To this day, it is against all etiquette to bargain with | for some time degenerating, that those great collections a barrister for his work. The law gives him no claim of legislative wisdom which have come down to modern for remuneration, which it kindly views as unworthy of the dignity of his profession; and it is usual to pay him beforehand for his legal assistance. On the other hand, though he has been paid beforehand, he cannot be compelled to perform any duty in return, for he is presumed to assist the client from his own free good will. In most other professions, it is the custom for the person employed to feel under a sort of obligation to the employer who has preferred him to others. This principle is reversed at the bar; for the person employed is the patron, and the employer the client. But to return to the legislation of the sages of the law. During the commonwealth, whoever, by his superior sagacity or knowledge, could obtain deference for his opinions, might be said to be a manufacturer of laws. Under the earlier emperors, the privilege of promulgating authoritative opinions was confined to a limited number of lawyers, of equestrian rank, licensed by the government; but the profession was again thrown open to the public by Hadrian. The most brilliant era of legal wisdom commences within a short period of the decline of the republic, and terminates with the reign of Alexander Severus. Mucius Scævola, the tutor of Cicero, was one of its earliest ornaments; and it included the celebrated jurisconsults Paul, Ulpian, Papinian, Capito, and Labeo. The two last of these, who lived in the age of Augustus, were the founders of the two sects the Proculians and Sabinians-into which the Roman lawyers were divided. The former advocated the doctrine that the laws should be amended at discretion, to meet circumstances as they occurred; the latter maintained the theory of their strict interpretation, be its inexpediency in the particular instance what it may. Capito, applying his doctrines to the inroads which the emperors were gradually making in the freedom of the republic, was a supporter of this species of innovation, and his followers were enrolled among the ready tools of despotism. Labeo sought to support the ancient freedom of the republic by an adherence to the letter of the old laws, and his sect became the champions of what may be termed constitutional freedom. The conflict is not unlike that which at one time existed in Britain between Lord Mansfield and Lord Camden; the former supporting, to a certain degree, an equitable, the latter, in all cases, a strict interpretation of the law. Having now enumerated the principal sources of the Roman law, we may notice its remarkable epochs. The laws enacted during the reigns of the kings, although a curious subject of inquiry among antiquaries, exercised too little influence on the civil law, as handed down to modern Europe, to be of much practical importance. During the administration of the decemvirs, the celebrated laws of the Twelve Tables were adopted. The traditionary history connected with this code is, that the Roman government, conscious of the want of a proper legal system, sent commissioners to Greece, who, after studying the laws of that comparatively civilised nation, produced the Twelve Tables for the acceptance of the Romans. The tradition, like many others connected with the Roman history of the period, has not sufficient historical evidence to support it against its natural improbability. These laws, of which specimens are professed to be preserved, are written in a language so different from that of the classical writers of Rome, that they were to Cicero an object of much the same curiosity as the old Scottish acts were to Bacon. Like the first laws of other rude states, they are simple and brief in their enactments. The bankruptcy systemwhich has so sadly shocked several benevolent scholars, that they have endeavoured to explain it as a merely symbolical provision-is peculiarly sharp and effective. It enacts that the insolvent debtor shall be cut in pieces, and that his body shall be distributed among his creditors. When law became a science openly studied, the Twelve Tables became the subject of many commentaries. It was not, however, till the Romans had been times were commenced. The first attempt to construct a code seems to have been the Perpetual Edict of Hadrian, already alluded to. Two private individuals, Gregorius and Hermogenes, appear to have collected the imperial constitutions into a system, or code, of which some fragments are still preserved. Nothing whatever is known of the biography of these compilers: it has not even been discovered in what reigns they respectively lived, though their labours received high commendation at the hands of Theodosius the Younger. Under this emperor the celebrated Theodosian Code was promulgated, in the year 438. The compilation of this body of laws was committed to eight individuals, who were allowed considerable latitude in explaining and abridging, and even in supplying deficiencies. It contains the legislative acts of sixteen emperors, from the year 312 to 438. Fragments of this code have been rescued from oblivion inch by inch, by modern scholars, whose labours, it may safely be calculated, have amounted to some twenty or thirty times more than those of the original compilers. The celebrated Godefroy of Geneva spent thirty years in the task; and within the last thirty years the discovery of some further fragments induced the celebrated Angelo Mai to study the Roman law for the purpose of editing them. We may now notice those great collections of the legal wisdom of the Romans, to which the above may be considered only preparatory. In 529, ten commissioners, appointed by Justinian, prepared The Code or Codex, as it is termed, from the collections