talk about cities in the Soudan as if that horrible expanse were Lancashire, and wonder why steamers should not ascend the Nile to Khartoum in about ten days. As to climate, they know generally, and in the rough, whether a country is cold or hot; but they do not know that, climatically, Hong Kong and Pekin are totally different places, that New York can be hotter than Madras or colder than Moscow, or that the reversal of the seasons which they know to be true of the Antipodes is true also of the Cape. The writer himself failed to convince a very intelligent Englishman that Christmas was hot weather at the Cape, and that the colony might therefore supply grapes to Europe out of season, and was held to be talking nonsense when hinting that the locality whence ice was imported did matter, as all ice was not equally cold. Among the lower classes this ignorance is still more profound, reaching depths which confuse rather than astonish the inquirer, and this about points not in the least remote from daily experience. We have the strongest reason for suspecting that Essex peasants cannot believe that the distance from England to Ireland by sea is three times the distance of England from France, or that New Zealand can be five times as far away as North America. Indeed, as a rule, the poor know literally nothing of geography, and have an aversion to learn the simplest facts, strangely in contrast with their interest about the ways of the people "over there." They will listen to any amount of talk about the people of any country that the speaker knows, often with eager interest and intelligence; but they will not even try to learn where that country is, or what are its physical features. Let any man who doubts this ask the first workman he knows about the Chinese and China, and see how much he knows of the former, and how absolutely nothing of the latter. one market for hardware perfectly without an idea of another on the other side of the globe. Still, the English deal with the world, and should be interested in its countries, and fight most of the world, and should feel some concern about its peoples and its configuration. They do not, however, very often; and we noticed during the Afghan war that they never realized to themselves what manner of barrier the Himalaya is, and were utterly amazed when we landed at Suakim to find that Arab tribes dwelt on the west of the Red Sea. "They would be black, surely," was the hesitating remark of a very intelligent man in our own hearing. Moreover, the newspapers are getting unintelligible without some knowledge of geography. Not to mention that over-informed man on the Times who has an immovable conviction that Englishmen know where Hungarian towns are, and are accustomed to talk of them even when their names have no vowels, a hundred correspondents are flinging costly telegrams daily into London which, if one knows nothing about the places, must surely be dull reading. It can hardly be entertaining to hear that the president of San Salvador is dead, when San Salvador, for all you know, may be a cape in Mars. Still, the people are not interested enough to learn. We should doubt if there were a single wandering lecturer on geography in England, or a "professor" who taught that to evening classes, and nothing else; and we are curious to know why. Because the teaching is bad, says the Geographical Associa tion. But that only pushes the question one step further back. As Englishmen manage to learn all they want to know, why is the teaching of geography so bad? except, indeed, as all teaching is bad, when it is directed to a number of unequal minds in unequal stages of preparation. If the people desired geography as they desire mathematics or arithmetic, they would It is certainly not want of need which very soon find or import people to teach kills the general interest in geography. them: as, indeed, they do when war, or revTo Englishmen the need is perpetually olution, or earthquake wakes up a momenpresent, though Lord Aberdare pressed tary interest. We suspect that, except to the commercial argument as everybody a few who possess what may be called conspeaking in London always does press it crete imagination, geography is an exceedtoo far. Merchants very often knowingly difficult study, -as difficult, at least, very little of the markets to which they send their goods, just as stock-jobbers know very little of the States whose se curities they buy and sell, both being content to know prices and not the reasons for them. Even when they do know, their knowledge is often localized in a very comic way; and a man will understand as statistics, and overtaxes attention, and strains the memory in a quite exceptional degree. Half the students forget a map as they forget their own faces in the glass, and are bothered with the names of places as they would be bothered with any other unconnected words, -as you, O reader, were bothered when you first learned the names of the English counties. Just try, if you have no property in Ireland, to say off quickly all the Irish counties. The mind refuses a task of that kind until its interest is awakened by some external cause; and it is to discover a cause which will operate that the sssociation should direct its first effort. Success will certainly not be insured by calling geography "physiography," though the idea involved in the change of word is right enough; nor by using little globes, which puzzle children to death; nor by selling thousands of skeleton maps, which make them cry with a sense of defeat. It may be found, possibly, in describing phenomena such as volcanoes, high mountain ranges, and vast seas, and so exciting the imagination; but the road may also be in quite another direction. The popular instinct is to know all about Chinamen, and their sloping eyes, and their pigtails, and their women's little feet, and their fondness for puppy-dogs as dinner, and their inability to use perspective, before anything whatever is learned about Shanghai and the Yellow River. Suppose we obey that instinct, instead of reprehending it as frivolous, and begin the study of physiography by a little talk about folk. We have an idea that if we wanted to teach children where Lapland was, we could do it with a few pictures