and at the second meeting, on the twelfth of July, 1802, it was resolved that the secretary be directed to collect from the members of the company their second payment of ten dollars, and that he be empowered to import from England, on the best terms he can, a library of such law books as shall be approved of by the directors. the next meeting, eighth of April, 1803, it was resolved that Messrs. Hopkinson and Wallace be a committee to prepare by-laws for the consideration of the directors, and it is particularly recommended to them to turn their attention to the best mode of regulation of payment of assessments by the members and the transfer of shares of the stock of the company. At the next meeting the by-laws were presented and adopted, and one Fox (first name not given) was appointed librarian at a salary of thirty dollars per year, payable ten dollars on the first day of each term. They had no June term then. The directors seem to have ordered a bookcase, though the contract does not appear. But on the fifth of December, 1803, Messrs. McKean and Wallace, a committee appointed to examine the accounts of Henry Connelly, report that Mr. Connelly had originally contracted to build the bookcase for the sum of $230, but from the accounts of moneys paid by him it appears that it actually cost him $266.20 exclusive of his own work. Thereupon, resolved that the treasurer be directed to pay to the said Connelly the aforesaid sum of $266.20, provided he will receive the same in full satisfaction of his account. At a subsequent meeting on the eighth of December, 1806, on motion it was ordered that the books be removed to the room adjoining the room now occupied by the Supreme Court and that Mr. Levy and Mr. Hopkinson be a committee to have it done, and they be authorized to sell the bookcase at private or public sale. Where the books were kept in the interim does not appear, nor is the regular place of meeting stated in the minutes, though not infrequently it is noted as held at the office of Edward Tilghman. As he was neither the senior nor the

junior among the directors, the use of his office throws very little light on the custody of the books, though it probably indicates an active interest on Mr. Tilghman's part in the affairs of the company. At a meeting on September 2, 1805, it was resolved that Mr. Rawle be a committee to make a catalogue of the books belonging to the company, and to have the same printed, together with the charter and subsisting by-laws. And on the second of December of the same year Mr. Rawle laid before the directors the printed catalogue, "which was well approved of by them." The pious care of a descendant to whom the association is indebted for many years of service as treasurer, has preserved a copy which is now in the library. It is a small duodecimo, of which the catalogue occupies eleven pages and the charter and by-laws the rest. Yet it represents 391 volumes of the most important books of its day. It was richest, of course, in the standard reports and treatises of authority tested by time, and was brought up to date with very notable energy; a representative collection of reports both at law and in equity from the year books down to Bosanquet and Puller, then in course of publication; the abridgments, institutes and books of entries, Bacon, Brooke, Coke, Comyns, Fitzherbert, Rolle and Viner; a goodly collection of text-books, among which, besides Blackstone, some of us may still recognize the friends (or foes) of our youth, Abbott on Shipping (edition of 1802), Bailey on Bills, Chitty on Bills (edition of 1799), Cruise on Uses, Doctor and Student, Fearne on Contingent Remainders, Fonblanque's Equity, Gilbert on Rent and on Tenures, Hale's History of the Common Law and Pleas of the Crown, Jones on Bailment, Kyd on Awards and on Corporations, Park on Insurance, Peake's Law of Evidence, Powell on Mortgages, Reeves' History of the Common Law, Roper on Legacies, Saunders on Uses and Trusts, Sheppard's Touchstone, Swinburne on Wills, and a numerous collection of books of practice, of which the most familiar are Buller's Nisi Prius, Crompton's Practice in the King's Bench, Harrison's Practice in Chancery, and Trials Per

Pais. These were the books with which our predecessors of a century ago were familiar and which in the main they were expected to master, as already quoted from Chancellor Kent. They make but a small show in comparison with many private libraries of to-day, but it was a notable collection, the first and largest of its kind in America, and kept the lead in that respect for many years. Indeed, it was not surpassed as a law library until very recently and now only by a few. When librarian, I was able to report that it contained substantially all the English and American Reports both in law and in equity, and was second to no library of its kind in America, except that of the Harvard Law School, which Professor Dicey said at a later day was the most perfect collection of the legal records of the English people to be found in any part of the English-speaking world.

