For tho' 'tis base instead of pure,
Alas it ever will endure."
Upon this passage is the following confirmative note: "Cheating will always prevail, in defiance of all human laws, for it cannot be avoided, but so long as contracts be suffered, many offences shall follow thereby."—(Doctor and Student, c. 3.) In buying and selling, the law of nations connives at some cunning and overreaching in respect of the price. By the civil law, a just price is said to be that, whereby neither the buyer nor seller is injured above one moiety of the true and common value; and in this case the person injured shall not be relieved by rescinding the sale, for he must impute it to his own imprudence and indiscretion.
The origin of Fee-tail estates:
"The expression, fee-tail, was borrowed from the feudists, among whom it signified any mutilated or truncated inheritance from which the heirs general were cut off, being derived from the barbarous word taliare to cut.—(2 Blac. Comm. 112.)
Fines and Recoveries (as fund and refund,) are like the poles, arctic and attractive. Of the latter is the following quid-pro-quo anecdote:
"A physician of an acrimonious disposition, and having a thorough hatred of lawyers, was in company with a barrister, and in the course of conversation, reproached the profession of the latter with the use of phrases utterly unintelligible. 'For example,' said he, 'I never could understand what you lawyers mean by docking an entail.' 'That is very likely,' answered the lawyer, 'but I will explain it to you; it is doing what you doctors never consent to—suffering a recovery.'
Among the notes to Rights and Titles is the following:
"Master Mason, of Trinity College, sent his pupil to another of the fellows to borrow a book of him, who told him, 'I am loth to lend books out of my chamber, but if it please thy tutor to come and read upon it in my chamber, he shall as long as he will.' It was winter, and some days after the same fellow sent to Mr. Mason to borrow his bellows, but Mr. Mason said to his pupil, 'I am loth to lend my bellows out of my chamber, but if thy tutor would come and blow the fire in my chamber, he shall as long as he will.'
In the next page is a note on the Nature of Property, in the perspicuous style of a master-mind: