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only complementary sentences, and nothing that can fairly be called a "scene" or "situation," that there is no falsehood uttered with a sting in it, and that Misawo herself, the highhearted daughter of a soldier, emerges from her servitude, in which she was surrounded by manifold temptations, with unsullied name and spotless honour. And here we may add that, in ascribing to an attendant in a house of public resort the self-respect and propriety of conduct which are exhibited in Misawo, the writer was not merely drawing a fancy picture. In Japan it is, we believe, wholly exceptional, if one finds an instance of departure in wife or young woman from the highest standard of womanly pure-mindedness. The "fallen" class among the Japanese may be called "unfortunate" with more truth than when the term is employed in England, inasmuch as they do not degrade themselves, but, while yet quite children, are actually sold for a given period to the landlords of the infamous tea-houses.* wholly unwarranted aspersion of the characters of the quiet, It would, consequently, have been a respectable young women who are to be found in the capacity of domestic servants in these taverns, had the author represented one of their number as being indeed sans peur, but not sans reproche. Moreover, it is greatly to the credit of Riutei Tanefiko that, in the household, struggling with hunger, there is no whisper of making devil's money by means of Misawo's juvenile attendant; and it might almost seem that it was to ward off the very possibility of temptation coming through that channel that the niece sacrificed herself.

To ourselves, the most amusing characteristic of the tale is its silence for the writer would, apparently, have us believe that a game of "hide and seek”—and his romance is very much such a game-may be played for years, but that, in the land of ubiquitous espionage, the chief hider cannot be found, and has to make himself known after hope of his discovery had quite died out. We trust the inquisitor-in-chief did not visit Mr. Riutei with very severe penalties for thus ignoring the function of his provincial subordinates.

After all, they are but "figures of this passing world," and not individual men and women, that are introduced to us here. In this assertion, we intend no special depreciation of the writer of this story. As yet, there are only classes of society in Japan.

The existence of these tea-houses is the great moral blot in Japanese life. It would seem, moreover, that Government derives a revenue from the scandalous 'institution.' On the other hand, so curiously does the sense of justice operate, no stain attaches in after-life to the unhappy victims; but the landlords, who made merchandise by their degradation, are treated as the very offscourings of society. We have read that even tanners-the lowest class in the social scale-will refuse to bury their dead bodies!

come.

Individualism, with its endless shades of development, has yet to No doubt, as indicated above, we have the evidence of distinct personal endowment in men who betake themselves to different intellectual pursuits. But on the whole, in Japan, as elsewhere, despotism has effected a dead level of uniformity. When liberty comes, equality ceases; the dull formality of winter passes away into the freshness, beauty, and variousness of spring.

66

Where man is so "cribbed and cabined," that there is no scope left for the revelation of individual character, you will have instead the manifestation of strange caprice, as the translator Dr. Pfitzmaier found to his cost when preparing this volume for the public. Only a first-rate student would have undertaken the task. The editor must first of all be master of the Japanese Syllabarium, consisting of forty-seven distinct symbols. He must also be acquainted with the ideographic signs of the Chinese, for these occur frequently in the tale. Then he must be prepared to find his way through Chinese words and expressions, written in the Japanese character, but changed in sound according to the peculiar Japanese pronunciation. Further, he must often be content to guess the meaning of a given word from the surrounding sense, instead of discovering additional sense from the word-pronouns standing indiscriminately for "I," "thou," or "he," there being no distinction of gender, number, or person amid the endless forms of the language. These qualifications Dr. Pfitzmaier possessed. To these conditions he submitted with the characteristic "Sitz-fleiss" (studentindustry) of his country. But what perplexed him most of all was the caprice of the author's mode of writing Japanese-the simple forms of the Syllabarium being so varied as to necessitate the casting of upwards of four hundred separate types, in order to produce fac-similes of the cursive characters in the original. Dr. Pfitzmaier, with true modesty, makes mention of several of the foregoing difficulties in his preface. He adds, ingenuously, that in some places he is still doubtful of the author's meaning, and has not quite succeeded in imitating, in particular instances, the characters of the block-printing,-for the Japanese as yet have no movable types; but as the volume stands, it at once is a testimony to the munificence of the Viennese government and to the indomitable perseverance and profound scholarship of the translator.

These signs are familiar to all the literary Japanese, and moreover are used indifferently to represent either a Chinese or a Japanese vocable, just as the Arabic numerals serve equally well for "zwei" or "zehn," as for "two" or "ten."

† There are, we hope, at least a few English students who are looking forward with interest to the appearance of the long-promised second part of the Japanese Chrestomathie, as also to the publication of the Japanese Dictionary, on which Dr. Pfitzmaier has been engaged for years.

ART. V.-MR. MAINE ON ANCIENT LAW.

Ancient Law; its Connection with the Early History of Society, and its Relation to Modern Ideas. By Henry Sumner Maine, Reader on Jurisprudence and the Civil Law at the Middle Temple, and formerly Regius Professor of the Civil Law in the University of Cambridge. London: John Murray, 1861.

