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from it, as the connection was wholly personal. This was often entered into by the weaker party as an obligation to pay a certain sum for the protection of alodial property; and was (Du CangeSalvamentum) a common resource of the monasteries. This practice then, if any, of commendation was the common link between the clientage of the Romans and the feudal system of the Barbarians. We wonder that Mr. Spence should in great part have overlooked its contemporary existence with the latter system; for though even this does not identify the two institutions, it wears a more plausible appearance of doing so than many circumstances on which he has insisted.

But the arguments on which he appears principally to rely for the maintenance of this part of his position, are the well known facts that the Roman soldiery in the frontier provinces received lands upon condition of holding themselves in constant readiness for the public defence, and that when they did not enjoy such possessions, they were entitled to quarters upon the provincials, with the use, for the time, of one third of the house with its furniture, whenever they were thus billetted. It will scarcely be believed that, upon this defined and restricted right of quarters, in which the soldier was expressly forbidden to include and demand either provisions or fuel, Mr. Spence rests the following deduction. The provincials were bound, whilst under the Roman dominion, to afford hospitalily to the Roman armies when sent amongst them, according to fixed and determinate rules. The Goths and Burgundians, who performed the same office of protection from foreign aggression which the provincials had formerly experienced from the Roman legions, claimed a similar recompense: but instead of mere temporary quarters, they claimed, by right of hospitality, a proportion of the lands and slaves of the provincials to be assigned to them in ownership.' (p. 242). A most gentle demand of hospitality! But one would imagine that the difference between a temporary and barren occupation, and a perpetual ownership, should constitute a sufficient distinction in any case.

Mr. Spence has principally misled himself, as others have done before him, by the recollection of the military service to which Roman soldiers receiving lands were pledged. This is his main proof of the resemblance of the Roman and feudal tenures; and it may be encountered by an old and most conclusive refutation:-that the Roman military colonists were bound to the state, and not to an individual lord. No two things can be more opposite than the simple and citizen-like condition by which these soldiers were to hold their lands, and the long gradation and mutual duties of the feudal system, descending from the sovereign to the great feudatories, from these to their own followers, and again often from the latter to the lowest vassal to whom a single acre might be carved out by the last process of sub-infeudation. In fact, it was this graduated tenure of land in exchange for military service,

which characterized the feudal system so peculiarly, that, as it appears to us, no other origin can possibly with reason be assigned to it, than the condition in which the barbarian conquerors found themselves in their new states. It is easy to find partial resemblances to it not only in the practices of Roman military colonization and clientage, but in the family ties of the Highland clans, and the military obligations of Asiatic land owners, to their chieftains: but however such apparent analogies from the practice of various countries may deceive for a time, we are convinced, with a great authority, that they will all vanish when they come to be closely examined.

This slight exposition of Mr. Spence's opinions on the feudal institutions will probably be sufficient to enable the reader to judge of his systematic determination to see a Roman origin in all the laws and customs of the barbarian nations. This disposition appears to us to have occasioned the only errors and defects in his book; and it certainly has led him into some wrong impressions and inconsistencies. Thus (p. 216) he broadly declares that the institutions of the Germans, as handed down to us by Tacitus, exhibit little that is peculiar, and differ in but a trifling degree from those of all rude nations. This opinion he may have deemed sufficient to guide us to the conclusion that there was no particular reason why they should not readily receive the impression of their future character from the more civilized people whom they subdued. But when Mr. Spence made this sweeping assertion, did he remember the high consideration enjoyed by woman among those nations?-a condition totally distinct from the characteristic of all other savage nations in this respect. Here the Germans differed totally and clearly in feeling and action from the people among whom they came; and the result is most remarkable in its connection with our author's subject, though he has totally neglected it. If the Barbarians (as in deference to the classical nomenclature we are content to call them) had adopted the Roman manners and customs, and among them naturally the Roman estimate of the place of woman in society, what contradictory process could ever have raised her into the idol of chivalry, or given birth to the chivalric spirit itself?

Sometimes our author's rigid regard for truth and accuracy, leads him into confessions very inconvenient for his theory: as when he remarks (p. 311) that all the nations, excepting the Goths, allowed the Romans, if such was their wish, to live under the Roman law.' We know that they did so; and moreover that this permission, in France especially, perpetuated for many centuries the distinction between the Gaul or Roman and the Frank. But how does an opposition of the Roman and barbarian codes so decided as to preserve this long separation of the two races, accord with Mr. Spence's doctrine, that the Barbarians adopted the Roman jurisprudence and political institutions?

To several such instances of contradiction as this we might point; and we might also direct attention to a few slight misapprehensions of other kinds which we have noticed. Such are the author's repetition (p. 280) of the error of Robertson and some previous writers, that feudal benefices were originally revocable at will; and his assertion (p. 541), after Blackstone and Gibbon, that the revival of the civil law as a study originated with the discovery of a complete copy of the Pandects at Amalfi: whereas it is certain that Irnerius, a German by birth, but bred at Constantinople, read lectures on the Pandects at Bologna several years earlier. These little inaccuracies, however, are but as a feather in the scale against the general preponderance and real value of Mr. Spence's learning and industry: nor, to say the truth, are we disposed to attach any very injurious effects even to the fanciful tendency of opinion on which we have commented. It does not in any degree interfere with the highest merit to which such a work as this of Mr. Spence's may aspire, and which his volume certainly possesses-that of offering admirable digests, both of the Roman, and of the various barbarian, codes and institutions, civil and political.

ART. II. The Life and Correspondence of Major Cartwright. Edited by his Niece, F. D. Cartwright. 2 Vols. 8vo. 17. 88. London. Colburn. 1826.

