nner pour ainsi
dire un lest a l'une pour la mettre en etat de resister a une autre,
c'est un chef-d'oeuvre de legislation que le hasard fait rarement, et
que rarement on laisse faire a la prudence. Un gouvernement despotique
au contraire saute pour ainsi dire aux yeux; il est uniforme partout:
comme il ne faut que des passions pour l'etablir tout le monde est bon
pour cela.--_Montesquieu, de l'Esprit des Loix_, liv. v. c. 14.

[26] Lord Bacon, Essay xxiv. Of Innovations.

[27] The reader will perceive that I allude to MONTESQUIEU, whom I never
name without reverence, though I shall presume, with humility, to
criticise his account of a government which he only saw at a distance.

[28] This principle is expressed by a writer of a very different
character from these two great philosophers; a writer, "_qu'on
n'appellera plus philosophe, mais qu'on appellera le plus eloquent des
sophistes_," with great force, and, as his manner is, with some
exaggeration.

Il n'y a point de principes abstraits dans la politique. C'est une
science des calculs, des combinaisons, et des exceptions, selon les
lieux, les tems, et les circonstances.--_Lettre de Rousseau au Marquis
de Mirabeau_.

The second proposition is true; but the first is not a just inference
from it.

[29] The casuistical subtleties are not perhaps greater than the
subtleties of lawyers;_ but the latter are innocent, and even
necessary_.--HUME's _Essays_, vol. ii. p. 558.

[30] "Law," said Dr. Johnson, "is the science in which the greatest
powers of understanding are applied to the greatest number of facts."
Nobody, who is acquainted with the variety and multiplicity of the
subjects of jurisprudence, and with the prodigious powers of
discrimination employed upon them, can doubt the truth of this
observation.

[31] Burke's Works, vol. iii. p. 134.

[32] On the intimate connexion of these two codes, let us hear the words
of Lord Holt, whose name never can be pronounced without veneration, as
long as wisdom and integrity are revered among men:--"Inasmuch _as the
laws of all nations are doubtless raised out of the ruins of the civil
law_, as all governments are sprung out of the ruins of the Roman
empire, it must be owned _that the principles of our law are borrowed
from the civil law_, therefore grounded upon the same reason in many
things."--12 _Mod._ 482.

FINIS.

J. MOYES, TOOK'S COURT, CHANCERY LANE.

End