/4330 The Romance of the Old Reports.
99
could not be committed to writing, but they and Bracton and the other ancients has been were permitted to preserve their precedents translated, but the uninitiated will appre for the dispatching and deciding public and hend the sense as easily as would the eye private causes. " Graecis Uteris utuntur," less Samson. The Egyptian priests, the says Caesar. They used the Greek language Hebrew scribes, the Gaulish Druids, never in order to conceal their meaning from the preserved their sacred mysteries with more common herd. The Egyptian priests, with inviolate safeguards than these conservators their paragraphs of pictures, did not more of the law. How profound the craft! how effectually conceal the sacred secrets of their deep and inscrutable! what subtilty, what craft from the profane illiterate. Let those occult wisdom enshrouded these " fictions who rail at the canting hypocrisy of the law, of the law! " Even the lion and unicorn, ram pant upon the title page, seem to bear in in clinging to antedated forms and ceremo nies, and in mystifying their meaning in their ingenuous faces an expression of wonder and awe at the mystery whose portals they an idle jargon — let them find in this monu ment of the ages, in this wisdom of the past, guard. a refutation of their silly objections and a Caligula had the laws of Rome written in noble precedent for the great principle to small characters and hung up so high that which it still clings. In further support of their dread purport was not known until the its antiquity I cite Strabo, Pliny and Ju unfortunate who violated them suddenly venal. found himself possessed of their meaning, and In historical sequence it is a long leap the award of his obtuseness. These ancient from Ca?sar to Alfred, from the Druids to sages placed their edicts so far above the ap the Demboc, and in comparison that relic prehension of common minds that they were seems like a thing of yesterday, although equally beyond reach for available purposes. antiquarians have pronounced it the most In the later writers, however, there is much less of this complexity and technicality. The ancient record now extant. Such a consider ation gives us an overwhelming idea of the protracted processes of law, with their wilder ness waste of words, their tautology, their venerable antiquity of our law. In the pres ence of such facts the Wittenagemote is no tortuous twists and sinuosities, their incipienlonger a convocation of ghosts, the genius of dum, dubitendum, puzzliendum, and replica the Heptarchy arises from the realm of tion without endum, are gradually reduced shadows and we see the sails of Caesar to the simple elements of common sense, hovering off the shores of Kent. The year and lawyers may be ultimately inspired with due respect for the labors of Lindley Mur books were begun by royal reporters ap pointed by Edward II., and are preserved ray upon the Queen's English, quit calling it with religious zeal, but no man knows their manslaughter when a woman is killed, and contents. You may as well attempt to con otherwise refrain from confounding cases and the cuneiform inscriptions of old Chaldaea — genders. r-" to tell us what language Rameses' mummy There are many absurdities ir the ^jjqr^e-^ y ^. ' spoke, what means the mystic crocodile — ports. In the chancery cas<r pf Narty v. as hope to gather their purport, to play the Duncan the costs amounted to.$to,ooo be CEdipus to their sphinx-like riddle, for the fore it was decided which party fc'as liable to year books were written in the deadest of all whitewash a sign. Sir George'Rose mongrel languages, the Norman-French. very unique reporter. Durti They have never been translated, and never lorship of Lord Eldon, who will be. procrastination, and in dov The original Latin of Glanville, Dyer, quently retained counsel
