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Coke's Reports was published. Its merits may be sampled by its summary of Cawdry's case (5 Rep. 1.):

'Gainst common-prayer if parson say

In sermon aught, bishop deprive him may.

The chapter on juridical proverbs and mnemonic verses is enlivened by the account of a modern collector of legal maxims, whose Latinity goes no further than to permit of his rendering Messis sementem sequitur as "Harvest follows Seedtime," and Actor sequitur forum rei as "The agent attends the Court where the business is carried on." It was only by a mistranslation of a more wilful and malicious kind that a Cromwellian satirist, to whom Dr. Murray introduces us (p. 63), rendered Nisi Prius as "First come, first served," Capias as "a Catch (to a sad tune)," and Breve de Dote as "Give the devil her due."

A book so full of the stores of proverbial wisdom naturally abounds in illustrations of the proverbial delays and disappointments which await the litigant, and which fully justify the wise counsel (p. 182) that a man "should go to law with a slow foot, but hasten from it with eagle's wings." Yet that advice seems to have been as often disregarded in bygone days as it is in our own. For we find (p. 178) a seventeenthcentury lawyer complaining of the stomachfulness and perverseness of clients; who are of that contentious disposition that they will spend all that ever they are worth, so that they may have their will; malevolous spirits who cannot be content to undo themselves but strive to ruin others; and not only so, but strive to defame their learned counsel because the cause went against them."

The bibliophile will be interested in the chapter (pp. 20625) on the various éditions de luxe in which paper-makers and printers and engravers have lavished their skill on legal treatises. None, however, of the juridical pictures to which Dr. Murray refers are so early as that sketch of A.D. 1242, preserved in the Corpus Library at Cambridge, which portrays the punishment of a traitor.

Many little points of interest are dealt with amongst the very miscellaneous contents of this volume. There is, for instance, the expression "Gentlemen of the Long Robe" as a synonym for barristers; perhaps obsolete now, though so recent a parliamentary orator as Mr. Gladstone himself used to employ it. Probably few, even of those whose reading has

made it familiar to them, know from what other profession the Bar were to be distinguished by the length of their gowns. But Dr. Murray makes it clear, from French parallels: "The long robe refers to an advocate or counsellor; the short robe (la courte robe,' 'la basse robe ') refers to the other branch of the profession," i.e., to solicitors.

So wide is Dr. Murray's sweep that he does not disdain chronicling the uncleanly memory of the Judge and Jury Society of sixty years ago; where (as Thackeray puts it) "a mimic Judge administered a Bacchanalian law," but administered his fetid burlesque with a legal aptitude that astonished no less experienced a forensic observer than Rufus Choate, as the diary of his English tour relates. Yet only a passing allusion in a foot-note (p. 232 n.) is conceded to the “Parliamentary Logick" of a once-famous member of Lincoln's Inn-" Single-speech Hamilton." Dr. Murray might well have said more about this volume, with its five hundred pieces of practical advice to debaters, counsels deduced from forty-years' shrewd observation of the House of Commons. When the book first appeared, Windham found it worthy of study and of annotation. And some eighty years later it was thought worthy of translation into French by one of Gambetta's closest friends; from which we may conjecture that its maxims had not been unknown to that great tribune himself. It has indeed been described as the wickedest book in the English language; for nine-tenths of it are devoted to teaching the reader how to get the better of his controversial opponents when he knows himself to be in the wrong. But, since lawyers as well as politicians have often shewn themselves eager to be taught that evil art, Dr. Murray might well have afforded his readers a fuller notice of Hamilton's strange and singularly interesting work.

As might be expected in the retrospect of so long a period of literature, many of the earlier authorities cited by Dr. Murray are concerned with the relations between the legal and the spiritual aspects of life. Thus several pages (pp. 197-206) are devoted to the useful warnings afforded by the critics who, during eighteen centuries past, have exposed the ethical shortcomings of lawyers, or have held up before them a higher standard of duty. Dr. Murray does not seem to have noticed in this connexion that little manual, written by Edward O'Brien and edited by Aubrey de Vere, which was one of the early fruits of the Oxford Movement-" The Lawyer:

his character and rule of Holy Life"; an imitation, and a skilful one, of the method and diction of George Herbert's Country Parson. The lawyer's clients are, however, informed by Dr. Murray how they may borrow, from a French sixtenth-century parish-priest of Avranches, a manual of psalms and canticles for the daily expression of their varying emotions during the shifting fortunes of a lawsuit (pp. 168-70). Again, the conscientious jurist may alarm himself by learning (pp. 170-4) how many of the treatises of his professional colleagues have provoked the disapproval of the Church and been placed on the Index Expurgatorius—a fate that befell even such great authorities as Vinnius and Dumoulin. Hottoman of Basel, we are told, fell under this official censure for having respectfully referred to Justinian as a good Christian, without taking the precaution of adding that the eulogy was not meant to include the years in which that emperor leaned to the Eutychian heresy. And, even more properly within Dr. Murray's professed field of "Merriments," a connexion between matters ecclesiastical and matters legal is still traced by him. Thus we read that in a scandal (pp. 93-5), which arose amongst the Presbyterians of London in 1824, a mock trial of the impugned minister "before the Lord Chief Justice of the Court of Common Sense and a special jury" was published; apparently from the pen of the then popular novelist John Galt. It may be conjectured that it was inspired by a pamphlet of a hundred years earlier (which Dr. Murray does not mention though it was so popular as to obtain repeated republication during half a century),-the "Trial of Wm. Whiston before the Lord Chief Justice Reason." In this satire "Mr. Solicitorgeneral Codex (i.e., Bp. Gibson) prosecutes; and all the writers of the New Testament appear as witnesses for the defence, to sustain the accused Arian against the attack of Convocation.

