lowed but a brief and general notice. It was the design of the author, in the following Course of Legal Study, to reclaim the time and labour thus often and unprofitably expended, by selecting what was valuable in legal learning, and so arranging, as best to adapt it to the complete and ready comprehension of the student.

The value of method is, we acknowledge, a trite topic of dissertation; but in the inquiries of the American law student this method becomes indispensable: where the ideas and language are remote from those of common life; where the terms are, in an especial degree, peculiar to the science, and of various and singular derivation; and where the body of forms, as well as principles, depends, to a very great extent, on institutions and systems which have long since passed away. Instead of bewildering himself in works which presuppose a knowledge of these changes, and a familiarity with these terms, the student should descend to institutionary treatises; examine the earliest history of the people whose law is his study; detect this in its elements; trace it through all the modifications which time, circumstance, and modes of thinking produce; discover the origin and reasons of the seemingly unmeaning forms with which it is environed; and thus proceed gradually, but with smoothness and certainty, over difficulties otherwise insuperable,

and to the understanding of peculiarities otherwise inexplicable.

The common law of England, which forms the great body of our own law, has its principal foundation in the feudal institutions. After acquiring the general principles of morals and politics, the next step is, therefore, to inquire minutely into these; and, after examining how far they were mingled, in the law of England, with a portion of of the old Saxon constitutions, to pursue them through all the successive alterations which resulted from a change of men's opinions in matters of religion, government, or commerce: in this investigation the authors recommended under the second title will be the best guides. The student may then contemplate these revolutions more nearly and critically in his consideration of the doctrine of Real and Personal Rights, and their respective Remedies, (which two titles comprehend the great body of the English common law,) and of the law which obtains in the courts of Equity; which last, together with the Lex Mercatoria, and the Law of Crimes and Punishments, are only great branches or divisions of the general law of England. Next succeeds the Law of Nations, followed by the Maritime and Admiralty Law, which is connected with the National Law on the one hand, and with the next title, the Roman Civil Law (from which it draws most of its

principles and procedures, and which consequently becomes of importance to the English lawyer,) on the other. Thus, master of English jurisprudence, the student may proceed to inquire in what points it is altered or modified in the Constitution and Laws of the United States, or in those of the respective States, particularly his own; and having fortified his mind with the principles of political economy, and borne these with him in his review of the natural and political resources of his own country, (a study essential in a nation where the lawyer and politician are so frequently combined,) should close his studious career with some attention to rhetoric and oratory.

Notwithstanding the seemingly great extent of this course, (and certainly we cannot flatter the student with the hope of mastering it with the degree and kind of attention which is usually bestowed on it,) let him not be discouraged. What necessarily proves difficult to the desultory and immethodical reader, who comes to his books in the intervals of idleness or dissipation only, and resumes with reluctance what is willingly abandoned on the first call of pleasure, or the first apology for relaxation, may, by a temporary exertion of method and attention, be converted first into a habit, and eventually into a pleasure.

Study and research are not without their at tractions: the mere exertion of mind is productive of pleasure, when the difficulties are not conceived too formidable, or too numerous, and the student does not advance to the investigation, hopeless of success, or unfurnished with the means, and ignorant of the sources of informa tion. In short we conceive, that to an intellect of ordinary capacity, the Law, instead of that guise of difficulty and perplexity in which it for the most part appears, would assume no small degree of interest, and offer no inconsiderable gratification, were the student initiated, so to speak, in its geography; were he instructed in the nice connexions and dependencies which unite its many minute divisions, and conduct him naturally and easily from one topic to another, instead of being set down in the first instance in the midst of difficulties of which he has had no previous explanation, and of which he knows not whither to apply for a solution. These minute connexions, this natural order and arrangement, it was the aim of the author (in which he hopes to have succeeded in some imperfect degree,) to exhibit in the following pages.

As the law of England is not a fabric begun and completed by a single legislator, nor has ever been digested by authority which had the

power to lop its excrescences, and reduce it to symmetry, its forms will often seem absurd and complicated, its modes of redress, (in theory at least.) circuitous, and its distinctions, in some few cases, unfounded or unjust. But however it may be wanting somewhat in unity and regularity, it possesses an interest of a higher description. Its history is the history of the manners and opinions of a people advancing from barbarity, through many modes of thinking, under the impulse of many circumstances, some of a temporary and particular, and others of a more general and durable influence, to a high degree of civil and political liberty, of physical and intellectual improvement. In all the grand revolutions of the law is to be discovered, not the variations arising from accident, or the contradiction of individual opinion in its makers and interpreters, but the gradual expansion of men's minds on the subjects most allied to their felicity as men, and their freedom as citizens. In the authors who have delineated these changes, (and some of whom will be found enumerated under the second title of our course,) the reader will discover how these revolutions of opinion, as regarded the relations of monarch and subject, the ends of society, the pursuits and avocations of life, have changed also the law in the points of tenures, the alienation of property, the suc