opening of that most beautiful and most instructive of all books, to which we shall have numberless occasions to refer. I speak of Livy. On the eve of that usurpation in which, while all the forms of a constitution won through a thousand struggles were still preserved, the State became all in all, and the best hope which good men could entertain was the vague dream of a peace which might give some repose when the contest for empire should be terminated by the success of some one of the competitors, he tells us that he sought to forget present and approaching evils in relating the story of the Roman people from the first:-" Hoc laboris præmium petam ut me a conspectu malorum quæ nostra tot per annos vidit ætas, tantisper, certe dum prisca illa tota mente repeto, avertam." He adverts to the earlier history as mingled with fable. He relates it as he has found it told, and leaves it to his reader to set what value he may on the old legends. He then passes to his truer purpose, and what he thinks of real moment:-" Ad illa mihi pro se quisque acriter intendat animum quæ vita, qui mores, fuerint; per quos viros, quibusque artibus, domi militiæque et partum et auctum imperium sit. Labente deinde paulatim disciplina velut desidentes primo mores sequatur animo; deinde ut magis magisque lapsi sint; tunc ire cæperint præcipites; donec ad hæc tempora, quibus nec vitia nostra, nec remedia pati possumus, perventum est."

The laws of a people cannot be understood apart from its history and its language; and thus our subject embraces a wide field. We must guard, however, against the temptations which beset us on every side. We must deal with history only as it is illustrative of law; and while the most accurate and searching examination of every statement which we find in the works either of the historians or the jurists will be absolutely necessary, we must guard against the antiquarian spirit which is ever on the watch to lead the student away

into dry and desert places. We must guard also against the vapours of philology, and take care not to be deluded with the mere shadows of thoughts, sounds of words whose meaning is dead and gone, and which, when they lived, were at best but phantoms of abstraction, or, in Bacon's more accurate thought,-phantoms of phantoms, for the notions themselves which Words expressed were often, in Bacon's language," confusæ et temere a Rebus abstractæ." In speaking of the delusions of words, we may be allowed to cite a poet, and say that

"The Spirit that bideth by himself

In the land of mist and snow"

has had strange pleasure in playing tricks on our German friends; and there can be no doubt that their practice of conjuring up the ghosts of dead words has been carried too far, and that in examining the structure of language they have now and then forgotten, or seem to have forgotten, the purposes for which language was used by articulately speaking men. To destroy the living frame of language, and resolve it into the dust out of which it was created, is, for most purposes, carrying analysis too far. Do not mistake me as disposed to underrate the importance of what the antiquarian acquires or inherits. Do not mistake me as disposed to take a low estimate of philology. Both are unspeakably valuable; both are absolutely necessary for us, and little of much account to us has been yet done in either, except by Continental scholars. But they are in their nature ministerial, and I would guard you against their usurpations, not forbid their Their very disposition to usurp what is not their's, and never can be their's, is reason for our distrust. Are they in their nature less servile because they have never done good service? Will they, properly employed, be unserviceable because useless or troublesome before they have been disciplined and brought to good? They are slaves, who have not

use.

as yet found a master, or who have fled from their proper service. Reclaim them, restore them, render them useful. They are in their nature slaves, and they would be despots. I mean they are essentially ministerial, and in using the words "slaves" and "servile" in this way, I am not in truth borrowing a metaphor from a condition of human society, and by implication admitting my approval of such condition, but using the words in a truer application than could ever have been made of them when applied to individual men, when I appropriate them to abuses of particular faculties of the mind, which nature has in all men made inferior and subordinate to the whole mind, and when I endeavour to press upon you that the busy restlessness or ill-directed industry of these inferior faculties, should not be suffered to assert a province not properly their's, and thus destroy the liberty of the entire man. They are in their nature servile,—as Caliban and Ariel were, before Prospero had landed on their island, and as they continued when made subject to his dominion. Without such servants the island could never have been what it became in the hands of the benevolent magician. Such instruments, as the misshapen Drudge, who thought all things should for ever remain as they were, who worked blindly on, not sympathizing with any one of his master's purposes, living in his traditions of the days of Sycorax, and her god Setebos, and regarding all good done as a wrong offered to his old claim of ancestral right,-and the winged meteor of Fancy,-I had almost said, the Spirit of winged words, whose very life is perpetual change, were alike indispensable, and may, for the purpose of our illustration at least, be regarded as typifying the lubber and limber elves of Antiquarianism and Philology, whose services you will require, but whose usurpations you must

resist.

Your's must be no partial or exclusive study, and the books with which you are already acquainted are those to

which I would again direct your careful attention. To form anything of a clear conception of the early Roman institutions it will be absolutely necessary for you to examine whatever traces are to be found in Livy, in Dionysius, and above all, in Cicero, with such investigations as the researches of Niebuhr supply. It is not possible to have studied Niebuhr without concurring with Arnold in the feeling that, by incessant study of all that remains of ancient literature illustrative of the subject, he had acquired on the subject of Roman constitutional law a tact to which Arnold gives the name of Divination.

It is curiously confirmatory of what Arnold says, that points which Niebuhr inferred from very doubtful passages of Dionysius, were proved to be right by a discovery of Cicero's book, "De Republica." To a student of Civil Law, still more to one who makes general jurisprudence his study, I know of no book of the same value as Niebuhr's Roman History; and I do not regard its chief value to be what it has rescued from the dominion of fable and popular romance, and added to the domain of history; but more, far more than this, I regard the introductory chapters of his work, exhibiting the states of society in the early Greek colonies, with which Rome must be classed, and the forms into which society had past in the Italian Republics of the Middle Ages. From each of these sources, much more from the latter, and the analogies thereby suggested,— from the PAST, out of which Rome grew, from the FUTURE, which in great part Rome created, Niebuhr infers, through the almost miraculous instinct of genius, and with what often approaches the certain demonstrations of the severest science, the actual intermediate state of constitutional law and government. He has been said to have destroyed the early Roman history. I am not sure that there is much meaning in this. Livy, no less than he, re

lated what are called the facts of the early Roman history, in the spirit of one telling an old story of impossible romance; but from these early legends he has succeeded in extricating something, not perhaps of absolute fact, if this word is to be confined to details of actual incident, but of conditions and relations of society, to enable us to learn which history is chiefly valuable.

At some future time, most probably at our next lecture, but as soon as it is at all possible, I shall point out some books for the purpose of directing your studies. At the moment there are difficulties, as I do not know any modern book that would quite answer the purpose, and the older treatises, which are used in Scotland and on the Continent, however useful they may be to the natives of the countries for which they were drawn up, are inconvenient, and may mislead, as they give not the Roman Civil Law, but the Roman law adulterated with the modern law of some particular country. Our best and safest course, that which is likely to be most useful to you professionally, to such of you, I mean, as are law students, and which also connects itself most fitly with the general purposes of academic education, of which I trust I shall not lose sight, is, that we should in the first instance make ourselves acquainted with the authentic books of the Civil Law.

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The Statutes of Cambridge, and, I believe, our's, direct the first year of the law student's course to be in the Institutes of Justinian. This is mentioned in Bishop Hallifax's Elements of the Civil Law. I had not known, or I had forgotten the fact; but, without saying that we should be bound by the modes of teaching of old time, I am not sorry to find that what, without any knowledge of the old regulation, I had satisfied myself would form the best introduction. to our studies, has also the sanction of venerable authority. In the University of Edinburgh there are two classes of Civil