Scott, afterwards Lord Stowell; speaking of whom, Chancellor Kent says: "An incestuous connexion between an uncle and niece has been recently adjudged, by a great master of public and municipal law, to be a nuisance extremely offensive to the laws and manners of society, and tending to endless confusion, and the pollution of the sanctity of private life."[1]
Jeremy Taylor is placed in the Puritan's list, as pleading for the lawfulness of the marriage before us. We have already shown (p. 28) how our brother has misquoted this writer, and this led us to suspect he might be mistaken in classing him as he does. As the place is not cited, we were subjected to the trouble of several hours' search in his work to find the authority. The result of our labor is this: J. Taylor enumerates the following to be unlawful marriages:—
1. Between parents and children. They are unnatural. 2. Between brothers and sisters. They are incestuous, prohibited by positive law. "This discourse," he says, "is not intended so much as secretly to imply, that it can now at all
- ↑ Kent, 2 Com. p. 82.