previously made, and the intermediate enactments. Soon after its promulgation, the emperor issued several new constitutions, and the whole were consolidated and reissued in 534. This great task was superintended by the celebrated Tribonian, whose eminent learning and discrimination, allied with untiring industry, but stained by the vices of corruption and partiality, have afforded a fruitful theme of praise and obloquy. This was by no means Tribonian's only labour. In the year 530, he was appointed the chief of a commission of sixteen, whose duty it was to cull the choice and useful passages from the authors of comments and opinions. The various authorities, which, we are told, would have made several camels' loads, were thus reduced within a compass which, if it do look somewhat formidable to the consulter, is still manageable. Such are the fifty books which constitute the celebrated Pandects,' or 'Digest' of the Roman law a work without which modern Europe would have known but little of the subject. Along with Theophilus and Dorotheus, the indefatigable commissioner was able to prepare, in conjunction with this great digest of the law, an abridgment or manual of its leading principles, which bears the well-known name of The Institute.' This condensed and elegant little work was sanctioned by the emperor in 533. It has become the subject of innumerable comments, and has afforded the model on which the legal writers of most modern nations have desired to prepare their treatises. Justinian continued, during the remainder of his life, to promulgate new laws; and these, collected together under the title of Novella,' or Novels,' form the remaining department of the corpus juris,' or body of the civil law. With Justinian we reach the climax of the Roman law; and to trace its farther progress in the Empire has been more a subject of curiosity to the antiquary than of importance to the lawyer. Some fragments by later commentators, chiefly in the Greek language, have been disentombed by zealous searchers. The Roman law was nominally respected by the northern conquerors of Rome. Alaric, king of the Visigoths, indeed, caused a compendium to be prepared for the use of his dominions, consisting chiefly of an abridgment of the codes of Gregorius, Hermogenes, and Theodosius. Towards the end of the ninth century, Basilius, emperor of the East, issued a new code, intended to supersede the labours of Tribonian, termed the Basilica.' In the dark ages, however much of the Roman law | may have remained in practice, it had died away in literature, and was neither studied nor commented on. At the taking of Constantinople in the fifteenth century, only one copy of one of the Justinian labours, the Novels, seems to have been discovered. It was long believed, indeed, in the learned world, that from the period of the Basilica to the twelfth century, the very existence of the Roman law was among the things forgotten. The circumstances of its resuscitation were found in a traditional anecdote, that at the siege of Amalphi in 1137, some Pisan peasants discovered a complete copy of the Pandects among the plunder, the melodious language, comprehensive philosophy, and clear definitions of which, so charmed the readers of that barbarous age, that its contents were immediately devoured with avidity and propagated with zeal. In Florence, a manuscript is still preserved, said to be the identical book with which this anecdote is connected, taken at the siege of Pisa in 1406. The essence of the tradition has been disproved by late discoveries, which show that the civil law was known previously to the siege of Amalphi. rived a marriage law so different from the ceremonious system that prevails in England. Its leading principle is, that the consent of the parties alone is necessary to a valid marriage, and that when that is proved, nothing more is necessary; and that a child born between parties who are subsequently married, becomes legitimate by that act. The law of trusts and of the mutual rights and obligations of guardian and ward, have found their way more or less into every modern system, and even into the statute-law of England. Prescription, or the principle that claims are limited by the lapse of time, has come down to us from the Romans. The law of testaments, and the descent of movable property, is mainly derived from the same quarter. It is in the case of the tenure and transmission of land, indeed, that the person versed in modern systems will find himself least at home in the Roman, from the effect which the feudal institutions of the various nations of Europe have produced on that branch of the law. The subjection in which children were placed to their parents is apt to create surprise, even when compared with the strict filial etiquette of our own ancestors. A revolting feature of the corpus juris is the portion of legislation devoted to the subject of slavery and the property in slaves. The Roman law has already been mentioned as the source of the law of nations, or, as it is more justly called, the international law, in modern Europe. It was quite natural that a system voluntarily adopted among nations for regulating their mutual intercourse, should be founded, to as great an extent as might be expedient, on the system of the internal laws which the majority of the nations had chosen to adopt. But the law of nations is perpetually varying with circumstances, and it is impossible to draw that distinct view of its nature and provisions which may be given of the laws of any particular state. It has been argued, indeed, that the term 'law' is improperly applied to the system. Whereever the term law is used, there is understood not only a regulation laid down, but a means of enforcing it in the hands of a superior power. The civil and criminal laws are enforced by the ordinary courts; the military The