says Dryden, with as much truth as force, and suggesting a very apt and pregnant illustration of his position. Interpretation is the great business of Courts, and it may suggest useful matter for reflection to consider how just Blackstone's remark is, that, in giving effect to the intentions of testators, fifty cases (we should say five times fifty) of difficulty arise about the construction of the words, to one involving a pure question of law, applicable to the disposition, when the intention has been once fully ascertained.

A new statute is passed-what does it mean? Any man may guess at the purpose of the lawgiver-a learned counsellor may be pretty confident that he has hit upon it, after deliberate consideration-but, after all, so arbitrary are such enactments, so much depends upon nice verbal criticism, and so little upon broad views and a scientific comparison of analogies, that it is hard to say what effect any given argument can have upon a judge's mind. There is no sea-room-not scope enough for bringing to bear upon him the whole artillery of cognate and subsidiary learning. His conclusion is apt to be fortuitous and fanciful. Still his conclusion settles the case. Now is it, or is it not to settle the law? If it is not, the wildest confusion, the most inextricable difficulties, the most interminable litigation is the consequence. The jus vagum et incognitum-the miserable slavery of anxious and agitated minds ensues; all confidence is banished from among men, and the repose and order of society are at an end. Black-acre goes to A.-White-acre to B. under the very same title, and the same circumstances; for no reason in the world, but that it is better to have a virgin code, untainted by judicial contamination, than to sacrifice such beautiful abstractions to the vulgar interests of mankind in the old fashioned way of our forefathers.

But, if the interpretation of the judge is to be, so to express it, embodied in the code-if stare decisis is to be the rule, as it must be, or anarchy and ruin ensue, then what becomes of the boasted benefits of reform? How does it exclude judicial legislation? Ask M. Portalis and his compeers-ask the very men upon whose authority this enormous delusion is attempted to be practised upon the creduility of mankind.

But then the common law-the common law-with its antiquated trumpery-and its technical jargon—and its quaint subtleties, and its black letter, and its Norman French, and its scraps of bad Latin, and its Egyptian mystery, and its fictions, and its formulary! Verily she hides her truths at the bottom of a deep well, and her ways are past finding out! And so does all truth lie at the bottom of a well. Do the advocates of codification mean to dispute either of these two propositions: 1st. That no code that ever has existed, or that can be conceived to exist, can

bring the law down to the level of the great bulk of mankind, so as to dispense with professional lawyers, or to relieve these from the devoted and laborious study of a whole life, in order to entitle themselves to public confidence ;-and 2d. That as great lawyers, that is to say, men as profoundly and thoroughly versed in their science, and as perfectly prepared for a skilful application of it to particular cases, have existed in Westminster Hall, as ever expounded the codes of Justinian or Napoleon.* Is it pretended, for instance, that any jurist, now distinguished in the Palais de Justice, knows more about the law in France, or can more confidently predict the result of a cause, than Coke or Plowden, even in that most technical and pedantic age, knew of the common law and its application? Or, are lawyers less necessary now, and is the bar less a road to distinction in life than in the days of Loyseau and Du Moulin? One advantage, we admit, the code has. In every thing relating to the public law of France to the rights, duties, and liabilities of the citizen as such-the people have, in ordinary cases, the means of informing themselves without consulting a legal adviser. Almost all this part of our law is in our statute book, and as it is in general more simple, and, at all events, more necessary to be known than any other, we have always desired a digest of it, either with legislative sanction or otherwise. Nothing is risked, and every thing is to be gained by such reform. It is inconceivable, to those who have not had much experience, how difficult it is to find out what is the law on any of these subjects, among the loose and scattered, and often contradictory enactments of differrent legislatures. But does any one imagine, especially after the passages which we have cited from the French authorities, that every man in Paris is his own lawyer, or that the head of a professional man is less stored with recondite and extensive reading and his pocket with liberal fees, than formerly? Nobody, we presume, can be under such a persuasion with regard to the Justinian collection. The very sight of the corpus juris civilis is appalling. We have already alluded to the studies of its professors to the immense erudition of the Cujas' and the Godefroys. And we will only add that Justinian himself exacted a novicate of five years in his law schools. We suspect that few of our young advocates had gone through as many months of solid study, before they passed muster as junior counsel.

