sign, or fail in its execution, an uncorrupt people will still confide in him. They will continue to repose on his general wisdom and in, tegrity; will regard him as a kind and watchful father; yet, tho' wise, not infallible.

He will look forward, rather than to what is past, and be more zealous to select and reward those who may do well, than to prosecute those whom, in his own opinion, he may think delinquents.

His principles and conduct, as they will be hated by vile, so they will be derided by narrow minds, which cannot enlarge their conceptions beyond the beaten track of present practice. Prince Maurice was ridiculed in his first attempts, for those very expedients by which he drove the Spaniards out of his country.

If his little or no influence in parliament be objected to him, he will answer as Henry the Great did with regard to Rochelle: I do all I desire to do there, in doing nothing but what ought.'

(

I

He will practise that double ceconomy, which is so rarely found, or even understood.

I

" mean not only that inferior œconomy, which consists in the management of the receipts and issues of the public revenue; but that superior economy, which consists in contriving the great schemes of negotiation and action.'

To fulfil this great purpose, he will search for men capable of serving the public, without regard to wealth, family, parliamentary interest, or connection.

He will despise those idle claims of priority of rank, or seniority in station, when they are unsupported by services performed in that rank and station: he will search for those, wherever they are to be found, whose active spirits and su perior capacity promise advantage to the public.

He will not abuse this power indulged to him, of superseding superior rank, by preferring his own favourites. If he finds the appearance of ability and worth among the friends or dependents of his enemies, he will trust them with the execution of his most im portant designs; on the success of which, even his own character may depend.

Having no motive but the wel. fare of his country, if he can. not accomplish that by such measures as his heart approves, he

will not struggle for a continuance in power, but bravely and peaceably resign.

Whether such a character as is here delineated may ever arise, is a question which it were superfluous for the writer to determine: if ever such a minister appears, he will best be seen by his own lustre.

There is another character, belonging, indeed, to a much lower walk in life, which might be no less strange than that which is here delineated. I mean the character of a political writer; not only intentionally, but in fact impartial.

This is a character which hath never yet existed; nor, probably, will ever appear in our own country. However, let us attempt a sketch of this ideal portrait, for the use of those who may aspire to impartiality; and consider by what characteristics he would be distin 'guished.'

He would choose an untrodden path of politics, where no partyman ever dared to enter.

He would be disliked by partybigots of every denomination; who, while they applauded one page of his work, would execrate the next.

The undisguised freedom and boldness of his manner, would please the brave, astonish the weak, disgust and confound the guilty.

Every rank, party, and profession, would acknowledge he had done tolerable justice to every rank, party, and profession, their own only excepted.

He would be called arrogant by those who call every thing arrogance that is not servility.

If he writ in a period when

his country was declining; while he pointed out the means from whence alone honest bape could arise, he would be charged by scribbling sycophants with plunging a nation in despair.

While he pointed out the abuses of freedom, and their fatal effects, he would be blackened by designing whispers, as the enemy of freedom itself.

The worthless of every profession would be his sworn enemies; but most of all, the worthless of his own profession.

As he would be reviled and defamed by the dissolute great, without cause, so he would be applauded by an honest people beyond his deservings:

Tho' his abilities were small, yet the integrity of his intention would make amends for the mediocrity of his talents.

As such a writer could have little pretensions to literary fame, so he would not be intoxicated with the fumes of literary vanity; but would think with Sheffield, that

I was not much afraid; for once or twice
I was about to speak, and tell him plainly,

The self same sun that shines upon his palace,

prospect we now have, that one learned foundation at least will fully answer the intention of the founder. The discourse before us is a solid,

tage,

But looks on both alike.

His free and unconquered spirit would look down with contempt on views of interest, when they came in competition with views of duty.

Nay, were he called to so severe a trial, he would even dare to make the greatest and the rarest of all honest sacrifices, that of friendship itself, to truth and vir

tue.

Should the sense of his duty to his country, determine him to a farther prosecution of his labours, he would say,

If such his fate, do thou, fair Truth, descend,

And watchful guard him in an honest end; Kindly severe, instruct his equal line,

To court no friend, nor own a foe, but thine.

But if his giddy eye should vainly quit

Thy sacred paths, to run the maze of wit;
If his apostate heart should e'er incline
To offer incense at Corruption's shrine,
Urge, urge thy pow'r; the black attempt con-

found;

taining at once an history of our law, a just panegyric on it, arguments for putting the study of it under proper regulations, and a spirited persuasive to make that study, so regulated, a considerable part of academical education, especially

for

persons of rank. After strongly urging this to gentlemen in general, he particularly applies to the nobility.

"What is said of our gentlemen in general, and the propriety of their application to the study of the laws of their country, will hold equally strong, or still stronger, with regard to the nobility of this realm, except only in the article of serving upon juries. But, in. stead of this, they have several peculiar provinces of far greater con. sequence and concern; being not only by birth hereditary counsel. lors of the crown, and judges upon their honour of the lives of their brother peers, but also arbiters of the property of all their fellowsubjects, and that in the last resort. In this their judicial capacity, they are bound to decide the nicest and most critical points of law; to examine and correct such errors as have escaped the most experienced sages of the profession, the lord keeper, and the judges of the courts at Westminster. Their sentence is final, decisive, irrevocable: no appeal, no correction, not even a review can be had: and to their determination, whatever it be, the inferior courts of justice must conform; otherwise the rule of property would no longer be uniform and steady.

