"Columbia, hail! along thy favour'd shore, No grov'ling wretch with impious zeal shall dare Then cease distinction, difference denied, Soon shall the world receive the gen'rous fire, When female worth with purest beam shall shine, When mutual pleasures undisturb'd shall roll, BOSTON, MASS. 560. Note. The hon. THEOPHILUS PARSONS, Jate chief justice of Massachusetts, was a son of the rev. Moses Parsons of Byfield. He received the rudiments of bis education in his native place, under the celebrated Samuel Moody, esq. the preceptor of Dummer academy. He was graduated at Harvard university in 1769. He studied law at Falmouth, now Portland, under the late judge Pradbury, and, for a time, kept the grammar school in that town He first commenced the business of his profession in the same place, but soon removed to Newburyport. In 1806, he was appointed chief justice of the state, aud held that high and honourable office to the close of his life. He died in Boston, where he had lived for a number of years, in the autumn of 1815, at the age of 63. A very interesting sketch of his character was given by the hon. Isaac Parker, one of the associate justices of the supreme judicial court, in an address to the grand jury, delivered on the 23 of November, 1813. From this address the following paragraphs are here added. "I shall not be accused of fulsome panegyrick, in asserting that the subject of this address has for more than thirty years been acknowledged the great man of his time. The friends, who have accompanied him through life, and witnessed the progress of his mind, want no proof of this assertion; but to those, who have heard his fame, without knowing the materials of which it is composed, it may be useful to give such a display of his character as will prove, that the world is not always mistaken in awarding its honours. "From the companions of his early years I have learned, that he was comparatively great, before he arrived at manhood; that his infancy was marked by mental labour and study, rather than by puerile amusements; that his youth was a season of persevering acquisition, instead of pleasure; and thats PEN. I. VOL. III. when he became a man, he seemed to possess the wisdom and experience of those, who had been men long before him. And, indeed, those of us, who have seen him lay open his vast stores of knowledge in later life, unaided by recent acquirement, and relying more upon memory, than research, can account for his greatness only by supposing a patience of labour in youth, which almost exhausted the sources of information, aud left him to act rather than study, at a period when others are but beginning to acquire. "His familiar and critical knowledge of the Greek and Latin tongues, so well known to the literati of this country, and to some of the most eminent abroad, was the fruit of his early labours, preserved and perhaps ripened in maturer years, but gathered in the spring time of his life. His philosophical and mathematical knowledge were of the same early harvest, as were also his logical and metaphysical powers. "Had he died at the age of twenty-one, I am persuaded he would have been held up to youth, as an instance of astonishing and successful perseverance in the severest employments of the mind. "Heaven, which gave him this spirit of industry, endowed him also with a genius to give it effect. "There were united in him an imagination vivid, but not visionary, a most discriminating judgment, the attentiveness and precision of the mathematician, and a memory, which, however enlarged and strengthened by exercise, must have been originally powerful and capacious. "With these wonderful faculties, which had, from the first dawnings of reason, been employed on subjects most interesting to the human mind, he came to the study of that science, which claims a kindred with every other; the science of the law. "This was a field worthy of his labours and congenial with his understanding. How successfully be explored, cultivated, and adorned it, need not be related to his cotemporaries. "Never was fame more early or more just, than that of Parsons as a lawyer. At an age when most of the profession are but beginning to exhibit their talents and to take a fixed rank at the bar, he was confessedly, in point of profound legal knowledge, among the first of its professors. "His professional services were every where sought for. In his native county, and in the neighbouring state of New-Hampshire, scarcely a cause of importance was litigated in which he was not an advocate. His fame had spread from the country to the capitol, to which he was almost constantly called to take a share in trials of intricacy and interest. “At that early period of his life, his most formidable rival and most frequent competitor was the accomplished lawyer and scholar, the late judge Lowell, whose memory is still cherished with affection by the wise and virtuous of our state. Judge Lowell was considerably his senior, but entertained the highest respect for the general talents and juridical skill of his able competitor. It was the highest intellectual treat, to see these great men contending for victory in the judicial forum. Lowell, with all the ardour of the most impassionate eloquence, assaulting the hearts of his auditors, and seizing their understandings also, with the most cogent, as well as the most plausible arguments. Parsons, cool, steady, and deliberate, occupying every post, which was left uncovered, and throwing in his forces, wherever the zeal of his adversary had left an opening. Notwithstanding this almost continual forensick warfare, they were warm personal friends, and freely acknowledged each other's merits "The other eminent men of that day, with whom Parsons was brought to contend, did full justice to his great powers. 1 have myself heard the late governour Sullivan declare, he was the greatest lawyer living. "So rapid and yet so sure was the growth of his reputation, that immediately upon his commencing the practice of the law, his office was considered, by some of the first men our state has produced, to be the most perfect school for legal instruction. "That distinguished lawyer and statesman, Rufus King, having finished his education at our university, at an age when he was qualified to choose his own instructer, placed himself under the tuition of Parsons; and probably it was owing in some measure to the wise lessons of the master, as well as to the great talents of the scholar, that the latter acquired |