As to the common law being scattered over so many volumes, it is just as reasonable as to say that the decalogue and the gospels are spread over whole libraries, and can only be learned through them because whole libraries have been written upon them. The cases, which exhibit the rule in one important application of it, and which must be profoundly meditated by [* French Bar fallen off since the code. See Lettres, &c., Pref. lxv.]

every one who aims at something more than being able to repeat a dry formulary like a parrot, are, indeed, to the honor of the law, numerous enough-almost as numerous as the infinite variety of human concerns require them to be. But the rules themselves are comparatively few. The proportion is precisely that between a report running through some scores of pages, and the marginal enunciation of the doctrine in as many lines, or words, it may be. Fearne's book may be cited as an example of this. The first two hundred pages are taken up with the discussion of little else than the rule in Shelley's case. Let any one who wishes to see how many volumes the principles of the common law, (and they are all that can be codified,) fill up, only make the experiment for himself. He will find that the whole doctrine of contingent remainders lies within a very narrow compass, however refined the questions may be that arise out of it.

Then why not codify it? We answer simply because it will cost a great deal to do so, and because, in the present state of our law, it can do very little good, and may do much harm. The digests, which have already been executed by private hands, and which are improving every day, wholly supersede the necessity of such a work for professional purposes. If one of these were brought so near to perfection as to want only a legislative sanction to make it a code equal to that of the French, we should not desire to see it take that shape. Our objection depends upon the difference between written and unwritten law, and the danger arising out of the essential character of the former. The difference, as we have endeavoured to shew, is between what depends upon general reasoning and what depends upon verbal criticism. A rule is laid down in a digest: if it be inaccurately enunciated you go to the case which has settled it. Your remedy is in the report-you detect the error, and rectify it; and the precision and uniformity of the law is maintained. But, from the moment you enact all those rules, they are adopted and promulgated as positive law and must be interpreted as such. You are to make a great bonfire of your libraries, and take a new start. If there is the least change or obscurity in the language, verbal criticism begins, every thing that has been settled is afloat once more, and the glorious uncertainty continues until as many more camel loads of reports take the place of the old ones. Even supposing a code perfectly well done, we do not think the game worth the candle in the actual state of things-but, if it be inartificially executed, the labours of six centuries are utterly thrown away.

But we are told none of these consequences can take place, because we shall retain the common law nomenclature and still resort to it, for collateral light and illustration. Indeed! But

how very imperfect and ineffectual such a reform would be. We have seen that all the conclusions of law are deduced, by a train of reasoning analogous to that of the mathematicians, from definitions. To retain the nomenclature, therefore, if we understand the meaning of that term, would be in fact to retain the whole body of the common law; and to have recourse to its text writers and reporters would be only to aggravate the evils of which we complain.

Upon the whole, we would recommend to our younger friends a profound study of our jurisprudence as it stands, rather than the ambition of reforming it. A thorough knowledge of that jurisprudence is a highly profitable and glorious distinction among men-especially in an intellectual and free country. In our own land, it is the way to every thing desirable, and must ever be so--and, though practical cleverness and dexterous empiricism may, with the help of good fortune, achieve much, there is no hope so solid as that bottomed upon an honest, thoroughpaced knowledge of the science. It is better than talent--but it helps talent-it is fuel for its fires, a lamp to its feet, and a staff of strength in its right hand.

VOL. 11.-60

PUBLIC ECONOMY OF ATHENS.*

The Public Economy of Athens, in four books; to which is added a dissertation on the Silver-Mines of Laurion. Translated from the German of AUGUSTUS BOECKH. London. 1828.

In his preface to this work, (which was first published at Berlin in 1817,) Professor Boeckh, as we are informed by the translator, pronounced the knowledge of the ancient history of Greece to be still in its infancy. The observation, we have no doubt at all, is perfectly just. It is but of late years, and first and principally in the universities of Germany, that the researches of scholars have been directed by the spirit of a distinguishing and comprehensive philosophy. They have made dicoveries in fields of inquiry which one would have thought exhausted long ago. They have poured out a flood of light upon every controverted point, and, on the other hand, have shaken many an established dogma, and exposed many a consecrated error. They were not content to learn their lessons by rote, with implicit acquiescence as was the fashion even with very erudite men, a century ago. They took it for granted, or to speak more properly, they reasonably concluded, from what the genius and judgments of the ancients had done in every variety of intellectual achievement, that what appears incongruous and absurd in their institutions or their conduct and opinions, is not so in reality, that the presumption against our knowledge is stronger than against their sense, and that we ought to have a care how we indulge our supercilious fancies with regard to such men, lest we incur the old censure of the damnat quod non intelligit. It is quite inconceivable to those, who have not looked narrowly into such matters, what a revolution this school of philosophical erudition has brought about in them. Examples might easily be cited in every department of literature-but we will confine ourselves to one about which we are now principally concerned-that of historical criticism. Their inquiries in this branch of learning have united two things that were very rarely found together before, immense erudition, with acute scepticism and discriminating judgment. It is very clear that, in the hands of such men,

[* When I wrote this article I had not read Niebuhr's prologomena to his history, with which my introductory remarks sometimes so strangely coincide.-Brussels, November 10th, 1834.]