We glory in about sixty whose busts and statues may occupy what are now the "deep solitudes and awful cells" in our national gallery. Our literary men of eminence are happily more numerous than the political or the warlike, or both together. There is only one class of them which might be advantageously excluded, namely, the theological; and my reasons are these. First, their great talents were chiefly employed on controversy; secondly, and consequently, their images would excite dogmatical discord. Every sect of the Anglican Church, and every class of dissenters, complaining of undue preferences. Painture and sculpture lived in the midst of corruption, lived throughout it, and seemed indeed to draw vitality from it, as flowers the most delicate from noxious air; but they collapsed at the searching breath of free inquiry, and could not abide persecution. The torch of Philosophy never kindled the suffocating fagot, under whose smoke Theology was mistaken for Religion. Theology had, until now, been speculative and quiescent: she abandoned to Philosophy these humbler qualities: instead of allaying and dissipating, as Philosophy had always done, she excited and she directed animosities. Oriental in her parentage, and keeping up her wide connections in that country, she acquired there all the artifices most necessary to the furtherance of her designs: among the rest was ventriloquism, which she quite perfected, making her words seem to sound from above and from below and from every side around. Ultimately, when men had fallen on their faces at this miracle, she assumed the supreme power. Kings were her lackeys, and nations the dust under her palfrey's hoof. By her sentence Truth was gagged, scourged, branded, cast down on the earth in manacles; and Fortitude, who had stood at Truth's side, was fastened with nails and pulleys to the stake. I would not revive by any images, in the abode of the graceful and the gentle Arts, these sorrowful reminiscences. The vicissitudes of the world appear to be bringing round again the spectral Past. Let us place great men between it and ourselves: they all are tutelar: not the warrior and the statesman only; not only the philosopher; but also the historian who follows them step by step, and the poet who secures us from peril and dejection by his counter-charm. Philosophers in most places are unwelcome: but there is no better reason why Shaftesbury and Hobbes should be excluded from our gallery, than why Epicurus should have been from Cicero's or Zeno from Lucullus's. Of our sovereigns, I think Alfred, Cromwell, and William III alone are eligible; and they, because they opposed successfully the subverters of the laws. Three viceroys of Ireland will deservedly be placed in the same receptacle; Sir John Perrot, Lord Chesterfield, and (in due time) the last Lord-Deputy. One Speaker, one only, of the Parliament; he without whom no Parliament would be now existing; he who declared to Henry IV. that until all public grievances were removed, no subsidy should be granted. The name of this Speaker may be found in Rapin; English historians talk about facts, forgetting men.
Admirals and generals are numerous and conspicuous. Drake, Blake, Rodney, Jervis, Nelson, Collingwood; the subduer of Algiers beaten down for the French to occupy: and the defender of Acre, the first who defeated, discomfited, routed, broke, and threw into shameful flight, Bonaparte. Our generals are Marlborough, Peterborough, Wellington, and that successor to his fame in India, who established the empire that was falling from us, who achieved in a few days two arduous victories, who never failed in any enterprise, who accomplished the most difficult with the smallest expenditure of blood, who corrected the disorders of the military, who gave the soldier an example of temperance, the civilian of simplicity and frugality, and whose sole (but exceedingly great) reward, was the approbation of our greatest man.
With these come the statesmen of the Commonwealth, the students of Bacon, the readers of Philip Sidney, the companions of Algernon, the precursors of Locke and Newton. Opposite to them are Chaucer, Spenser, Shakspeare, Milton; lower in dignity, Dryden, Pope, Gray, Goldsmith, Cowper, Scott, Burns, Shelley, Southey, Byron, Wordsworth; the author of Hohenlinden and the Battle of the Baltic; and the glorious woman who equaled these, two animated works in her Ivan and Casabianca. Historians have but recently risen up among us: and long be it before, by command of Parliament, the chisel grates on the brow of a Napier, a Grote, and Macaulay!
WALTER SAVAGE LANDOR.
[From the Spectator.]
JURISPRUDENCE OF THE MOGULS: THE PANDECTS OF AURUNGZEBE.[4]
THE Government of British India have not neglected to countenance the study of the indigenous and other systems of law which they found established on acquiring possession of the country. Warren Hastings was the first to recognize the value of such knowledge; and to his encouragement, if not to his incitement, we are indebted for the compilation of Hindoo law translated by Halbed, Jones, Colebrooke, Macnaghten, Hamilton, and a pretty numerous body of accomplished men, of whom Mr. Baillie is the most recently enrolled laborer in the vineyard, have carried on the good work. More comprehensive and accurate views of Hindoo law have gradually been developed, and the more advanced and more influential system of Mahometan jurisprudence has also shared in the attention of European students. There is, however, still much to be done in this field of inquiry; as a few remarks on the nature of the present publication, and the source whence its materials are derived, will show.
The law of Mahometan jurists is for India pretty much what the Roman law is for Scotland and the Continental nations of Europe. Savigny has shown how, throughout all the territories formerly included within the limits of the Roman Empire, a large amount of Roman legal doctrines and forms of procedure continued to be operative after the Empire's subversion. The revival of the study of the Roman law, as embodied in the compilations of Justinian, by the doctors of the school of Bologna, augmented and systematized these remnants of Roman jurisprudence, and extended their application to countries which (like great part of Germany) had never been subjected to the sway of Rome. In like manner, throughout that part of India which was permanently subdued and organized by the Mogul dynasty, and also those parts in which minor Islamitic states were established, the organization of the courts of justice, and the legal opinions of the individuals who officiated in them, necessarily introduced a large amount of Mahometan jurisprudence. This element of the law of India was augmented and systematized by the writings of private jurists, and by compilations undertaken by command of princes. As with the Roman jurisprudence in Europe, so with Mahometan jurisprudence in India, only so much of its doctrines and forms could at any time be considered to possess legal force as had been reenacted by the local sovereigns, or introduced by judges in the form of decisions. A systematic knowledge of the whole body of Mahometan law was important to the Indian lawyer, as enabling him more thoroughly to understand the system, and its various isolated doctrines; but the whole body of that law was at no time binding in India. Since the establishment of British sway, only so much of the Mahometan law as has kept its ground in the practice of the courts, or has been reenacted by the "regulations" or "ordinances" of the Anglo-Indian Government, is law; the rest is only valuable as the "antiquities of the law," which help to trace the origin of what survives, and thereby throw light upon what in it is obscure or doubtful.