or if when such attempts were made, disorder and mischief had constantly ensued, we might take warning from such examples. If no wise jurists had ever recommended the digesting and new ordering of the law, there might be temerity in the proposal, but Hale and Bacon have not only approved, but offered their views and plans. And are not our own written statutes periodically revised? Why not that part of our laws which rests upon less solid evidence? It has been the first glory of the greatest sovereigns and the best policy of the wisest people. The most cele brated law-givers have traveled into all regions where early civilization had left its luminous traces, to gather the chosen flowers and fruits of every clime. If the fathers of our Revolution, at the peril of much more than life, of all the ven geance that offended power can visit on the un successful patriot, dared to uproot the three great pillars of the common law, the monarchy, the hierarchy and privileged orders, shall we stand in superstitious awe of unlaid spectres, shall we still be amused by nursery tales, and tremble at the thought of innovations upon institutions which their admirers themselves assimilate to the prac tice of the Gentoos, the Mexicans, and the children of the Sun; which have not half the imposing dignity of those of our ancestors, the red men of the Five Nations, as may be seen by any one who will read the account of them by Mr. Colden' and compare it with the uncouth manners of the Saxon Heptarchists. It is true, at the same time, that the Knglish reports contain, amidst a world of rubbish, rich treasures of experience, and those of our own courts contain materials of inestimable worth, and require little more than regulation and systematic order. This with fixing and determin ing the principles on which they ought to depend, and settling by positive enactments all doubts that hang upon them, abolishing forever all forms that impede the march of justice, and firmly establish ing those which are needful to its ends, and trans lating into plain and intelligible language those borrowed, ill-penned statutes, of which every word gives rise to endless commentaries, will complete the wished-for object. Particular cases will not then be resorted to instead of general law. The law will govern the decisions of judges, and not the decisions the law. Judgments will be legibus non exemplis. And it will not be necessary that 1 See The Cordwainers' Trial, New York, 1816.
at least one victim should be sacrificed to the making of every new rule, which, without such immolation, would have no existence." Sampson's " Memoirs " is a very readable book. It gives an account, in the form of letters, of his romantic and dangerous ad ventures, by land and sea, of his imprison ments, and shipwreck, and sufferings, of his cruel separation from his family, and of his final embarkation for America, whither he went by invitation of his uncle Sampson, "to inherit a pretty rich estate, which he possessed in that county of North Carolina which still bears his name." These pages give us a vivid idea of this gay, vivacious, ingenious, and indomitable Irishman. Var iously cultivated he seems to have been, for he played on several different instruments, and was something of an artist. He drew portraits and designs in charcoal on the walls of his prison. When in prison, in Portugal, he played on his flute, to the edification of an opposite neighbor, a young lady, who danced to the music; and out of some sticks, which he begged from a muledriver, he constructed a bow and arrows, by means of which he shot letters to her, describing his situation, and asking her intercession. He gained a view of his jailer's room overhead, by tying a shaving mirror on the end of a stick, and holding it out of the window. He also hollowed out an orange-rind, and enclosing an epistle, low ered it from his window with a thread unravelled from a stocking. The high flown strain of old-school gallantry, in which these episodes are written, is very charming. Something (but not much except in length) of a poet, too, for he here prints forty-six quatrains, eights and sevens, and eights, entitled, " Hope and the Exile, a Vision. The book has acute observations on the French. Sampson seems to have been gallant, — being Irish he could not well be otherwise — for he introduced his observa tions on the French women as follows : "What a subject, O Jupiter! What muse to
