much additional force, and derive their principal charm from virtue; and that he who desires to impart a lustre to the utility of his learning, must foster all the amiable affections of the heart.

The complaints of students, of the difficulty and embarrassment attending the study of English law, are not without reason. Before the publication of the Commentaries of Blackstone, to whose learning and research, comprehensive understanding, and methodical arrangement and treatment of the various topics of the law, every inquirer on that subject will gratefully acknowledge his obligations, the legal tyro was without any extensive, and at the same time philosophical and institutionary treatise, on that vast and mingled mass of custom, statute and judicial decision; unless that character be accorded to Wood's Institutes, and the voluminous and immethodical productions of Sir Edward Coke. Thus, by a strange fatality, in the study of a body of law, rendered singularly laborious and perplexing by the great extent of the subject; by the great variety of matter to which it applied; and by the vicissitudes which it had suffered at various times, from the various situations, necessities, and habitudes of the people for whom it was framed; whose principles, maxims and rules were dispersed through innumerable volumes, displeasing or obscure from the obsoleteness of their style and language; the student was abandoned to a haphazard choice of the sources from which to draw the treasures of 'black-lettered wisdom;' and of the avenue by which he might penetrate, with least fear of stoppage or entanglement, into the maze of the law.

Though the extensive and elegant Commentary of Blackstone now forms the portal through which the student customarily passes to a more particular and laborious study of his profession, yet much time and labour are undoubtedly afterwards thrown away, for want of due method in taking up the topics of which he has only exhibited an outline; and however valuable his work as an induction to English law, it would certainly prove more pleasing and more profitable to him who had previously mastered the peculiarities of the feudal institutions and laws from which it arose, and of which the nature of his plan allowed but a brief and general notice. The same may be said of the study of Natural Law, and, in some degree, of Historical Jurisprudence, as preliminary to the reading of the 'Commentaries;' subjects too often neglected by the law student, and which, if properly attended to, liberalize the mind, and often result in forming learned and philosophical lawyers of those who would otherwise have probably been little else than able attorneys. It was the design of the author, in the following Course of Legal Study, to reclaim the time and labour thus often and unprofitably expended, by selecting what was valuable in legal learning, and so arranging as best to adapt it to the complete and ready comprehension of the student.

The value of method is, we acknowledge a trite topic of dissertation; but in the inquiries of the American law student, this method becomes indispensable: where the ideas and language are remote from common life; where the terms are, in an especial degree, peculiar to the science, and of various and singular derivation; and where the body of forms, as well as

principles, depends to a very great extent, on institutions and systems which have long since passed away. Instead of bewildering himself in works which presuppose a knowledge of these changes, and a familiarity with these terms, the student should descend to institutionary treatises; examine the early history of the people whose law is his study; detect this in its elements; trace it through all the modifications which time, circumstance and modes of thinking produce; discover the origin and reasons of the seemingly unmeaning formswith which it is environed; and thus proceed gradually, but with smoothness and certainty, over difficulties otherwise insuperable, and to the understanding of peculiarities otherwise inexplicable.

The Common Law of England, which forms the great body of our own law, has its principal foundation in the feudal institutions. After acquiring the general principles of morals and politics, the next step is, therefore, to inquire minutely into these; and, after examining how far they were mingled, in the law of England, with a portion of the old Saxon constitutions, to pursue them through all the successive alterations which resulted from a change of men's opinions in matters of religion, government, or commerce: in this investigation, the authors recommended under the second title of the Course, will be the best guides. The student may then contemplate these revolutions more nearly and critically in his consideration of the doctrine of Real and Personal Rights, and their respective Remedies, (which two titles comprehend the great body of the English common law,) and of the law which obtains in the courts of Equity; which last, together

with the Lex Mercatoria and the Law of Crimes and Punishments, are only great branches or divisions of the general law of England. Next succeeds the Law of Nations, followed by the Maritime and Admiralty Law, which is connected with National Law on the one hand, and with the next title, the Roman Civil Law, (from which it draws many of its principles and procedures, and which consequently becomes of importance to the English lawyer,) on the other. Thus master of English Jurisprudence, the student may proceed to inquire in what points it is altered or modified in the Constitution and Laws of the United States, or in those of the respective states, particularly his own; and having fortified his mind with the principles of Political Economy, and borne these with him in his review of the natural and political resources of his own country (a study essential in a nation where the lawyer and politician are so frequently combined) should close his studious career with a due attention among other things, to Rhetoric and Oratory, legal Biography and Bibliography; and lastly, to the topic of Professional Deportment.

Notwithstanding the seemingly great extent of this course, (and certainly we cannot flatter the student with the hope of mastering it with the degree and kind of attention which are usually bestowed on it,) let him not be discouraged. What necessarily proves difficult to the desultory and immethodical reader, who comes to his books in the intervals of idleness or dissipation only, and resumes with reluctance what is willingly abandoned on the first call of pleasure, on the first apology for relaxation, may, by a temporary

exertion of method and attention, be converted, first into a habit, and eventually into a pleasure.

Study and research are not without their attractions; the mere exertion of mind is productive of pleasure, when the difficulties are not conceived too formidable or too numerous, and the student does not advance to the investigation hopeless of success, or unfurnished with the means, and ignorant of the sources of information. In short we conceive that, to an intellect of ordinary capacity, the Law, instead of that guise of difficulty and perplexity in which it for the most part appears, would assume no small degree of interest, and offer no inconsiderable gratification, were the student initiated, so to speak, in its geography; were he instructed in the nice connections and dependencies which unite its many minute divisions, and conduct him naturally and easily from one topic to another; instead of being set down in the first instance in the midst of difficulties of which he has had no previous explanation, and of which he knows not whither to apply for a solution. These minute connections, this natural order and arrangement, it was the aim of the author (in which he hopes to have succeeded in some imperfect degree) to exhibit in the following pages.

As the Law of England is not a fabric begun and completed by a single legislator, nor has ever been digested by authority which had the power to lop its excrescences, and reduce it to symmetry, its forms will often seem absurd and complicated, its modes of redress (in theory at least,) circuitous, and its distinctions, in some few cases, unfounded and unjust. But however it may be wanting somewhat in unity