have been greater orators than Sir John Macdonald, greater masters of the details of public measures; but to no other has the prophet's clearness of vision been vouchsafed in the same degree. His opponents admit his patriotic devotion to his country. He was essentially Canadian. His ambition was to create <a powerful and prosperous self-govern ing British colony on the northern half of the
continent, and that ambition was amply grat ified. The historian of the future, removed from the events of Sir John Macdonald's life, may be able to see more clearly the rea sons why his career has been so successful, so fruitful in great things accomplished; we who have been witnesses of that success feel safe in affirming that one reason was that he loved his country and served it well.
OLD LAW AND ODD COOKERY. By Nathan Newmark. IN the City by the Golden Gate there is to
- be found a Law Library which at various
times has had the benefit of the supervision of men of more than ordinary scholarship and of real antiquarian tastes. The result is seen not only in the miscellaneous collection, but also in the law books themselves. Per haps there is nothing so extraordinarily rare in some of them, yet those interested in legal lore of the days gone by or of distant regions, who delve among the volumes on the crowded shelves, may run across many a suggestive relic of the legal controversies of past centuries. What strikes one most strangely is the orderly alphabetical arrange ment of the law, like that of the modern encyclopaedia, in some of the works antedat ing not only Blackstone, but also Sir Matthew Hale and Sir Francis Bacon. Way back be fore the days of the supposed Shakspeare — whose name is spelled in sixty-one different ways, but who is not yet quite ciphered out into another commanding personality, that of the Lord Chancellor just named, who took all knowledge for his province — came forth Fitzherbert's Abridgment, in which topic after topic, according to the place of its name in the alphabet, is treated in the law-jargon of the time; and it is surprising to see how many of these subjects survive to-day. This, and Rolle's like but later Abridgment are perhaps
the bulkiest volumes in the library; and it is natural to contrast them with Brooke's "New Cases," that pocket volume which shows that the idea of convenient little books for the profession existed already in that early time. This smallest of books consists of selec tions from Brooke's Abridgment, which came out about half a century after Fitzherbert's, and with it digested the learning of the Year Books, so well known as quite the earliest of our reports. Then it is rather startling to find in this place a translation of the famous work of Maimonides, who flour ished in the Golden Age of Hebrew liter ature, when the Moors ruled Spain, and whose clear explanations of the Mosaic laws make the reading of Deuteronomy much less dry and bewildering. Still stranger is it to chance to open a volume every other page of which is filled with singular characters look ing much like a chain of circles or series of loops strung across a line, and find from the translation from the Burmese set opposite that these are the celebrated Brahminical Laws of Menu, here spelled " Menoo " and more prop erly called " Manu," into which we may dip for the most peculiar regulations. A reading of Rudyard Kipling's lantern-flash stories and of Edwin Arnold's Oriental poems may pre pare us for these minute references to rigid castes; but what surprises one is to find the
