Mr. DAVIS. I have known my colleague, Mr. Speaker, for nearly 30 years, or since the time of his connection with the eminent law firm of Butler, Barney & Humphrey, of the city of NewYork. I knew his father. His father and my own were warm personal friends. I felt, from the time of my acquaintance with the son, an attachment which may have been warmer, perhaps, in consequence of the friend ship which existed between my father and his. His father, Rev. Dr. Humphrey, was a man of eminent intellectual ability and culture, and it might have been expected that the son should inherit the uulities which that father possessed, and trainc under such a father should exhibit in life that degree of culture which he was capable of inspiring. But it will be my purpose to speak of Mr. I'IUMPHREY in respect. to the traits of character by which he was distinguished and for which he was beloved rather than of the incidents of his life. As might be anticipated from the peculiar advantages of education to which I have alluded, our departed friend, gifted by nature with fiuein tellectual abilities, was remarkable not only for classic attainment but for refined literary taste. His acquaintance with the languages, with the productions of poets, philosophers, and writers on varied subjects, was so accurate that he was often referred to as the arbiter for the settlement of questions of authorship. I am conti dent, that had his life been devoted to literature rather than to law, he would have taken high rank in a dept where failure is far more frequent than success. In giving expression to this opinion, I am by no means insensible to his conceded merit in the legal profession. He possessed many of the qualications essential to a legal ud viser and practitioner. 1st and foremost he was proverbially an honest man, desirous of knowin the right, and then of doing it. He believe that law was instituted in the interests of justice, and that those who were practitioners at its bar were bound, so far as human infirmity would permit, to prevent its perversion to the pay oses of oppression or wrong. He regarded the law as a wise a ency for the enforcement of rights and the repress of injuries, and while he felt it to be a duty to guard carefull and well the just rights of his client, he discargedin toto that miserable fallacy which has too often brought reproach upon the profession, that a lawyer was bound to do everything for a client which the technicalities of the law might permit; but was guided by the nobler an higher principle that his relations to his client bound iiim to no act and no service which, in his own behalf, he might not perform without dishonor or self reproach. With this sentiment controlling his professional career from its opening to its close, givin color to his counsels as well as direction to is action, it may reasonably as wall I as truthfully be supposed that