real revival of the civil law is to be traced in the history of the universities. Of these, Paris, Bologna, and Leyden, took the lead in the department of jurisprudence. Contemporary with, or immediately after the siege of Amalphi, lectures were given on the Pandects in the university of Oxford, by a teacher of the name of Vacarius. For reasons which we shall have to state when we come to treat of the laws of England, the civil law, thus early commenced, never made much progress in England. Nor, although the civil law was so prominent a subject of professional study in Scotland, has that part of the empire done much to elucidate the science. Both England and Scotland, indeed, have produced writers on the civil law; but with one or two exceptions, the British jurists are not among those names which become familiar to the readers on the subject, from the frequent reference made to them by subsequent commentators. The earlier modern civilians followed three oracles-Bartolus, Baldus, and Accursius, whose works, it is believed, the most enthu-law, by courts martial; the law of the church, by the siastic admirer of the study would not now peruse, and who probably retain their chief celebrity from having been targets for the wit of Rabelais. In the seventeenth century, more elegant and philosophical commentators followed, and the subject was pursued with zeal to the middle of the following century. A prodigious number of civil law books issued from the press during that period; and we have heard it asserted, that a complete collection of all the books published on the civil and canon law would make a library of two hundred thou-submit; but America resisted, and the dispute occasand volumes. The labours of Godefroy alone are sufficient to damp the ardour of a modern literary collector; and there is perhaps no surer mode of comprehending what human patience and perseverance is capable of, than the contemplation of a civil law library. Holland has been profuse with great authorities-Grotius, Matthæus, Schulting, Noodt, Voet, and Huber, belonged to that country. Germany produced the philosophic jurist Puffendorf, and Heineccius, whose elementary works as the clearest and most methodical of the commentaries-have been popular as class-books of civil law. Among modern investigators in this laborious science, the Germans have ecclesiastical courts, &c. But who, it is said, is to be the judge to enforce the law between nations? When two nations have a dispute, and their power is equal, it remains undecided; if the one is much superior in strength to the other, it has matters its own way. In the late war, Great Britain maintained that she had a right to search all neutral vessels, for the purpose of ascertaining if they contained contraband goods or sheltered deserters. The smaller states were bound to sioned a bloody war. So it probably will be again when the same claim is urged. Instead of being a fixed law applicable to all, the weak will have to obey, and the strong will resist. For the enforcement of any rules that may be called the law of nations, then, it is clear that there is no better sanction than this, that the powers which openly outrage them will call forth a degree of indignation on the part of the rest of the world which may prove dangerous. The partition of Poland, for instance, called forth the indignation of the rest of Europe; and it may be still a question whether the acquisition was a prudent one to the nations concerned. It is not to be supposed, however, that there are no courts where the law of nations is enforced. To give a general outline of the Roman law, would Each country in Europe has generally a court where be to describe the common principles of the majority its own views on the subject are laid down. England of the codes of civilised mankind. Although the pro- has, for instance, the prize jurisdiction of the Court of gress of commerce and manufactures has introduced a Admiralty, which is thus called a civil law court. quantity of transactions such, for instance, as bills of During the late war, when Napoleon, by his Berlin exchange which the Roman lawgivers could never decrees, declared Great Britain and her colonies in a have contemplated, yet their system is the foundation state of blockade, and Britain retaliated by the orders of all the commercial laws of Europe-a circumstance in council on the rest of Europe, a multitude of cases which has probably facilitated the uniformity so ne- where the ships of neutral powers had been seized for cessary in transactions which involve inhabitants of breach of neutrality were adjudged. And here a cirdifferent countries. From the same source, Scotland cumstance occurred which could not take place proand the greater part of continental Europe have de-bably in any other country, that the view taken of the taken the lead. law of nations by the judge was different from that | Perth in 1242 and 1269, passed some important laws taken by his government; for Lord Stowell declared regarding tithes. that a blockade could not be held to exist by mere proclamation, but that there must be present on the spot an armament sufficient to enforce it. One of the principal defects of the writings in the civil law, and one that renders the subject in a great measure unpopular at the present day, is the spirit of speculation with which they are imbued, and the extent to which they carry divisions and arrangements which are of no service in practice, and provide for wants purely hypothetical. The civilian in his study, shut out from the world, and ignorant of its pursuits, sets his brain at work to create the various exigencies of practical life to which the maxims of the institute were applicable, and to devise how they could be applied; but when his labours were brought to the light of day, it was found that the world in its