their various arguments, with all the grace and flowers of eloquence, omitting nothing on either side, so that no one could perceive to which side the Advocate-General leaned. The continual habit of this during twenty-four years, joined to the natural scruples of a conscientious man, and the ever-starting points and objections of the learned one, had moulded him into a character of incertitude, out of which he could never escape. To decide was an accouchement with him, so painful was it." From this account by St. Simon, we learn how honourable and impartial was the office of the public accuser in the old French courts; and that he blended with his functions the high impartiality of the judge; a characteristic that the office has since lost, in that court at least. It also explains the Chancellor's indecision, and his failure as a judge. Whatever were his defects as a decider of causes, he made amends by his talents as a legislator and an organiser of jurisprudence. To this, indeed, he gave himself up in his latter years almost exclusively, declining to meddle more with politics, and devoting himself to ameliorate the laws and the forms of procedure. It is on this subject that it is difficult to explain his merits to the reader. One of the first objects of his attention was to separate the functions of the Grand Council from those of the Parliament. When he resumed the seals in 1737, he suppressed the Judges and Presidents of the former court, to do away with its pretensions of usurping the place of the Parliament. He at the same time collected and remodelled the law of appeals, and regulated the respective jurisdiction of different courts; and we learn from Isambert that the Ordonnance issued by him at this period still serves as the rule of law procedure before the Court of Cassation and the Council of State. The law for repressing forgery formed the

subject of another long Ordonnance. The next legal subject of importance that absorbed the attention of Daguesseau was that of Entails. This forms the subject of a voluminous Ordonnance, bearing date August, 1747. One of its clauses nullifies entails extending beyond two degrees, not including the testator. An Ordonnance, signed May, 1749, not enough attended to, establishes a sinking fund for paying the debts of the state, and the levy of a twentieth to constitute it. The question of Mortmain is the subject of an Edict in the same year. Wills form another source of legal difficulties which Daguesseau sought to simplify or remove.

The character of Daguesseau has been drawn minutely, and at great length, by one of the most penetrating of his contemporaries, who sat at the council board with him and was his most decided political enemy. Nevertheless, we need go no farther than this very writer, the Duc de St. Simon, for a record of the Chancellor's virtues and genius: "An infinity of talent, assiduity, penetration, knowledge of all kinds, all the gravity of a magistrate, piety and innocence of morals, formed the foundation of his character. He might be considered incorruptible (St. Simon makes an exception); and with all this, mild, good, humane, of ready and agreeable access, full of gaiety and poignant pleasantry, without ever hurting; temperate polished without pride, noble without a stain of avarice. Who would not imagine that such a man would have made an admirable Chancellor? Yet in this he disappointed the world." His faults, according to the same writer, were indecision as a judge, and too high a respect for the Parliament and the legal profession, to which St. Simon asserts he sacrificed the royal authority. In this the aristocratic writer is mistaken. Daguesseau compromised too much for the

independence of Parliament; it is among his faults. "He was the slave of the most precise purity of diction, not perceiving how excess of care rendered him obscure and unintelligible. His taste for science added to his other defects. He was fond of languages, especially the learned ones, and took infinite delight in physics and mathematics; nor did he even let metaphysics alone: in fact, it was for science that he was born. He would, indeed, have made an excellent First President, Chief Judge of Parliament; but he would have been best placed of all at the head of the literature of the country, of the Academies, the Observatory, the Royal College, the Libraries; there his tediousness would have incommoded no one, &c." In short, the Duke, in his scheme of restoring the aristocracy to exclusive influence, found the Chancellor in his way, and wished him out of it. He tells us that Daguesseau was of middling stature, with a full and agreeable countenance, even to the last expressive of wisdom and of wit.

GEORGE FREDERIC HANDEL, whom we will venture to call the greatest of musicians, considering the state in which he found his art, and the means at his command, was born at Halle, in the Duchy of Magdeburg, February 24, 1684. He was intended, almost from his cradle, for the profession of the civil law; but at the early age of seven, he manifested so uncontrollable an inclination, and so decided a talent for the study of music, that his father, an eminent physician, wisely consented to change his destination, and suffered him to continue under the direction of a master of those studies, which he had been secretly pursuing with no other guide than his own genius.

Friedrich Zachau, organist of the cathedral church