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THE GREEN BAG
ODDITIES OF THE CODE INSCRUTABLE BY HARRY RANDOLPH BLYTHE SOME things are meant to be humorous and are humorous. Law has little to do with such things. They would not appear to advantage in the Digests or Reports. The solemn and the frivolous always were incompatible companions. Other things are meant to be humorous and are not humorous. These things, like wise, do not flourish in a legal atmosphere. The lawyer who introduces them into court has made a serious mistake in profession; he really ought to edit a comic weekly where pathetic things are appropriate. Again, still other things are not meant to be humorous and arc humorous. And all the calf-bound volumes of the world shelter a few of these things because they cannot help it. The lawgivers who send their exalted phrases sounding down to posterity are as helpless to guard against posterity's smile as you and I, in our dreams, are powerless to say that the things we see are not realities. In each case there is no corrective faculty; neither the dreamer nor the humor is self-conscious. Judged by their time and the customs of the people, the excerpts set forth in this article are serious and sublime enough. But lapse of time, change of place, and difference of custom draw sharp effects. When anything is untimely, out of place, or in conflict with custom it is sure to be odd and liable to be humorous. We smile at the Puritan blue laws. These, however, are comparatively recent and once governed our own country. If, passing these by, one goes to the laws of a country peopled by a different race, professing a different religion and with a history com puted not in centuries but in cycles, so that the laws still retain the dust of great an tiquity, the absurd effects are not only more numerous but more delicious. We can then
laugh without the thought that our grand fathers' grandfathers displayed characteris tics somewhat suggestive of an ass. Two volumes, looking very much as though they were derelicts on the legal ocean, came to my desk recently. One was a large, pretentious-looking creature with a style that marched so stately I surmised the editor might have had military training. Fact proves otherwise, however, for Sir William Jones was one of the greatest scholars England ever produced; he mastered thirteen languages and was conversant in twenty-eight others. This, the last book of his career, bears the date, Calcutta, 1794, and labors under the inscrutable title, "Menu Laws." Before I turned the stiff, crackling pages I half believed it might be a code suitable for persual only by stewards, cooks, and society matrons who give ambi tious dinners. I was shortly enlightened, as you will be presently. The other was small and gloomy looking, with time-bitten binding but withal pos sessed of an aristocratic personality. On the inside of the front cover, still undimmed by the onslaughts of a century, was pasted an excellent cut of the Porchester coat of arms. Just how that emblem of greatness came to be placed there I will reserve for your fancy. Again I was faced by an inscrutable title, " Gentoo Laws," by Mr. Nathanial Brassey Halhed. It bears the date, London, 1777, and, though the author failed to climb into the encyclopaedias, yet he must have been scholarly (or judged his generation so), for he saw fit in his preface to promulgate an essay on the Sanskrit language, setting forth several pages of the original for the reader's edification and delight. I was not slow to determine that each of these volumes contained a code of the laws of