practice, and he in his thoughts, had taken totally different routes, and that the one could not be the companion of the other. If a tailor make clothes with another man's cloth, to which of the two shall they belong? If an artist paint on another man's canvas, who shall be the proprietor of the picture? Such were among the subtleties discussed among the Roman jurists. In later days, when legislators have too much to do in keeping up with the practical demands of society to indulge in hypothetical law-making, such subjects would not be taken up until cases of difficulty actually occurred; and then, before deciding the abstract questions, it would probably be asked under what circumstances tailors are likely to make garments out of cloth which does not belong to them, or artists to paint on other people's canvas? THE CANON LAW. The Canon Law is, properly speaking, the ecclesiastical law of the Roman Catholic Church. In its more limited acceptation, it may be called the by-laws of the church as a separate corporation; but its field widened with the influence of the hierarchy. It embraced many subjects of pure civil and municipal law, such as the distribution of property between married persons, succession, &c., by linking them with ecclesiastical matters; and thus the clerical tribunals came to rival, if not to excel in importance, those of the state. The canons of the Greek Church, a portion of which were said to be the work of the apostles, added to and explained by general councils, were sanctioned by the Novels of Justinian, and have so been viewed as a portion of the body of civil law. A collection of canons was made in the year 520; and this work, with the papal decrees, and the privileges conceded to the church by Charlemagne, formed the chief subject-matter of the canon law down to the twelfth century. It was then that this law ceased to be the mere regulations of a peculiar body, and became a general system of jurisprudence. About the year 1114, a collection of the decrees of popes and cardinals was commenced by Ivo, Bishop of Chartres, and was revised and completed in 1149 by Gratian, a Benedictine monk. Another element in the system consisted of the Decretals, which were rescripts or epistles by the pope, or by the pope and cardinals, deciding how the law of the church stood concerning disputed matters referred to them. These were first collected and edited in 1234 by Raimond de Renafort, chaplain to Gregory IX. This work was divided into five books, to which a sixth was added under the auspices of Boniface VIII. in 1298. These two great works, with some additions made to them by succeeding popes, formed what, in imitation of the collected works in the law of Rome, was called the Corpus Juris Canonici, or Body of the Canon Law. Besides these general statutes, there were local canon laws passed by the clergy of various countries, at national or provincial assemblies, held under the auspices of papal legates or archbishops. In the reign of Henry III. there were assemblies of the former kind; and under the respective archbishops of England there were frequent provincial synods. In Scotland, two provincial synods, held at The great aim of ecclesiastical legislation was to bring civil questions within its pale. Disputes as to tithe and the privileges of the clergy came very naturally to its hand. The priesthood were in a great measure intrusted with the administration of legacies, especially where they were destined to pious uses; and they thus acquired a jurisdiction in questions of succession, of which we see vestiges in this country in the Court of Arches and the other ecclesiastical courts of England, and the commissary system in Scotland. Marriage being constituted a sacrament, the canon law not only took into its hands all questions regarding the union and separation of the parties, but adjudged in the criminal act out of which the latter circumstance might arise, and took under its cognisance questions as to dower. The church obtained a powerful hold over the proceedings of ordinary courts of law, by the introduction of the practice of witnesses and parties calling God to attest the truth of their statements-the origin of the present system of administering an oath. Over this ceremony, and all matters connected with the truth or falsehood of the statement it sanctioned, the clergy took a particular charge. Notaries, who, in the days of ignorance, were intrusted with the execution and registration of contracts-who, in fact, were the living registers of almost all transactions of importance, were necessarily taken from the only class who could writethe churchmen-and their appointment and removal naturally fell into ecclesiastical hands. A great rivalry thus existed between the civil and the canon law; but it was a friendly rivalry. The clergy were the repositaries of both systems, and they had to decide how much should be assigned to the one and how much to the other. The canon law borrowed largely from the civil, of which it is sometimes considered a mere branch; it was naturally, indeed, the object of the clergy not so much to change the law itself, as to take the administration of it into their own hands. To be juris utriusque doctor, or doctor of either law, civil and canon, was a common distinction. During Henry VIII.'s reign, lectures on the canon law were abolished in England, and with them the corresponding degree. Jealous as the English were of the encroachments of the civil law, they still more determinedly opposed that of the canon. What the powerful court of Rome had set its heart upon, however, could not be wholly resisted; but it was always a principle, that though the civil authorities of England might take laws from the ecclesiastical system, the canon law was never, in its own simple authority, to be obeyed within the realm. THE FEUDAL LAW. The feudal