John Austin and his Wife. 53 and entirely from his mind, if it were not for the prospectus of a large work on " The Principles and Relations of Jurisprudence and Ethics," of which a single copy only re mains to inform us that he cherished such a plan. But the plan was nothing more. The work never existed, unless it were in uubibits, or in grentio legis, or in some other like legal equivalent of nonentity. It never " fed the uses " of the students of Jurisprudence, or of the author's own aimless and obscure life. No life of such talent and promise ever seemed so utterly wasted and resultless as his down to the very time of his death, in i860. So it would have been but for one woman, — the wife who had loved and worshipped him for forty years of marriage with a devo tion that all the failures of his career, all the world's neglect, all the poverty and privation of a wandering, unsuccessful life, could not shake. Mrs. Austin was the sister, we be lieve, of Isaac Taylor, of Norwich, and must have had a full measure of that rare spiritual insight, and appreciation of whatsoever things are lovely and of good report, that have marked his religious and philosophical writ ings. The Preface she prefixed to her hus band's collected writings may seem, to a cool and critical judgment, a vast exaggeration of the powers and work embodied in those writ ings. But it will be read with delight as one of the most charming prose-elegies in the lan guage, while there is a heart that can feel the exceeding beauty of a wife's unquestioning confidence and self-forgetting love. After quoting one of his letters before marriage in which, with what seems to have been his habitual morbid anxiety as to the future, he 8
speaks of privations and disappointments be fore them, she says : — "The person to whom such language as this was addressed has therefore as little right as she has inclination to complain of a destiny dis tinctly put before her and deliberately accepted. Nor has she ever been able to imagine one so consonant to her ambition, or so gratifying to her pride, as that which rendered her the sharer in his honorable poverty. I must be permitted to say this, that he may not be thought to have disappointed expectations he never raised, and that the effect of what I have to relate may not be enfeebled by the notion that it is the queru lous expression of personal disappointment." (Preface, pp. iii, iv.) In the year after Mr. Austin's death his widow reprinted the volume of 1832, and then with wonderful patience and assiduity labored upon the long-neglected manuscripts until every possible morsel of his lectures was reproduced in the edition of 1863. The result was a success so marked and brilliant for a book of the kind that the dead author in his most ambitious dreams could hardly have anticipated it. There has been noth ing like it in the last century of English law. Many causes beside the real merit of Aus tin's writings contributed to the result. In the thirty years since the delivery of these lectures the time had been slowly ripening for a new advance in " the greatest and the slowest of all sciences;" and what John Austin in the prime of his youth spent all his strength on in vain came to pass, as it were, at a touch from the hand of a woman, who worked for his sake, not her own. But while all the world were reading and talking of the book and of him, she had rejoined him.