Should

Should a judge in the most subordinate jurisdiction be deficient in the knowledge of the law, it would reflect infinite contempt upon him. self, and disgrace upon those who employ him; and yet the consequence of his ignorance is compa. ratively very trifling and small: his judgment may be examined, and his errors rectified by other courts; but how much more serious and affecting is the case of a superior judge, if, without any skill in the laws, he will boldly venture to decide a question upon which the welfare and subsistence of whole families may depend!-where the chance of his judging right, or wrong, is barely equal; and where, if he chances to judge wrong, he does an injury of the most alarming nature; an injury without possibility of redress!

Yet, vast as this trust is, it can no where be so properly reposed as in the noble hands where our excellent constitution has placed it; and therefore placed it, because, from the independence of their fortune, and the dignity of their station, they are presumed to employ that leisure which is the consequence of both, in attaining a more extensive knowledge of the laws than persons of an inferior rank; and 'because the founders of our policy relied upon that delicacy of sentiment so peculiar to noble birth; which, as on the one hand it will prevent either interest or affection from interfering in questions of right, so on the other it will bind a peer in honour (an obligation which the law esteems equal to another's oath), to be master of those points upon which it is his birth-right to decide.

The Roman pandects will furnish

us with a piece of history not unapplicable to our present purpose. Servius Sulpicius, a gentleman of the patrician order, and a celebrated orator, had occasion to take the opinion of Quintus Mutius Scaevola, the oracle of the Roman law; but for want of being conversant in that science, could not so much as understand even the technical terms which his counsel was obliged to make use of; upon which Mutius Scaevola could not forbear to upbraid him with this memorable reproof, "that it was a shame for a patrician, a nobleman, and an orator, to be ignorant of the law under which he lived.' Which reproof made so deep an impression on Sulpicius, that he immediately applied himself to the study of the law; wherein he arrived to that proficiency, that he left behind him about a hundred and four score volumes of his own compiling upon the subject; and became, in the opinion of Cicero, a much more complete lawyer than even Mutius Scaevola himself."

The cause of the neglect of the study of the common law in our universities, he delivers thus:

"That ancient collection of unwritten maxims and customs, which is called the common law, how. ever compounded, or from whatever fountains derived, had subsisted immemorially in this kingdom; and though somewhat altered and impaired by the violence of the times, had in great measure weathered the rude shock of the Norman conquest, This had endeared it to the people in general, as well because its decisions were universally known, as because it was found to be exGg 3 cellently

cellently adapted to the genius of the English nation. In the know. ledge of this law, consisted great part of the learning of those dark it was ages: then taught, says Mr. Selden, in the monasteries, in the universities, and in the fa, milies of the principal nobility. The clergy in particular, as they then engrossed almost every other branch of learning, so, like their predecessors the British druids, they were peculiarly remarkable for their proficiency in the study of the law. Nullus clericus nisi causidicus, is the character given of them soon after the conquest by William of Malmsbury. The judges therefore were usually created out of the sacred order, as was likewise the case among the Normans; and all the inferior offices were supplied by the lower clergy, which has occasioned their successors to be denominated clerks to this day.

But the common law of England, being not committed to writing, but only handed down by tradition, use, and experience, was not so heartily relished by the foreign clergy, who came over hither in shoals during the reign of the Conqueror and his two sons, and were utter strangers to our constitution as well as our language; *and an accident, which soon after happened, had nearly completed its ruin. A copy of Justinian's pandects being newly discovered at Amalfi, soon brought the civil law into vogue all over the west of Europe, where before it was quite laid aside, and in a manner forgotten though some traces of its authority remained in Italy and the eastern provinces of the empire. This now became, in

a particular manner, the favourite of the popish clergy, who bor rowed the method, and many of the maxims of their canon law from this original. The study of it was introduced into several universities abroad, particularly that of Bologna; where exercises were performed, lectures read, and degrees conferred in this faculty, as in other branches of science: and many nations on the continent, just then beginning to recover from the convulsions consequent upon the overthrow of the Roman empire, and settling by degrees into peaceable forms of govern, ment, adopted the civil law (being the best written system then extant), as the basis of their several constitutions, blending and interweaving it among their own feudal customs, in some places with a more extensive, in others a more confined au, thority.

Nor was it long before the prevailing mode of the times reached England; for Theobald, a Norman abbot, being elected to the see of Canterbury, and extremely addicted to this new study, brought over with him in his retinue many learned proficients therein, and among the rest Roger, surnamed Vacarius, whom he placed in the university of Oxford, to teach it to the people of this country. But it did not meet with the same easy reception in England, where a mild and ration. al system of laws had long been established, as it did upon the continent; and though the monkish clergy (devoted to the will of a foreign primate) received it with eagerness and zeal, yet the laity, who were more interested to preserve the old constitution, and had

already