real purpose of the law. It is true that, even in this case, another purpose of the law is punishment; but the law is willing to forego that object, provided the injured person consents to waive it. The right, therefore, of the injured person, in this particular class of injuries, might without absurdity be treated as the principal object. Being a right availing only against determinate persons namely, the offender or his representatives-it is a right in personam, or, in the language of the classical jurists, an obligatio; and its particular nature afforded no reason why it should not, in an arrangement in all other respects dictated by the exigencies of the civil code, take its place where alone, in such an arrangement, a place could be assigned to it-namely, under the general head of Jura in Personam, as a sub-species. But this, though it accounts for the place assigned in the Roman law to obligationes quæ ex ' delicto nascuntur,' forms no reason for applying the same arrangement to the whole law of wrongs and remedies, and making it the basis of a division including the entire field of the corpus juris crimes, punishments, civil and criminal procedure among the rest.

·

After treating of dominium in the narrower sense in which it is opposed to servitus-a right to use or deal with a thing in a manner which, though not unlimited, is indefinite, as distinguished from a right to use or deal with a thing in a manner not only limited but definite-Mr. Austin proceeds to treat of rights limited or unlimited as to duration; of rights vested and contingent; and of dominium or property in the more emphatic sense in which it denotes the largest right which the law recognises over a thing-a right not only indefinite in extent and unlimited in duration, but including the power of aliening the thing from the person who would otherwise take it by succession. The Lectures finally break off, where they were interrupted by ill health, in the middle of the important subject of Title. There is no finer specimen of analytical criticism in these volumes than the comment (in the Notes to the Tables) on the erroneous and confused notions which the Roman jurists connected with their distinction between Titulus and Modus Acquirendi.

It cannot be too deeply regretted that, through the combined effect of frequently-recurring attacks of depressing illness, and feelings of discouragement which are vividly reproduced in the touching preface of the editor, Mr. Austin did not complete his Lectures in the form of a systematic treatise. We are fully persuaded that, had he done so, the result would have proved

those feelings of discouragement to be ill grounded. The success of the first volume, by no means the most attractive part of the Course, is a proof that even then there was in the more enlightened part of the legal profession a public prepared for such speculations; a public not numerous, but intellectually competent-the only one which Mr. Austin desired. Had he produced a complete work on jurisprudence, such as he, and perhaps only he in his generation, was capable of accomplishing, he would have attracted to the study every young student of law who had a soul above that of a mere trader in legal learning; and many non-professional students of social and political philosophy (a class now numerous, and eager for an instruction which unhappily for the most part does not yet exist) would have been delighted to acquire that insight into the rationale of all legal systems, without which the scientific study of politics can scarcely be pursued with profit, since juristical ideas meet, and, if ill understood, confuse the student at every turning and winding in that intricate subject. Before the end of the period to which Mr. Austin's life was prolonged, he might have stood at the head of a school of scientific jurists, such as England has now little chance of soon possessing. But the remains which he has left, fragmentary though much of them be, are a mine of material for the future. He has shown the He has shown the way, solved many of the leading problems, and made the path comparatively smooth for those who follow. Among the younger lawyers of the present time, there must surely be several (independently of the brilliant example of Mr. Maine) who possess the capacity and can acquire the knowledge required for following up a work so well begun; and whoever does so will find, in the notes and miscellaneous papers which compose the latter part of the third volume, a perfect storehouse of helps and suggestions.

It remains to say a few words on the question of execution. A work left unfinished, and never really composed as a book, however mature and well-digested its thoughts, is not a proper subject for literary criticism. It is from the first volume only that we are able to judge what, in point of composition, Mr. Austin would have made it. But all the merits of expression which were found in that volume reappear in quite an equal degree in the remainder, and even, as far as the case admitted, in the looser memoranda. The language is pure and classical English, though here and there with something of an archaic tinge. In expression as in thought, precision is always his first object. It would probably have been so, whatever had been the subject treated; but on one in which the great and fatal

hindrance to rational thought is vague and indefinite phrases, this was especially imperative. Next after precision, clearness is his paramount aim; clearness alike in his phraseology and in the structure of his sentences. His preeminent regard to this requisite gives to his style a peculiarity the reverse of agreeable to many readers, since he prefers, on system, the repetition of a noun substantive, or even of an entire clause, in order to dispense with the employment of the little words it and them, which he is quite right in regarding as one of the most frequent sources of ambiguity and obscurity in composition. If there be some excess here, it is the excess of a good quality, and is a scarcely appreciable evil, while a fault in the contrary direction would have been a serious one. In other respects Mr. Austin's style deserves to be placed very high. His command of apt and vigorous expression is remarkable, and when the subject permits, there is an epigrammatic force in the turn of his sentences which makes them highly effective.

