Benjamin R.Curtis was admitted to the bar in Boston when he was twenty-two years old and shortly after was retained in a very important case.
It is said that an old deputy sheriff, who had just heard Curtis's opening argument, was met in the street and asked if anything was going on in court.

"Going on ?" was the reply.
"There's a young chap named Curtis up there has just opened a case so that all Hell can't close it." I suppose Edward Everett Hale and James Freeman Clarke were almost as famous in the pulpit when they were twenty-five or twenty-six years old as they ever were afterward.

I might extend the catalogue indefinitely.

Where is there to be found to-day at the New England bar or in the New England pulpit a man under thirty of whom it can be said that his place among the great men of his profession is assured?
It will not do to say in answer to this that it takes a greater man in this generation to fill such a place than it took in other days.

That is not true.