But the life of a strong man, lived no matter where, and perhaps all the more if it have been isolated from the noisier events which make so large a part of history, contains the best material of biography.  Judge Parsons was fortunate in a son capable of doing that well, which, even if ill done, would have been interesting.  A practised writer, the author of two volumes of eloquent and thoughtful essays, Professor Parsons has known how to select and arrange his matter with a due feeling of effect and perspective.  When he fails to do this, it is because here and there the essayist has got the better of the biographer.  We are not concerned here, for example, to know Mr. Parsons’s opinions about Slavery, and we are sure that the sharp insight and decisive judgment of his father would never have allowed him to be frightened by the now somewhat weather-beaten scarecrow of danger to the Union.

In the earlier part of the Memoir we get some glimpses of pre-Revolutionary life in New England, which we hope yet to see illustrated more fully in its household aspects.[A] The father of Parsons was precisely one of those country-clergymen who were “passing rich on forty pounds a year.”  On a salary of two hundred and eighty dollars, he brought up a family of seven children, three of whom he sent to college, and kept a hospitable house.

[Footnote A:  Mr. Elliott, in his New England History, has wisely gathered many of those unconsidered trifles which are so important in forming a just notion of the character of a population.  We cannot but wish that our town-historians, instead of giving so much space to idle and often untrustworthy genealogies, and to descriptions of the “elegant mansions” of Messrs. This and That, would do us the real service of rescuing from inevitable oblivion the fleeting phases of household scenery that help us to that biography of a people so much more interesting than their annals.  We would much rather know whether a man wore homespun, a hundred years ago, than whether he was a descendant of Rameses I.]

Of Parsons’s college experiences we get less than we could desire; but as he advances in life, we find his mind exercised by the great political and social problem whose solution was to be the experiment of Democracy at housekeeping for herself,—­we see him influencing State and even National politics, but always as a man who preferred attaining the end to being known as the means,—­and finally, as Chief Justice, reforming the loose habits of the bar, intolerant of gabble, and leaving the permanent impress of his energetic mind and impatient logic on the Common Law of the country.