over-nice moralists, and malicious wits, it can boast of one signal
advantage over all other business callings,--that eminence in it is
always a test of ability and acquirement. While in every other
profession quackery and pretension may gain for men wealth and honor,
forensic renown can be won only by rare natural powers aided by profound
learning and varied experience in trying causes. The trickster and the
charlatan, who in medicine and even in the pulpit find it easy to dupe
their fellow-men, find at the bar that all attempts to make shallowness
pass for depth, impudence for wit, and fatal for wisdom, are instantly
baffled. Not only is an acute, sagacious, and austere bench a perilous
foe to the trickery of the ignorant or half-prepared advocate, but the
veteran practitioners around him are quick to detect every sign of
mental weakness, disingenuous artifice, or disposition to substitute
sham for reality. Forensic life is, to a large extent, life in the broad
glare of day, under the scrutiny of keen-eyed observers and merciless
critics. In every cause there are two attorneys engaged, of whom one is
a sentinel upon the other; and a blunder, a slip, an exaggeration, or a
misrepresentation, never escapes without instant exposure. The popular
reputation of a lawyer, it has been well said, is but the winnowed and
sifted judgment which reaches the world through the bar, and is
therefore made up after severe ordeal and upon standard proof.

These observations are deemed not inappropriate as an introduction to a
sketch of the life of one of the most eminent lawyers of New England,
whose career may be regarded as signally worthy of imitation.

HENRY WILLIAM PAINE was born August 30th, 1810, in Winslow,
Maine. His father, Lemuel Paine, a native of Foxborough, Mass., was a
graduate of Brown University, and a lawyer by profession, who began
practice in Winslow, Maine, in partnership with Gen. Ripley, afterwards