occupy the chairs appointed for the readers-gentlemen who prepare themselves most thoroughly for their work; this vile prejudice against legal lectures still exists among our students for the Bar. It is fostered by causes and circumstances which it is here unnecessary to enumerate. This prejudice, however, should be discouraged by the advocates of the study of scientific law in this country. Is it of no advantage for the young man fresh from school or college, or for the middle aged man who is looking forward to the county magistracy or to the chairmanship of sessions, or for the Member of Parliament who looks to the Bar as a stepping-stone to office and promotion, to gain a clear systematic knowledge of the fundamental principles of that law, which is our best inheritance; and to have a careful analysis presented to him of some of those leading cases which stand like marks in the great unexplored forest to guide the footsteps of the traveller ? When we have before us the example of a philosopher constantly depressed in spirits and broken in heart from want of success as a teacher through causes entirely beyond his control-may not another question be put? Is it right to make the success of a great experiment at legal education depend upon the prejudice or the caprice of unfledged and inexperienced law students? A learned lecturer on a great subject like law, perhaps a Q.C., should certainly have no anxiety or fear lest, perchance, through the forgetfulness of some students to enter their names upon entrance the number in attendance upon his class should appear small to the "Legal Council of Education," and the whole scheme of legal education with its learned readers be deemed and adjudged a failure. If we are aiming at anything like an accurate knowledge of the science of law in this country assuredly this should not be. Apparent success is easily obtained. The Professor's Chair may be "rigged for a rise," like the Stock Market. It may be done as follows:-Let the Reader in his private class give a minimum of instruction and consume a minimum of time; let him in his public class think but little of his subject and every

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thing of style; let him strive to make his public lecture as pointed, pithy, and antithetical as an article in a popular review; let him entirely banish from his mind those anxious thoughts which made Mr. Austin feel that the teacher of a great subject like jurisprudence must be in earnest; let him polish his pebbles" so brightly that the fashionable languid student may be even induced to close the novel he has taken into the hall to read during the lecture, and he will be sure to succeed. It was just because Mr. Austin was too conscientious and great a man to do this that he failed. It was because his successor at the Middle Temple, Mr. George Long, was too honest and able a scholar to do this that he has been long since extinguished and has become an editor of the classics and a teacher of boys. It is because Sir James Mackintosh would not do this that a small volume in the shape of a book of devotions is the principle fruitage on this subject of his noble mind.

But let us return to our brief review of Mr. Austin's life. "Depressed by failure, unsustained by sympathy in his lofty and benevolent aspirations, or by the recognition of his value as a teacher; agitated by conflicting duties, and harassed by anxiety about the means of subsistence

he resolved to abandon a conflict in which he had met with nothing but defeat, and to seek an obscure but tranquil retreat on the continent where he might live upon the very small means at his disposal."

He quitted England and settled at Boulogne, his heart smarting under a sense of neglect and failure. It was indeed a truth that he expressed to one with whom he ever talked freely, when he said: "I was born out of time and place. I ought to have been a schoolman of the twelfth century—or a German professor." About a year and a half after his retirement from England a proposal was made to him by the Colonial Office, through his much esteemed and faithful friend Sir James Stephen, to proceed to the Island of Malta as Royal Commissioner, to inquire into the nature and extent of the grievances of which the natives of that island complained.

Two great men-Sir George Cornewall Lewis and Mr. Austin-both now no more, rendered to the Island of Malta services of the utmost moment, still remembered with lively and affectionate gratitude. Mr. Austin returned to England, and was preparing to enter upon his more peculiar province of legal and judicial reforms, when he was called to endure a new disappointment. Lord Glenelg had ceased to be in office, and Mr. Austin was abruptly dismissed. No reason was assigned for this, nor was his dismissal accompanied with a single word of recognition for his past services.