system and the Roman law may be said to have struggled for supremacy through nearly the whole of modern Europe. Of the influence of the latter we have already taken a cursory view. The former was an ingredient in the constitution of the continental and British monarchies. It was the source of those popular or aristocratic assemblies which shared more or less, according to circumstances, the government of the various states in which they existed; and it was thus the ostensible origin of the British parliament. The constitution of the German empire is essentially feudal; and the customs, or peculiar local laws of the various provinces of France, previously to the Revolution, were models from which the system was studied. The English law, especially that of real or landed property, is full of feudal usages, though their operation has often been checked. In Scotland, the forms of the feudal system may be found existing in almost original purity, though, as we shall hereafter see, they have been adapted, perhaps as far as they are capable of being so, to the wants of civilised times. An account of the rise and progress of the Roman law must, for obvious reasons, be far more satisfactory than any that can be given of the feudal system. The CHAMBERS'S INFORMATION FOR THE PEOPLE. former was (at least the greater part of it) the con- | despotism, which is frequently adduced as a disgusting struction of ingenious individuals, possessed of authority memorial of the barbarism of feudality. Of illustrato enforce their mandates on their fellow-beings. The tions of despotism, indeed, the feudal system is full. latter gradually rose out of circumstances and the Independently of its own peculiarities, it would have state of society. It was not devised by a powerful been impossible for any legal system to have passed which characterised the middle ages of Europe, without legislator, to be promulgated to a willing people; but through the scenes of rapine, blood, and barbarism it rose out of habits and events which took place in an age when there were no historians to record their pro- being the instrument of many iniquities. At the outgress. Hence the origin of the feudal system has been break of the French Revolution, which at first was little a fruitful subject of debate and theory; and in the more than an attack on the most offensive relics of absence of facts, it has often been necessary to resort feudalism in France, some of these horrors were dragged to moral deductions. It has been maintained by some from their dingy retreat in parchment records and that nothing can be more simple than the feudal sys-black-letter chronicles, to add to the frenzy of the tem; that it was a mere arrangement by which military times. Among other instances, was adduced that of service was given in exchange for land, and that many a feudal lord, on his return from the chase in winter, warm in the reeking trunk during the evening revel. half-civilised nations present instances of a similar disembowelling a vassal, that he might keep his feet The proper return of the vassal for his lands and the contract. Ingenious speculators have found the resemblance of the system in particular stages of the history of Greece and Rome, in Turkey, Persia, Hindoostan, protection of his lord was, as already stated, military But law, the quantity of service to be so given was regulated. and the Highlands of Scotland, among the aborigines service. Where this system was established as a fixed of North America, and in the Loo-choo Islands. however important may be the investigation of such A knight's fee imposed on the holder the duty of being analogies between the practice of mankind under diffe- forty days in the field for his superior, and the half or rent circumstances, as a part of the history of the human quarter of a knight's fee involved corresponding propormind, they throw but little light on the feudal system, tions of service. When fiefs came first into existence, the chief interest of which is to be found in the vastness it is probable that there was no other service worth posof the field which it covered, and the influence which sessing but the use of the strong arm. Conquered land was what he wanted; so that the one became the price it has exercised for so many centuries over the legal was what the chief possessed, men to fight more battles institutions of Europe. The essential elements of the feudal system were of the other. It was not always the case, however, that land, and military service given for the use of it, by the land was valuable for nothing but as the reward of vassal who held it, to the superior of whom it was held. fighting, and it was gradually bestowed for other conIt would be wrong to speak of either of these two par-siderations; yet so closely connected had the relation ties as the absolute proprietor of the lands; for in the more perfect stage of the system, each had his own peculiar privileges, with which the other had no right to interfere, except where the law permitted him. The vassal was not, in the general case, the slave of the superior. The duties and services he had to perform were regulated by compact or custom. On the other not the independent prohand, however, he was He could not convey prietor of the lands he held. them to a purchaser, nor could he pledge or bequeath them, without obtaining the sanction of the superior to the person to be substituted to him. Land was thus completely removed from the operation of commerce; and in those countries where the feudal system continued to exist, it was only by fictions and connivancesby bribing the superior, or getting the courts of law to compel him to give his consent-that sales and pledges could be effected. The lands held in this manner were termed fiefs. When they became hereditary, as they did apparently by custom, arising from the