THIS is upon the whole an entertaining and rather a curious piece of biography. Not that the interest of the work is by any means of that kind which it was probably designed to convey: for in the opinion of all dispassionate men, the political career and the utopian views of Major Cartwright will be very far from possessing the dignity and importance ascribed to them, either by the extravagant zeal of his associates, or the natural partiality of his family. As the indefatigable champion of "radical reform," his name will be remembered only in conection with all the wild and impracticable schemes which have agitated the country during the last half century; and, regarding him as a public character, even the unquestionable integrity of his motives will scarcely be held to compensate for his total want of sound judgment. That he was unwearied in his pursuits during a long life, is an evidence of his consistency though not of his wisdom: no argument could shake him, no appalling lessons of experience undeceive him; and whether his obstinacy was strengthened by failure or his long devotion to a darling and exclusive project had disordered his imagination, his conduct equally bore all the marks of an inveterate mental delusion. That his intentions were honest, we have not the shadow of a doubt; but in the same proportion that he was himself sincere, his blind prejudices rendered him a ready dupe and the facile instrument of more able and designing men.

That Major Cartwright's political creed was comprised in the doctrine of annual parliaments and universal suffrage, not many of our readers can need to be reminded; and still fewer will require any proof of the utter and palpable unfitness of such a system for the present composition of our civil society. But the radical reformers have sometimes confidently appealed to the Saxon origin of the British constitution, and sometimes to the natural rights of man, to warrant their speculations. The first plea is now almost abandoned, and that it should ever have been advanced proved only the most ridiculous ignorance of our constitutional history. No one whose opinion is of the least weight now imagines that a representative system existed at all among our Saxon ancestors, and as a living writer, distinguished equally for his elegant learning and his sincere love of liberty, has pithily remarked, "scarce a demagogue is longer heard to chatter about the wittenagemot." Still less is it possible to maintain that the freedom nobly asserted by our forefathers at later periods, and triumphantly won by their exertions from the haughty Plantagenet princes, was compounded of such elements as the partisans of "radical reform" would require.

Their second plea combined a far more vigorous and plausible argument: the natural rights of man are inherent and indeterminable, neither to be limited by the evidence of antiquarian usage, nor rendered obsolete by the usurpations and despotism of centuries. But in what do these rights consist? In all that, and in no more than, is expedient for the good of society. That universal suffrage and annual parliaments are expedient for the British empire is a proposition so absurd and monstrous, that we are thoroughly and calmly convinced no man of education, of experience, and of reflection, who is in his right senses, can possibly entertain it with sincerity. That a temperate reform in parliament is heartily to be desired, we shall always hold; and we should hail with eager satisfaction the secure enactment of any really effectual measures for improving the purity of election, and the equality of representation, for destroying the overbearing influence of great families, and for shortening the excessive duration of parliaments.

But radical reform means none of these things: it is based neither upon the true principles of the constitution, nor the true happiness of the people; it has invariably been brought forward to heat and inflame the populace at every recurrence of public distress, and at every season of danger domestic or foreign; and its promoters have evidently upon all occasions sought to aggravate the irritation of the public mind as the readiest means of promoting their object. The sure quality of its fruits is to be foretold from the nature of the soil in which the seeds have thus been found to flourish. The principles of radical reform are those of the wildest democracy; and their results, if ever put into practice, would serve only to familiarize us with the blessings of mob government, and the sweets of a popular revolution.

Considering these volumes, then, merely as political biography, there would be little pleasing attraction in the life of a man whose impotent efforts were directed to shake the constitution, and even to subvert the foundations of the state; in the vain and presumptuous confidence of his own skill to renovate and to improve. The political curiosity of the book is not however in relation to Major Cartwright himself. The reader will care little for the mere progress of the enthusiast's political career; but he will find the volumes filled with a good deal of matter that is really interesting in its connection with other public characters of far more celebrity and consequence. Thus we have a regular view of the share taken at different periods by Lords Shelburne and Rockingham, the Dukes of Portland and Richmond, Mr. Pitt, and Mr. Fox-by all the, successive leaders, in short, of the ministry and opposition between the close of the American and the climax of the French revolutions-in advocating the cause of Parliamentary reform. Thus, also, there is introduced and interwoven in the narrative a mass of correspondence, some part of which at least is amusing and remarkable. We have letters from Fox and Burke, the Duke of Portland and Lord Shelburne, the late eccentric Earl Stanhope, Mr. Whitbread, Sir Philip Francis, Horne Tooke, Granville Sharp, Dr. Parr, Mr. Jefferson, formerly president of the United States, and John Quincy Adams, who now holds that dignity.

But to our minds the interest of these volumes lies not nearly so much either in their political matter, nor even in their literary curiosities, as in a much more simple attraction-their character as a piece of private biography and striking delineation of individual peculiarities. In these respects the work forms what a painter would call an admirable study of human nature. It is the production of Major Cartwright's niece and adopted daughter, who lived under his roof from early infancy, who knew the man thoroughly, and appears to have borne to him all the affection of a child. She has had access to all his papers, she possesses a full family acquaintance with the whole current of his life, and he seems to have designed her himself for the office which she has undertaken.

It has certainly been performed under feelings of respect to his memory which do her honour, and with apparently a rigid attention to truth. Thus, she has naturally imbibed all the political prejudices of her hero, and she is at no trouble to withhold or temper them. She has written under the same delusion in which he lived, and she views his whole life as a glorious and well-directed sacrifice to patriotism. She implicitly believes in the uprightness of his intentions, and cannot endure a doubt of their wisdom. But beyond this her book is a plain, simple, and modest composition; without pretension and without violence; composed in love and sincerity; seeing nothing to be ashamed of-nothing that she may desire to conceal; and consequently giving us a full, fair, and

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