ly, put in the modern addresses of advocates to the jury. This too will explain—(according to the difference of style and character, which may well be supposed to have existed in the Serjeant or apprentice by whom such an action was first conceived or perfected to its present form)—the peculiarly business-like view which our pleadings take of the actions for crim. con. and seduction. The conversion of these injuries into a species of property, the value of which is to be ascertained and compensated in the common measure of all prices, is, perhaps, a distinctive characteristic of the most commercial of nations: but the exquisite and refined dissimulation with which the property alleged to have been injured is described—in order to give its appreciation the requisite certainty and uniformity—exhibits the most splendid instance of a continuous figure in obliquity and indirection, which, perhaps, no poetry has ever equalled. Were ever fictions more beautiful or more amiable than those on which are founded the actions of ejectment and of trover? In the former of which the injury done and suffered is entirely transferred to ideal personages; and in the latter, as also is so justly said of the institution of marriage, the law has improved and interpreted for the better the commonest instinct of human nature. What could better exemplify the strong affinity of our laws for poetry, than the fond discretion with which all this and the like imagery has been preserved in the unsparing cutting away of other matters less useful and brilliant? Indeed, the very name given in common to the whole of these proceedings Forms—(in the civil law, carmina)—sufficiently indicates the faculty of the mind to whose exercise their origin is due, and with whose literary productions their use is to be classed.
"In further illustration of these resources of the law, it may be expected that I should refer to a sometime popular treatise, called the Pleader's Guide: but that work, in my opinion, has not always treated its subjects with the gravity they deserve; and tends rather to estrange pupils from the science; upon which, however, the book otherwise must be allowed to contain much profitable instruction. But some of the richest mines of legal poetry remain still to be explored. The strong analogy of criminal trials to tragedy has been ingeniously remarked by my learned friend and competitor, Mr Jardine: and the resemblance of many nisi prius cases to comedy can have hardly escaped the most superficial observer; and something of it is curiously preserved by the Reports, for the benefit of posterity. The action of replevin, indeed, has already engaged the labours of both painters and dramatists; under the name of 'The Rent Day,' it has drawn tears from thousands at our national theatres; and the pencil of a Wilkie has proved a common-law or statutable distress may become of all others the most pathetic. But though, in both those works, the declaration and avowry are admirably delineated, there can be no doubt that the whole of the pleas in bar would be bad on a general demurrer. Succeeding artists may avoid this fault:—and the design give rise to an emulation no less noble than that of Timanthea and Parrhasius to delineate the trial of the controversy for the arms of Achilles."You see that we are introducing to you no common man—a quaint and acute prose writer—and you already anticipate good, perhaps great things in his verse. He goes on to ask, that if the art of painting succeeds so well in judicial subjects, can they prove less congenial to poetry? And where else is the real character, both of individuals and of their age, either better observed than in the proceedings, or better preserved than in the records of a court of justice?
