160 court of appeals of maryland

the conclusion that judges who wrote these
opinions were men of good ability. That case
of Dowling v. Smith was one of the most strongly
contested cases the court of the fifties had before
it, and was argued by four of the best lawyers
the state had: Charles J. M. Gwinn, Jonathan
Meredith, Reverdy Johnson and Charles F.
Mayer. Again, in another important case, Bal-
timore v. The State, 15 Maryland Reports, 376,
Judge LeGrand and Judge Tuck each filed an
opinion; and other opinions of Judge LeGrand's
to which reference may be made for an estimate
of his work, are those in Parkinson v. The State,
(dissenting), 14 Maryland Reports, 184, 201,
and Benson v. Ketchum, 14 Maryland Reports,
331, 352. Not all of his opinions are of equal
quality, perhaps, but they show knowledge of the
law, strength of conviction, and a trained capacity
for writing. Most of them show, also, a boiling
down which manifests capacity or effort above
the ordinary, perhaps both together, and, of
course, it made .the opinions clearer. And the
tradition transmitted from those who knew him
is that Judge LeGrand was, indeed, a judge above
the ordinary. Reverdy Johnson, who was not
given to uncritical eulogy, said at the memorial
meeting in the Court of Appeals after Judge
LeGrand's death, that he had won not only the
confidence but the admiration of the bar. And
Chief Judge McSherry, writing in 1904 of the
past chief judges of the court, ranked him as one
of the three best. It is reasonably certain that
his continuation in office would have been ap-
proved generally if the rancors of the Civil War