tacit consent of the parties interested, the superior was still presumed to give an assent to the change from father When the sucto son; and before he acknowledged the latter as his vassal, he exacted from him a fine. cessor was a minor, and thence unable to fulfil the military duties of the fief, the superior in some cases became his guardian, drawing the rents of the estate, and compelling him to marry whom he should point out, under a penalty which, it would seem, ought to amount to the sum which the guardian, or superior, could receive by selling the alliance. The superior's claim upon the estate during the vassal's minority became, like most other feudal exactions, fixed by usage, and seems in general to have amounted to one year's rent of the land. In some countries females could not In others, where their right was acknowsucceed. ledged, the superior claimed the privilege of assigning husbands to them; and exacted a fine, sometimes for admitting the husband as a new vassal, sometimes as the price for permitting him to marry his ward. The feudal system, like every other, had its degrees of goodness and badness. Where we find the milder features of the feudal law, the right of the lord over his female vassals, or the wives and children of his followers, was a mere tax; but where the darker influences of the system were at work, it gave legality to a licentious of a military tenure become with land, that any other Borough communities were another class to whom 54 commercial communities consisted of an exemption | petuity to their bounty by written deeds. From all these from the more vexatious of the feudal exactions, to be circumstances, the investiture of the vassal became a shortly noticed. These were generally conceded to them by the monarchs, as a counterpoise to the growing power of the feudal aristocracy; and within these sanctuaries commerce and civilisation created a power, by which both kings and nobility were effectually held in check. Among those who were placed in the position of feudal vassals to the seignior, or lord, were his own domestic servants, whose power and influence would be, to a certain extent, measured by that of their master. To perform the menial duties of his household, a Roman emperor employed a slave, just as a senator or a proconsul might do. The barbarian conquerors, however, gave lands to those who performed these functions; and the person who performed for Charlemagne the office of butler, valet, huntsman, or groom, got for his services the commodity most readily at his master's hands-portions of conquered territory. The services were thus performed as the consideration for feudal benefices. The menial servant of the monarch might have tenants and retainers under him; and thus the wages ennobled the functions. Hence we have had in modern Europe masters of the robes, grooms of the stole, masters of the buckhounds, masters of the horse, &c. held by the highest nobility of the realm. The graf, or land-steward of a district, was an important personage. Instead of attending to the letting of paddocks, and the rotation of crops, he was intrusted with the power of life and death over the inhabitants. The humble grieve, who has the management of a small landed estate in Scotland, and the shire-rieve, or sheriff, who performs high judicial functions in the same part of the empire, have divided, as it were, between them the original duties of the feudal officer from whom their names are derived. The same feudal origin may be as distinctly traced, on a larger scale, in the relation of master and servant in modern times. Servitude, however menial, when allied with feudal dependence, did not carry the same degradation as mere slavery; and in the opinion of some, the situation of the feudal attendant was higher than that of the menial servant of modern days, who freely gives his labour and attendance for a price. In Scotland, where feudal usages have lingered so long, it has been remarked that the relation between master and servant is of a more confidential nature than it is found to be in other parts of the country. While the line drawn between their positions is as clear as it can well be in a free country, the situation of the servant has a more than ordinary share of respectability attached to it, because, instead of being the individual servant of an individual master, he and his race are looked upon, to a certain extent, as the retainers of the house which he serves. On this point, indeed, an adherence to feudal usages in situations to which they are not applicable, has been productive of one of the greatest evils of modern society-the extent to which servants are kept, not for use, but as an ornamental evidence of wealth. Our lineal aristocracy continue to follow, so far as the usages of the day permit, the practice of their ancestors; and the gentlemen of plush and shoulder-knots are the representatives of those who wore buff jerkins, and handled the pike. The rich merchant and manufacturer must not be without the usual insignia of wealth; and thus a race, whom idleness and constant association with each other must deprave, are kept up among a bustling and active community, as if we lived in the days when the majority must either serve or starve. It has been remarked, that in republics such as Holland was, the wealth of rich individuals generally took the more ennobling direction of patronising the fine arts and literature. In the earlier ages of the feudal system, when there was much land to distribute, the natural features and boundaries were sometimes little known to those who gave it away. The persons who received it were aggrandising and ambitious, and not likely to yield to each other disputed portions. Above all, the conquerors were uneducated, and had little means of giving per very important and solemn affair. Investiture was |