when attacked. The plaintiff got a verdict for the whole amount of the property de stroyed. From that time there were no riots for more than thirty years, for the Saturnalia of blackguardism became dis couraged at having to pay its bills. A memoir of Judge Gibson would also be incomplete without a mention of Ingersoll v. Sergeant, i Wharton, 336. In March term 1836 the opinion was delivered, but not by the Chief-Justice, who would have writ ten something much superior and shorter, one may be sure. .This pompous harangue announces, during fifteen pages of so-called reasoning, that the Statute of Quia Em ptores was never in force in Pennsylvania. In Pennsylvania the young student-at-law is often ushered into the presence of Ingersoll v. Sergeant with such a ritual of salaams that throughout his days he fails to react from the early impression that the ceremony made upon him. The reputation of Inger soll v. Sergeant ends at the State line; and it may be suspected that even in Pennsylvania its fame travels by echo rather than by di rect contact. It is the fashion for lawyers to speak well of it, to take its impregnabil ity for granted; but honest ones have been heard to confess that they never read it through. And no wonder. The pages bristle with second-hand knowledge, — not the sort that comes from having anything in your head, but only books at your elbow. Ill-assimilated and sometimes superfluous quotations abound on every page without fertilizing the sterility of the native soil, fatiguing the attention without convincing the reason. A sort of argument is certainly patched together, but what may its weight be when put against the facts in the other scale; namely, that when statutes are in tended to be repealed, it is done with very precise and express language; that the words in Charles the Second's charter allow land in the new province " to be held of the said William Penn . . . the statute . . . commonly called the Statute Quia Emptores . . . in any wise notwithstanding"'? Does it
not seem that stronger language than this should be required to repeal a law that had been part of the blood and bone of English tenure for four hundred years? And does it not also seem perfectly reasonable that Quia Emptores was intended to be merely suspended so far as the Proprietary Govern ment was concerned, and that when this government ceased, a law which was not at war with colonial interests in the least, should resume its force if it had any? Moreover, " rents-charge " had been spoken of as unquestionably existing many times by both Bench and Legislature." These re marks would not have been ventured, were it not known to the writer that Judge Cadwalader, whose scholarship it would be presumptuous to praise here, derived nothing from the opinion in Ingersoll v. Sergeant but mirth, and that one of the oldest members of the Philadelphia Bar un hesitatingly calls it "an absurd piece of im aginary learning." One ludicrous historical blunder that occurs on page 349 has, it is believed, never been exposed. " The two last of these rights [marriage and wardship], however, were taken away by 12 Car. 2, c. 34, some six years before the granting of the province to William Penn." Charles the First was beheaded on the 30th of January, 1649. 'Charles the Second's reign, as we know, is counted from the end of his father's. The twelfth year of it, therefore, would be 1660 or 1661. The Province was granted to William Penn in 1682; that is, twenty-one years after 12 Car. 2, and not six, as the learned Judge has announced. Or, had he counted from the Restoration, — a still worse mistake, — the twelfth year would then be 1672, some ten and not some six years be fore the Charter. But more diverting than Ingersoll v. Ser geant is Wallace v. Harmstead, 8 Wright, 492. A small piece from this hotch-pot of ignorance may prove interesting: "But the statute of Quia Emptores was never in force in Pennsylvania . . . and therefore this rent service is not converted into a rent charge.