of Laplanders, and their dogs, and their reindeer, and their snow-shoes, and their long nights, more quickly and certainly than through any amount of maps. After half an hour's talk about the little people, the audience would be quite anxious to know where they lived in the world, and what their country was like, - would look at the map with interest, and would remember it, too. From The London Literary World. WHARTON'S "COMMENTARIES.” * To the uninitiated it might seem absurd to say that American lawyers could produce legal works that would be eagerly read by English students, and actually preferred by English barristers for purposes of practice to works on the same subject by their own countrymen. Yet * Commentaries on Law, Embracing Chapters on the Nature, Source, and History of Law; on International Law, Public and Private; and on Constitutional and Statutory Law. By Francis Wharton, LL.D., Member of the Institute of International Law, Author of Treatises on Conflict of Laws, on Criminal Law, on Evidence, and on Contracts. Philadelphia: Kay and Brother, Law Booksellers, Publishers, and Importers. every one conversant with the facts will tell you, that Story on Equity, Bigelow on Torts, and Wharton on International Law to mention but a few among the many that could be named are standard textbooks and accepted authorities, ranking certainly as high as any English writings of the present day upon the subjects of which they treat. Why it is that so much of English law should have been imported intact into the jurisprudence of the United States, would be answered differently by different people. Some would, doubtless, attribute it to the habits of thought carried by the Pilgrim Fathers to the New World, habits that were part and parcel of their nature and led them naturally to seek in the storehouse of the English common law the principles whereon to frame their own laws, and decide their disputes. Others, but their numbers would nowadays be proportionately few, would see in the preference shown for English law a testimony to its intrinsic excellence over other systems. Our fathers, it is true, may have flattered themselves that these excellences existed, and we find plenty of eulogistic references to them in the law reports of the last generation; but since the study of comparative jurisprudence has become a reality, there has been less inclination to speak of English law in the superlative degree. But, whatever indebtedness American lawyers may feel to English law, they are fast repaying it by the production of works like the one before us. Dr. Wharton has written no mere students' manual for the better passing of examinations, but a masterly treatise, every page of which bears evidence of deep research and keen insight into legal conceptions. He begins with a discussion of the nature and classification of law. He alludes to the difficulty felt by the historical school of jurists in following Bentham and Austin, the great leaders of the analytical school, in their definition of law as necessarily emanating from a sovereign. This sovereign may act, say the exponents of the analyti cal school, either directly by his own immediate agents executing his will, or through local governments established by himself; but without a sovereign, from whence it proceeds either directly or indirectly, there can be no law. Another disputed element of this school's definition is that there must be a command or prohibition; mere advice cannot consti tute a law. In answer to this view of the origin of law, Dr. Wharton points out, 1 as, indeed, Sir Henry Maine had done | tham, Austin, and our own time. The before, that "law, so far from being im- survey is at once exhaustive and concise, posed as a rule by sovereign on people, and may be commended to the student as is imposed as a rule by people on sov- perhaps the best that has yet appeared. ereign." The story of Austin's painful career is briefly but pathetically told; and although most students of jurisprudence are acquainted with it from the biography prefixed by his widow to her edition of " The Province of Jurisprudence Determined," they will not quarrel with Dr. Wharton for introducing his condensed narrative of that splendid but wasted life into his While Sir Henry Maine drew his examples of this reversed order of things from the East, Dr. Wharton appeals to the course of formation of distinctive jurisprudences in the several States of North America. THE SOVEREIGN NOT THE SOURCE OF ALL LAW. By whom were existing English statutes winnowed in the colonies of Massachusetts and Pennsylvania, for instance, so as to retain such as suited the temper and met the wants of the people, and to set aside all others? This was not done by the colonial assemblies. Had such a process of radical revision been attempted by these assemblies, it would have been promptly vetoed by the King in Council. It was not done by the British Parliament, though the British Parliament assumed to be the sole supreme Legislature by whose laws these colonies were controlled. It was done by popular assent, produced by national conscience and national need. It is true that when the colonies became independent sovereigns they passed laws by which the process of selection and rejection was approved. But it was never pretended that the process of selection and rejection derived its authority from such legislation. . . . From the development of jurisprudence, therefore, in the New World, as well as in the Old, we must infer that law is an emanation from the people to the sovereign, and not a command imposed by the sovereign on the people. work. TENNYSON ON "THE PRINCESS." MR. E. S. DAWSON, of Montreal, has brought out a new edition of his study of "The Princess," prefaced by the following letter from the Poet Laureate, which we reprint from the Critic: DEAR SIR, -I thank you for your able and You This subject is again adverted to in the thoughtful essay on "The Princess." third chapter, on "The History of English have seen, amongst other things, that if women and American Law," where it is stated ever were to play such freaks, the burlesque that, "to say that no law is to bind until and the tragic might go hand-in-hand. I may established by a sovereign, besides mak- tell you that