Some readers may be offended at the harsh words which he now and then uses, not towards persons, to whom he is always, at the lowest, respectful, but towards phrases and modes of thought which he considers to have a mischievous tendency. He frequently calls them absurd,' and applies to them such epithets as 'jargon,' 'fustian,' and the like. But it would be a great injustice to attribute these vehement expressions to dogmatism, in any bad sense of the word-to undue confidence in himself, or disdain of opponents. They flowed from the very finest part of his character. He was emphatically one who hated the darkness and loved the light. He regarded unmeaning phrases and confused habits of thinking as the greatest hindrance to human intellect, and through it to human virtue and happiness. And, thinking this, he expressed the thought with corresponding warmth, for it was one of his noble qualities that while, whatever he thought, he thought strongly, his feelings always went along with his thoughts. The same perfervidum ingenium made him apply the same strong expressions to any mistake which he detected in himself. In a passage of the Lectures*, he says, referring to a former lecture, I said so and so. But that remark was absurd; for it would prove,' &c. And in an extemporaneous passage, which some of his hearers may remember, he rated himself soundly for an erroneous opinion which he had expressed, and conjectured, as he might have done respecting a complete stranger to him, what might have been the causes that led him into so gross a misapprehension.

6

* Vol. iii. p. 24.

VOL. CXVIII. NO. CCXLII.

I I

That the occasional strength of his denunciations had its source in a naturally enthusiastic character, combined in him with an habitually calm and deliberate judgment, is shown by the corresponding warmth which marks his expressions of eulogium. He was one in whom the feelings of admiration and veneration towards persons and things that deserve it, existed in a strength far too rarely met with among mankind. It is from such feelings that he speaks of 'the godlike Turgot;' that, in mentioning Locke*, he commemorates that matchless power of precise and 'just thinking, with that religious regard for general utility and truth, which marked the incomparable man who emancipated human reason from the yoke of mystery and jargon;' that he does homage, in many passages of the Lectures, to the great intellectual powers of Thibaut and Von Savigny, and that, in a note at page 248. of his first volume, he devotes to Hobbes perhaps the noblest vindication which that great but unpopular thinker has ever received. That Mr. Austin was capable of similar admiration for the great qualities of those from whose main scheme of thought he dissents, and whose authority he is oftener obliged to thrust aside than enabled to follow, is shown in many passages, and in none more than in some remarks on Kant's Metaphysical Principles of the Science of Law.'t We may add that his praises are not only warm, but (probably without exception) just; that such severity as is shown, is shown towards doctrines, very rarely indeed towards persons, and is never, as with vulgar controversialists, a substitute for refutation, but always and every where a consequence of it.

* Province of Jurisprudence, vol. i. p. 150.

A treatise darkened by a philosophy which, I own, is my aversion, but abounding, I must needs admit, with traces of rare sagacity. He has seized a number of notions, complex and difficult in the extreme, with distinctness and precision which are marvellous considering the scantiness of his means. For, of positive systems of law he had scarcely the slightest tincture, and the knowledge of the principles of jurisprudence which he borrowed from other writers, was drawn, for the most part, from the muddiest sources; from books about the fustian which is styled the "Law of Nature."' (Vol. iii. p. 167.)

ART. VI-1. The History of the Royal Academy of Arts from its Foundation in 1768 to the Present Time, with Biographical Notices of all its Members. By WILLIAM SANDBY. In two volumes. London: 1862.

2. Report from the Council of the Royal Academy to the General Assembly of Academicians. 1860.

3. Report of the Royal Commission appointed to enquire into the Present Position of the Royal Academy in relation to the Fine Arts, together with Minutes of Evidence, &c. Presented to both Houses of Parliament by command of Her Majesty.

1863.

MR. SANDBY'S History of the Royal Academy was published under an unlucky star. It contains a large quantity of curious and instructive materials, not always employed with the taste and skill the subject required, but abundant enough to fill a great deficiency in the annals of British Art. It directed attention to the services which the Royal Academy has rendered to the arts and to artists in this country, at a time when some merited censure had been combined with a vast deal of unmerited unpopularity to disparage the most important of our art-institutions. It anticipated to a considerable extent the inquiry which has since been carried on under the auspices of a Royal Commission. Such a work was certainly needed to satisfy and inform the public, and to do justice to the Academy itself. Mr. Sandby bears a name which has been connected with the institution from its foundation, for Paul Sandby (we presume his grandfather) was one of the original Academicians named in 1768 by King George III., and Thomas Sandby the architect was also a member of the body. But, unluckily, in his desire to render the biographical notices of living Academicians as complete as possible, this writer was supposed to have committed a literary trespass on the rights of others who had laboured in the same field; and as it appeared that some portions of the work might be made the subject of proceedings in a court of equity, the whole impression was withdrawn from circulation as soon as this discovery was made, and it is probable that few copies of the work in its original form are in existence. The book, therefore, may be said to have passed out of the sphere of criticism: like the newly-born martyr of the Roman poet,

Vitæ

Hoc habuit tantum, possit ut ille mori.'

The historical facts that it contained must be sought for in