Page:Armatafragment00ersk.djvu/383

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¬the use and enjoyment of land, should be held to be the legal owner, it must be evident not merely to a lawyer, but to any shoc-blaek in an English alley, that if instead of sending down clerical B. to be clerical C. he had run the gauntlet through twenty alphabets, the use still pursuing him and becoming always the land itself, he could not possibly hold it. But the Judges of Armata, though profoundly learned in their general administration, unluckily thought otherwise, and pronounced that clerical C. had a good title, inasmuch as they could not go beyond B. who had the first use, nor carry on farther the end and object of the statute, by adjudging that the second use was still the land itself as much as if it had been the first. I can no otherwise account for this astonishing judg- ment except by what we frequently observe in one of the wisest and bravest of animals, who will in general advance against a cannon, yet who, in one of our lanes such as in Kensington or Knightsbridge, with nothing but shrubs and flowers all around him, will suddenly stand stock ¬still, ¬