Yet much graver treatment of theology may also be found in Dr. Murray's pages. St. Thomas Aquinas, if our memory be correct, took into consideration the question whether baptism can be validly administered by a Jew or a Pagan; and ultimately pronounced in the affirmative. But a still more startling question, as we learn from the book before us (p. 228), is propounded in one of the legal manuscripts of Raymond Lully, the Doctor of Illuminatus of the thirteenth century. Lully set himself to the question, whether a man could

be validly baptized by the devil? The conclusion which he reached was unfavourable to the bold suggestion. Students of Roman-Dutch law may remember the gravity with which Voet (xix. 2, 23) treats a problem of kindred naturewhether the tenant of a house will be entitled to rescind his lease if he finds the premises to be haunted by ghosts. He pronounces in favour of the right of rescission; though he prudently warns the tribunals to demand very clear proof of daemonum illusiones istiusmodi.

The connexion, however, of Satan with legal literature goes far beyond Lully's casual instance; as Dr. Murray devotes thirty pages (pp. 131-60 to shewing. The fact might indeed have been inferred from the familiar Italian legend about the advocate who, when turned blindfold into a church to select for himself and his brethren a patron-saint, stumbled over the base of the statute of the victorious St. Michael, and, clutching the defeated and prostrate fiend, cried "Here is our patron." But from the twelfth to the eighteenth century various authors, inspired no doubt by the analogy of Miracle-plays, seem to have occupied themselves in attempts. to communicate religious instruction to the ignorant by throwing it into the form of imaginary lawsuits between diobolical and divine litigants. Dr. Murray does not, however, mention what is probably the most brilliant, though perhaps the briefest, of such efforts. Lope de Vega, in his great drama The Discovery of America, has a scene where an action of ejectment is brought before the Heavenly Judge, by Christianity, to recover from the devil the new found continent. The defendant puts in, as might be expected, a plea of immemorial prescription. But the plaintiff meets it with the successful argument that prescription requires bona fides, and it certainly is not to be found in Satan.

Neither these superhuman beings, nor those less than human, appear as parties in any modern litigation. Yet a notable section of the book (pp. 127-31) is concerned with the legal prosecutions that have in past ages been directed against animals. A variety of useful references are given; though it seems an exaggerated generalization to say (p. 127) that "on the Continent, down to a comparatively late period, the lower animals were in all respects considered amenable to the laws."

COURTNEY KENNY.

THE RECENT CONTROVERSY ABOUT NEXUM.

It is my duty in the first place to speak in memory of my predecessor, Dr. James Williams. To do justice in a few words to a man of so varied attainments is not easy. Dr. Williams was a poet and an exceptional linguist, and he was learned in English as well as in Roman law. I may cite as characteristic works of his wide culture his monograph "Dante as a Jurist" and his "Institutions of Justinian illustrated by English law." To say of a man that he knew many things seems to imply that he knew none of them deeply. But no one who was acquainted with his work, no one, for instance, who heard his inaugural lecture in this hall, could fail to be impressed by the extent of his knowledge of the law which he was called upon to profess. Bad health, most courageously borne, alone prevented him from reaping to the full the harvest which comes to a scholar who in the maturity of his knowledge preserves his vigour unimpaired.

I. INTRODUCTORY.

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The problem of nexum is raised by the descriptions which Livy and Dionysius give of the condition of the insolvent debtor in early Rome. He is nexus, that is, in a state of bondage to his creditor, obliged to work for him and to submit to personal restraint and chastisement. A well-known passage of Varro 2 lays stress on the same feature: a man was called nexus who, though free, gave his services into slavery instead of money which he owed, until he paid it." This bondage, we are told by several authors, was abolished by a Lex Poetelia, of perhaps 326 B.C. "All nera of citizens were dissolved," says Cicero," and the practice of nectere ceased." 3

Aes Alienum leading to bondage until the Lex Poetelia, that is the situation out of which arise our problems. We ask what were the legal institutions underlying that situation, in particular what was the legal form of the contract of loan, and by what steps or stages did the debtor pass from borrowing to bondage.

The importance of these questions was not lost on Sir Henry Maine Nexum, the contract, like mancipation, the

2 The passage is quoted infra, p. 139.

De Repub. 2, 59 Sunt propter unius libidinem omnia nera civium liberata nectierque postea desitum.' Ancient Law, chapter 9.

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