THE book before us requires some introduction. The lay public, unacquainted with the distinction of the author, and judging or prejudging by the title, might suppose it to belong to the class of unreadable books. Such persons we must inform that this is no product of an antiquarian Dryasdust. Readers will here find themselves in the hands of a master, who, writing with a purpose, knows how to deliver the nett result of his labours in a compact shape, and with the clear tone of authority. The style, too, is of marked literary worth; throughout perspicuous and strong, often brilliant, and, what is a still higher merit, always in strict subordination to the subject. The subject itself, Ancient Law, seems indeed remote; but it is brought home to us by being exhibited in its relation to ourselves, and in the light of an essentially human interest. It is old too, but for this reason perhaps all the more new. We venture to say that the contents of this book will appear a series of surprising discoveries; and as M. Jourdain was astonished to find that all his life long he had been speaking prose without knowing it, so readers of this book may learn, not without marvel, the strange and yet most significant fact, that much of their every-day language and many of their commonest and apparently most modern notions upon morals, politics, and even theology, owe their shape, and sometimes perhaps their existence, to ancient law.

Thus much from a purely exoteric point of view. It would be most unjust to suppose that this book aims at disseminating in a popular form a few points of desultory interest in jurisprudence on the contrary, it is essentially a professional work. Its purpose, pursued methodically from the first page to the last, is a high and scientific one. Under the modest title of Ancient Law, the book seeks to apply, or rather to show the possibility of applying, to law the historic method of inquiry. By this term is of course meant neither the history nor the science of law properly so called, but the method which exhibits the interdependence of the two, by establishing the laws of jurisprudence in general upon a review of the whole past history of positive law. Now this method, though long familiar to philosophers, physical or

metaphysical, has hitherto been neglected by jurists. Law has never yet been formally subjected to the historic method. There have indeed been chronological histories of Roman and other laws; analyses, more or less scientific, of isolated systems in the condition of their maturity; metaphysical disquisitions on the law of nature; and Bentham has pulled down and built up codes by the principle of utilitarianism. There have been also numerous attempts to account for the development of law by the theory of race; but as yet none to exhibit the history of every municipal code as the subject of universal laws. Indeed the opinion not long ago prevailed that such an idea is chimerical; that there are no fixed conditions of jurisprudence; that laws are the result of accident, or of the caprice of the legislators for the time being. Montesquieu was the first to enunciate the truth in the memorable opening sentence of his great work. But the Esprit des Lois, though a giant stride in the right direction, really, as Mr. Maine shows, left the work to be accomplished. The illustrious author, like so many of his followers, was led astray from considering the universal conditions of the normal development of law into a disquisition upon-what, after all, constitutes only its accidental modifications-the influence of race and climate.

There are some reasons why, since the days of Montesquieu, the application to law of the historical method has become more practicable. Not to speak of the progressive elaboration of the subject in isolated departments, there have been recently gained some most opportune acquisitions of legal materials. The discovery by Niebuhr of the Commentaries of Gaius, in the Chapter-house at Verona, has restored a missing link in the history of Roman law; modern philologists have by their labours rendered the laws of Menu at once accessible and intelligible to the jurist, and late investigations into the character of most ancient, yet still existing, Hindoo and Russian village communities have opened some precious glimpses into the most primitive of all legal institutions. Moreover, science, in its slow but sure advance, has now irrevocably, though as yet most imperfectly, established a jurisdiction over social phenomena in general, and therefore authorises an application of its methods of inquiry to the special department of jurisprudence. In some respects, indeed, law seems a peculiarly appropriate subject for the historic method. Law being written, every step, or at least every considerable step, is matter of record; the records themselves, being official, are proportionately exact; the materials, therefore, are not wanting, which is seldom the case with those who trace the unregistered and evanescent steps of society at large. So, too, from the natural aversion of men to confess a change, the letter

of the law alters only slowly and deliberately; and its march shows but few oscillatory, still fewer retrograde, movements; and, in consequence, legal phenomena, as compared with general social phenomena, are less numerous, less complex, more decisive.

But how is the historic method to be applied to law? By the same process, we may say, as is now successfully establishing order in the science of philology. The various languages of the earth were long believed to have been uno ictu created and dispersed; they are now gathered into a historical pedigree which, for the matter of strictness, might pass muster at the Heralds' College, and arranged in a gradually ascending series of antiquity, every term of which is logically as well as historically connected with that which precedes and that which follows it; each tongue, each family of tongues, has a long history of its own, and these histories, whilst they explain the peculiarities of each language, no less exhibit, whether taken separately or compared together, the laws of language in general. Even so with jurisprudence. The application to it of the historic method cannot be ideally complete until Roman law, Hebrew law, Hindoo law, English law, and indeed every known system of law, whether ancient or modern, has from its earliest beginning to its latest phase been subjected to a rigid scientific and historical analysis; each of these systems again compared with the others, and finally all coordinated in the rank of their historical development, and exhibited as the various modifications of the laws of all laws. An appalling task this, certainly; one never, of course, to be perfectly accomplished, nor even approximately, except after the labour of generations. Let the reader who would form some conception of the necessary labour, recall the existing state of the one system with which he is probably best acquainted—our own English law.

It is at this juncture that Mr. Maine steps in. He does not indeed solve the problem,-he would be the first to confess that it remains to be solved,-but he shows how it may be solved. Mr. Maine's contribution to the application of the historic method consists chiefly in the suggestion of two notable devices, each of which must be mentioned at length. This first is his use of the Roman law as an instrument in examining all other systems. Just so the human body has, from its extreme perfection, been employed by physiologists as the instrument of general anatomy. The various systems of law are in Mr. Maine's eyes like different volumes written in the same cipher: he who has read one volume well, has in his possession the key to all. The most legible of the volumes is that of Roman law.

admirable field for the application of the historic method cannot be found.

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