the songs were not an aftering the judiciary not law interpreters but thought. Before the first edition came out, I law inventors, and ignoring the rights of deliberated with myself whether I should put the people, as a body, to gradually evolve songs in between the separate divisions of the their own laws, is to contradict the tradi- poem. Again, I thought, the poem will extions both of Roman and English law." plain itself; but the public did not see that the In the course of this chapter we have and at last I conquered my laziness and inchild, as you say, was the heroine of the piece, some very interesting sketches of the serted them. You would be still more certain great English jurists and their writings: that the child was the true heroine if, instead beginning with Fitz-Nigel, Bishop of Ely, of the first song as it now stands, "As thro' Glanville, and Bracton, and passing in the land at eve we went," I had printed the review the scholastic jurists, Fortescue, first song which I wrote, "The losing of the Littleton, St. Jerman, Stamford (the au- child." The child is sitting on the bank of a thor of the first English work on formal river, and playing with flowers a flood comes criminal law); the great Elizabethan writ-down-a dam has been broken thro' - the ers Hooker and Bacon, "to whom and not to Burke, we are to look for the first English exposition of historical evolution;' and then the famous Coke, and more famous Blackstone; till we arrive at Ben child is borne down by the flood-the whole village distracted after a time the flood has subsided-the child is thrown safe and sound again upon the bank, and all the women are in raptures. I quite forget the words of the bal lad, but I think I may have it somewhere. a peculiar charm in those passages of such great masters as Virgil or Milton where they adopt the creation of a bygone poet, and reclothe it, more or less, according to their own fancy. But there is, I fear, a prosaic set growing up among us, editors of booklets, bookworms, index-hunters, or men of great memoto the poet, and so believe that he, too, has no imagination, but is forever poking his nose between the pages of some old volume in order to see what he can appropriate. They will not allow one to say "Ring the bells," without finding that we have taken it from Sir P. Sydney—or even to use such a simple expression as the ocean "roars," without finding out the precise verse in Homer or Horace from which we have plagiarized it. (Fact!) Your explanatory notes are very much to the | asserting that books, as well as nature, are not, purpose, and I do not object to your finding and ought not to be, suggestive to the poet. parallelisms. They must always recur. AI am sure that I myself, and many others, find man (a Chinese scholar) some time ago wrote to me saying that in an unknown, untranslated Chinese poem, there were two whole lines of mine, almost word for word. Why not? Are not human eyes all over the world looking at the same objects, and must there not consequently be coincidences of thought and impressions and expressions? It is scarcely pos-ries and no imagination, who impute themselves sible for any one to say or write anything in this late time of the world to which, in the rest of the literature of the world, a parallel could not somewhere be found. But when you say that this passage or that was suggested by Wordsworth or Shelley or another, I demur, and more, I wholly disagree. There was a period in my life when, as an artist, Turner for instance, takes rough sketches of landskip, etc., in order to work them eventually into some great picture, so I was in the habit of chronicling, in four or five words or more, whatever might strike me as picturesque in nature. I never put these down, and many and many a line has gone away on the north wind, but some remain l.g., Its stormy crests that smote against the skies. I have known an old fishwife, who had lost two sons at sea, clench her fist at the advancing tide on a stormy day and cry out-"Ay! roar, do! how I hates to see thee show thy white teeth!" Now if I had adopted her exclamation and put it into the mouth of some old woman in one of my poems, I dare say the critics would have thought it original enough, but would most likely have advised me to go to nature for my old women and not to my own imagination, and indeed it is a strong figure. Here is another little anecdote about suggestion: When I was about twenty or twenty-one I went on a tour to the Pyrenees. Lying among these mountains before a waterfall that comes down one thousand or twelve hundred feet, I sketched it (according to my custom then) in these words: "Slow-dropping veils of thinnest lawn." When I printed this a critic informed me that "lawn" was the material Suggestion: A storm which came upon us in used in theatres to imitate a waterfall, and the middle of the North Sea. As the water-lily starts and slides. Suggestion: Water-lilies in my own pond, seen on a gusty day with my own eyes. They did start and slide in the sudden puffs of wind till caught and stayed by the tether of their own stalks quite as true as Wordsworth's simile, and more in detail. A wild wind shook-follow, follow, thou shalt win. graciously added, "Mr. T. should not go to the boards of a theatre but to nature herself for his suggestions." And I had gone to nature herself. I think it is a moot point whether, if I had known how that effect was produced on the stage, I should have ventured to publish the line. I find that I have written, quite contrary to my custom, a letter, when I had merely intended Suggestion: I was walking in the New Forest. to thank you for your interesting commentary. A wind did arise and Shake the songs the whispers and the shrieks The wind, I believe, was a west wind, but, be- Thanking you again for it, I beg you to believe me very faithfully yours, A. TENNYSON. Aldworth, Haslemere, Surrey, Nov. 21st, 1882. PS. By-the-by, you are wrong about "the tremulous isles of light;" they are "isles of light," spots of sunshine coming through the leaves, and seeming to slide from one to the other, as the procession of girls “moves under shade." And surely the "beard-blown" goat involves a sense of the wind blowing the beard on the height of the ruined pillar. |