The compilation of the catalogue was no afternoon's work, yet it was imposed upon Mr. Rawle, and apparently accepted by him without hesitation. Let me pause a moment to consider the conditions that this indicates. Mr. Rawle was then forty-six years of age, in very active practice not second to any unless to the three leaders already mentioned. Imagine the air of amused amazement, or shall I say amazed amusement, with which our own yet youthful chancellor, in spite of his devotion to the interests of the library, would receive the suggestion now that he should be a committee of one for such a purpose. Those were the days of elegant leisure even in the practice of the law. Let me digress a moment longer to read an extract from a very great advocate who was trained in that school but lived long enough to look somewhat contemptuously on modern haste and modern manners. In that book, which his own peculiarities and unconcealed egotism help to make so entertaining, Mr. David Paul Brown says: "We had not then reached the fast age or the awkward or careless or indifferent age. No man then sat with his heels higher than his head or planted his feet upon a chair or occupied two chairs at once, or threw his leg across its back, or supported himself by clinging on the rail, or got up before he

was ready, or sat down before he had finished, or interrupted his adversary, or manifested any restlessness or discomposure. If they had been translated from the court room to the most refined drawing room their manners and deportment would have required no improvement." (1 Forum, 558.) And yet that same elaborately courteous gentleman had encouraged himself in the peripatetic habit of thought and always walked up and down the room just outside the bar while other counsel was speaking, with sublime unconsciousness that in this fast age when we concentrate our attention on business, this caged-animal movement backwards and forwards distracts the attention of jury and judge and disturbs the decorum of the court of which he was so earnest an advocate. "For my own part," he says, "although far from presenting myself as an example to be followed, I would not give a walk of twenty feet back and forth in the way of preparation to reply to the argument of an antagonist, for the most elaborate notes that could be taken. This no doubt is to be attributed to a long-continued habit originating during schoolboy days."

Returning to the minute book, at the meeting on March 3, 1806, it was propounded as a difficulty to the directors that "by the charter the directors for the coming year are to be chosen on the Monday preceding the first day of the first term of the Supreme Court in each year; that this day being the first day of the first term of the present year, the directors ought to have been chosen last Monday. But that by a new judiciary law which was then in force the first day of the March Term was fixed for the 3rd Monday in March which would have required the election on Monday next, the 10th instant, and that it is by the supplement to the judiciary act, which supplement was passed only on Saturday last, that the term was altered to commence on this day." As an illustration of the strict notions of corporate life then entertained, it appears that even as late as 1821 the Law Academy had contemplated branching out into a Society for the Promotion of Legal Knowledge and Forensic Eloquence, which was incor

porated in 1821, the charter appointing the second Monday of May for the first annual meeting. When the charter day arrived the janitor had failed to unlock the meeting room, and the young lawyers incautiously adjourned without an election. Chief Justice Tilghman, president-elect of the society, was of opinion that failure to elect terminated the society's corporate existence. The difficulty which was presented to the directors of the Law Library Company as above stated was truly a legal conundrum which might pose some of us even in this day when we think we have learned something about corporate law. But the older heads of the Law Library were fertile in resource, and they got over the difficulty, like a modern law reformer, by shutting their eyes and ignoring it. They "Resolved that the members be convened on Monday next, the 10th instant, to elect directors for the present year." And on that Monday it is gravely entered that "At an election March 10th, 1806, no opposition was made to the election of the following directors:"

In 1806 John B. Wallace ceased to be secretary, and the minute book has a gap of several blank pages till 1809. Whether no meetings were held or the minutes were not written up there are no means now of ascertaining. By the next minute it appears that there had been a falling off in the interest and attendance; a new set of directors came in. Rawle, McKean, Hopkinson, Levy, Tilghman and Moylan dropped out. All of them, except Hopkinson, were advanced in years and the probability is they desired to turn over the work to younger men. J. B. Wallace, who had borne the brunt so long, stayed in, and of new ones that came in were Joseph Reed, Jr., James Milnor, John Hallowell, the elder Meredith, and William S. Biddle. At the first meeting John Stevens was appointed librarian, to be paid at the rate of fifty dollars per annum. The librarian was ordered to arrange the books according to sizes and numbers, to clean the windows of the cases, to repair the broken glass and locks and put the room in thorough order prior to examination of the library. And it was further resolved that hand bills be printed containing