accredited by your name, will be citable as authority, I shall not inquire whether they are your own original reports or not; so long as they appear to be original, I shall be satisfied; in preparing them you may get what assistance you can, and in whatever way you can; you may beg, or borrow, or take second or third-hand, anyhow, so that you do not actually copy or pirate. If you copy you may create doubt as to originality, and damage the reputation of the series; if you pirate you may expose me to trouble and expense; both these things must be avoided. Honeste si possis, si non quocunque modo, except copying and piracy."

What, may we ask, is a report published under the name of a barrister, and thereby accredited as his so as to be citable as authority, which is not his, if it be not a false representation, and a deception practised not only upon the profession and the public, but also upon the judge before whom it is cited as a precedent? Is the deception the less because the advocate who cites it is himself deceived? Just imagine the case of Graham v. Wickham to be cited from the N. R., the Jurist, and the Law Times, before a judge, who would consider it as his duty to compare the three reports to see if they substantially agreed, before he accepted the decision as an authority for his guidance, and that judge then to be told that there is only one original, and that the other two are copies more or less disguised! Ought our judges to be exposed to such consequences? What is the remedy? Is it not plainly that which the common sense of the Law Times suggested so long ago as 1843, when it asked, “Why should there not be one complete series of reports of cases in all the courts, which should alone be accepted by the judges as authority?" This is the desideratum felt by the public and the profession, and if it cannot be obtained by voluntary co-operation, we hope, for the interest of the Bar, as well as the good of the public, it will ere long be obtained by Government authority. L.

[NOTE. We are enabled to state, that since the above pages were in print, the Society of Sergeant's Inn has communicated to the Attorney

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General, through their treasurer, Mr. Serjeant Gaselee, that the Society declines to appoint a member of the Council of Law Reporting without, as in the case of Gray's Inn, expressing any want of confidence in the scheme, much less any disapproval of it. It was quite understood from the views known to be entertained by the judges as to their not desiring to influence the profession either way, that this was the course that would be adopted when the judges met in the present Easter Term. We have good reasons for saying that the statement which has been rather industriously circulated through the press, that all the judges without exception expressed their disapproval of the scheme, is inaccurate. In the month of December last, in a letter from the Lord Chief-Baron to the Attorney-General, officially acknowledging the receipt of the Bar Report, his Lordship writes thus :"The Report you have done me the honour to send has 'my approval,' and will have my support,' as far as I have any to give." Reporting," adds his Lordship, "has become a nuisance; and, like Sewage, it has become very difficult to know what to do with it." Vice-Chancellor Wood's opinion in favour of the scheme, at least as a remedy worth trial, is well known, and other judges concur with him. Different judges may, and probably do, entertain different opinions-upon such a subject it is to be expected, nay, it is inevitable, that differences of opinion should exist— some of the present judges are old reporters, and doubtless have their old associations and cherished memories, whose influence may be opposed to change; but to suggest that the judges, as a body, have concurred in condemning, without a trial and without a hearing, a scheme which has emanated from the profession, having for its object the removal of an admitted public and professional evil, and which depends for its success upon the sanction and concurrence of their Lordships, is not only a wrong, savouring of disrespect to them, but is an offence to the intelligence of the profession and the public.]

ART. VII.-CICERO BY FORSYTH.

Life of Marcus Tullius Cicero. By WILLIAM FORSYTH, M.A., Q.C., &c. London: John Murray.

History of Julius Cæsar. Vol. I.

& Galpin.

1864.

London: Cassell, Petter,

The Decline of the Roman Republic. By GEORGE LONG. Vol. I. London: Bell and Daldy.

IN

1864.

one of those letters, which are more characteristic of the man than all his speeches and essays, Cicero asks what history is likely to say of him after 600 years. The question may have been put in a spirit of vanity, eager for a flattering

reply; or it may have arisen from the troubled mind so often seen in genius; but one thing at least is certain, that neither Cicero himself, nor the most prophetic of his friends, ever dreamed that when thrice 600 years had passed away his fame would flourish in lands unknown to Roman rule, and that the minutest event of his life would then be a subject of interest to the inhabitants of the distant island scarcely held by his contemporaries to be a portion of the habitable globe. A vanity as insatiable, perhaps, as ever preyed upon a human soul, would have been gratified by the knowledge that the Bar of an empire greater than that of the Cæsars would, at a distance of nearly two thousand years, welcome a new biography of Cicero, chiefly because it gave them a more familiar and domestic view of the man whose faults and foibles cannot obscure his genius, nor destroy the real estimate of his character.