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He returned from Malta in 1838 so feeble in health that in 1840 his medical friends exhorted him to try the waters of Carlsbad. From these waters he received so much benefit that he determined to return to them, and the summers of 1841, 1842, and 1843 were spent there. The winters he spent at Dresden and Berlin. At Dresden he wrote for the Edinburgh Review," his answer to Dr. List's violent attack on the doctrine of Free Trade. In 1844 he removed to Paris. In that year an earnest appeal was made to him to publish a second edition on "The Province of Jurisprudence." Letters from friends-Mrs. Austin says-and even from strangers, arrived, lamenting the impossibility of getting a copy, and setting forth the constantly increasing reputation of the book." At this period he seems partly to have resolved to re-cast and re-publish his great work, under the title of "The Principles and Relations of Jurisprudence and Ethics." This intention was announced to Sir William Erle, the present Chief-Justice of the Common Pleas, the companion of his early studies, the beloved and faithful friend of every period of his life. In the fragment of a letter still preserved by the Chief-Justice, Mr. Austin says: "I intend to show the relations of positive morality and law (mos and jus), and of both to their common standard or test; to show that there are principles and distinctions common to all systems of law (or that law is the subject of an abstract science); to show the possibility and conditions of codification; to exhibit a short system of a body

of law arranged in a natural order; and to show that the English Law, in spite of its great peculiarities, might be made to conform to that order much more closely than is imagined." He had finally established himself in Paris when the Revolution of 1848 once more uprooted him. After this event he remained only a few months in Paris, watching the course of events when, submitting to a severe pecuniary loss, he returned to England and took a cottage at Weybridge in Surrey, near enough to London for convenience, and for occasional visits from his only child, and far enough to enable him to enjoy the retirement he coveted. Here he spent the last twelve years of his life in otium cum dignitate—his health improved, surrounded by the charms of a rustic home, with the guardian angel of his life for his solace and support. Of Mr. Austin M. Guizot said, "L'etait un des hommes les plus distingues, un des esprits les plus rares, et un des cœurs les plus noble que j'ai connus. Quel dommage, qu'il n'ait pas su employer tout ce qu'il avait, et montrer tout ce qu'il valait!" " Quel dommage" indeed, in this land of wealth and office and power! But regrets are now too late. The wisdom that would have instructed us is dumb, and the hand that could have penned pages of priceless value to us and to future generations lies palsied in the tomb. Mrs. Austin properly informs us that it was not through the wilful negligence of her husband that we have lost this rich inheritance. She says: "In giving this short account of his troubled life and baffled designs, my object has only been to show what were the circumstances by which he was forced out of the tract on which he had entered, and which his whole mind and soul were engaged, and why it was that he seemed to abandon the science to which he had devoted his singular powers with so much ardour and intensity."

When in 1861 Mrs. Austin reproduced the lectures of her late husband, she made the following statement. "The volume now re-published includes, as the author's preface states, the first ten of the lectures read at the London Uni

versity; which, though divided into that number for delivery, were," in obedience to the affinity of the topics, "reduced by him to six."

"There remained unprinted, all the rest of the lectures given at the London University. These I propose to print exactly as he left them. I shall alter nothing. There is also the short course delivered at the Inner Temple. But as this necessarily went in a great measure over ground which had been traversed in the earlier courses, it does not appear to the friends I have consulted that it will afford matter for a separate volume. It is thought that it will be expedient to collate these with the earlier and far more numerous lectures, and to insert, as notes or appendix, any matter which is not found in these. The state of the manuscript seems to show that the author meant to incorporate them with the former; or rather, to employ both in the combination of the great work he meditated.

"Lastly, I find a considerable mass of papers on Codification; an Essay on Interpretation; the 'Excursus on Analogy, referred to at the beginning of Lecture V. in the present volume; and the commencement of a project of a Criminal Code." Thus wrote Mrs. Austin in 1861. Since that time she has been constantly occupied in preparing these materials for the press. The collating of the course of lectures delivered. at the Inner Temple was rendered unnecessary by the fact that on a nearer examination it was found that the author had marked with his own hand the parts of the Inner Temple course which were to be added to, or substituted for, passages in the earlier lectures. The lectures as now printed in the second and third volumes are the two courses consolidated by the author himself. It appears that there were some passages through which Mr. Austin had drawn a faint pencil line. These passages are mostly retained, and are distinguished by brackets. We have also the notes on Criminal Law and those on Codification in their original though rough and imperfect state, so much so, that Mrs. Austin says, "I should not have

VOL. XVII.-NO. XXXIII.

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