In some respects the legal profession of England ought to be peculiarly fitted to form an estimate of the Roman Bar, and therefore of the merits of the great orator who will be its most brilliant representative to all time It is true that there are wide differences between Roman and English law, and in the positions of Roman and English lawyers; but there are also points of close resemblance. Both systems of jurisprudence grew out of custom, and would resort to a fiction rather than acknowledge a change; both borrowed largely from other nations; both heaped up through generations of practitioners a heterogeneous mass of precedents; both were strengthened by constitutional conflicts, and burdened with exceptional legislation; both were at once the defence and scourge of the people, the bugbear of the litigant and the backbone of freedom. The Roman lawyer was, as a rule, much more of the orator and the statesman than is the English barrister; but we doubt whether he was so much of the jurist, and he was not more imbued with legal or constitutional principle, nor was he (though generally wealthier and better born) more independent in his professional character. The

Bar of England, like that of Rome, has always taken a large share in legislation, and has made its voice potent in the senate as well as the forum. It is not, indeed, singular in the possession of the great qualities necessary for such a position; we will not commit the professional egotism of saying that it is even pre-eminent; but it has, at least, so far vied with the advocacy of the ancient republic as to enable it to sympathise in the most intimate way with the career of a Roman lawyer. Mr. Forsyth has, therefore, addressed a favourable audience, and has met with an applause which is, on the whole, merited, though it has not always been very discerning in its character.

The strength of these two volumes lies in the pleasant gossipy fashion with which they bring Cicero before the minds of their readers. They tell us about his villa, his library, his private tastes, his domestic relations; notably those with his wife Terentia, whom Mr. Forsyth gallantly defends, and who may possibly have been used ill in being discarded for a younger rival, but whose tongue we nevertheless suspect was as long as her husband's, though exercised after a different fashion. They also narrate his friendships and colloquialisms, retail his jests, not always first-rate, and describe, though with a sparing hand, his vanity and other weaknesses. Such things are all-important in biography, because they enable us to understand that everyday life of a man which elucidates his character much more than his conduct in a few rare emergencies, and they are not the least valuable of materials for history, inasmuch as they lay open the secret springs of public effort, and guide us to a divination of individual motive and exertion. But this after all is but one part of the work that has to be achieved in writing the life of such a man as Cicero; and while we readily acknowledge the success of Mr. Forsyth in this particular, we cannot think that he has compassed, in any degree adequate to the subject, the higher and more comprehensive aims which should distinguish the biography of one, not only himself orator, statesman, philosopher and jurist (for

all this he might have been elsewhere), but also a leading character in the most famous of states at the most stirring period of its political history. We cannot discover in these volumes any real insight into the philosophy of Roman history, or any just scrutiny of the vast forces which in Cicero's time were transmuting the Roman Commonwealth. We miss in a great measure those elucidations of Roman law which may fairly be looked for in a biography of a Roman jurist; and we must condemn as wholly misplaced and mistaken, the occasional attempts to illustrate modern politics by the events and legislation of an age with which the England of our day has so little in common. We think that a great deal may be learned of the character of Cicero from the pages we are criticising, and this, in itself, is no small praise; but we also think that a great opportunity has been lost of doing real justice to his public life, whether in politics or in literature, and that no justice has been done at all to the need of the reader for a masterly sketch of the judicial and legislative history of Rome at the momentous epoch adorned by the intellect of Cicero. In short, taking the statement of Mr. Forsyth in his preface, that his object "has been to exhibit Cicero, not only as an orator and a politician, but as he was in private life, surrounded. by his family and friends," we cannot help saying, that while he has succeeded in the second and less important part of this undertaking, he has failed to a considerable degree in the first and higher branch of the work. The portrait he has drawn is something in the nature of a photograph; it is great in details; it gives every crease in the coat and every curl in the hair; it enables you to identify the man; but the breathing soul is scarcely present in the picture, and the stirring realities of life are represented in a pillar and curtain, with a fancy landscape in the background. Yet a photograph, especially in the absence of a better likeness, is always acceptable; the one lying before us has been carefully and even lovingly executed; and it would be both unjust and ungrateful if we failed to say that we rose from our perusal of