practice of the law, that a lawyer who is disposed to make the most of his privileges, may render himself a very uncomfortable person to every one, with whom he comes in contact; and we feel also that one who is at the same time a good lawyer and a bad man, is a perfect caput lupinum, upon whom honest men have a right (morally speaking) to set their dogs, as upon a wolf or a bear.

Those moral perils, which we have spoken of as encompassing the practice of the law, are of two kinds; one, of obvious and palpable ones, against which he who is forewarned is fore-armed. There is danger that the professional man, in his zeal for his client's success, will not examine the quality of the means by which that success may be attained; and that he will surrender his conscience into his client's hands, and plead his instructions as an apology for oppression or dishonorable conduct; than which a more lame apology was never offered, none more savouring of that odious sophistry by which a man endeavours to drown the remonstrances of his own outraged moral sense. There is danger, too, that in his intercourse with his brethren, he will obey the law of selfishness, rather than the law of honor or the law of love, and endeavour to gain paltry advantages, by disingenuous suppressions of the truth, by treacherous surprises, by wilful procrastination, and a surly, disobliging temper, which makes the most of accident, oversight, and forgetfulness. The love of money too will beset him with continual temptation. It will tempt him to give such advice as shall be beneficial to his own interests, and fan the expiring embers of ill-will till they kindle into a broad blaze of litigation. It may constrain him to forget the distinction between his own money and that which is intrusted to him on behalf of others, and may lead him into that petty and reprehensible form of dishonesty, which unnecessarily delays the payment of a just due.

Besides these, and others like them, in which he who sins, sins against light, there are other perils, perhaps more formidable, because less obvious. There is danger, that the habit of constantly taking and supporting one side of a contested question, may in time extinguish the power of separating what is true from what is false, and that evil shall wear no different

likeness from good. "Abeunt studia in mores, " is a remark peculiarly applicable to the studies and employments of the bar. Lawyers, too, are in the habit of seeing so much of the

guilt and infirmities of humanity, and of contemplating its darkest side, that they are in imminent peril of losing all respect for, and sympathy with, human nature, and degenerating into cold-blooded skeptics and sneering misanthropes. He who enters upon the profession with the resolve that the man shall never dwindle into a fractional part of the lawyer, will not fail to guard against these and all other malign influences, by all sorts of purifying, elevating, and softening exercises; and Mr. Hoffman's eloquent pages will furnish powerful moral talismans to sustain and defend the pilgrim on his dim and perilous

way.

Mr. Hoffman earnestly recommends to the student, to take up some one of the four courses of study which he prescribes, and go through with it. We have no doubt that a faithful attention to the most limited of the four would be enough to make one a sound and competent lawyer; but we doubt whether many will undertake it; and we do not consider the chief value of the work to consist in the courses of study which it prescribes, simply as courses. There are different ways of learning law, as well as of learning any thing else; and each mind selects the course most congenial to its nature. Without wishing to discourage hard study (without which nothing great was ever accomplished), the fact that a man may read more books than is good for him, is as true in law as in other things. It is very possible for a man to be as much encumbered with his book-learning, as David was with Saul's armour. Great learning requires great powers to make it efficient. The club of Hercules, without the arm of Hercules to wield it, is but a harmless piece of timber. The great value of the "Course of Legal Study" to the practising lawyer, will be found to consist in the help which it will afford in the investigation of law points. It is an admirable catalogue raisonnée to the vast treasures of the Roman, continental, and common law. Here one sees, at a glance, the path of inquiry opened to him; and all he has to do is to pursue it with resolute steps. So extensive, thorough, and profound is Mr. Hoffman's learning, that the most experienced practitioner, and the best read lawyer, cannot fail to derive benefit from his labors, especially in such questions as require them to seek the foreign aid of the European and ancient Roman law.

But the great merit of this work consists in the beneficial influence which it is calculated to exert upon young lawyers VOL. XLVI. No. 98.

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and law students. It is emphatically the student's friend. It is written with a glow of professional enthusiasm, which mature years and long commerce with the world have not had power to chill; and which, though it may move the ridicule of the frivolous, and the sneer of the morose, cannot fail to awaken a throb of responsive feeling in an ingenuous and manly bosom. Here may be found the most judicious advice on books and study, elegant criticism and ripe learning, all conveyed in those cordial tones of encouragement, which are calculated to rouse the indolent, animate the desponding, and confirm the aspiring. The tone of the work is uniformly elevated, addressing itself to the highest and best principles of our nature, and leading the young to the pure and unfading sources of honor, happiness, and respectability. The constant reply of Lagrange to the young men who consulted him respecting their mathematical studies, was, "Study Euler;" and in like manner we should say to every law student from Maine to Louisiana, "Study Hoffman.' Without the "Course of Legal Study," we should deem the most ample law library imperfect. We want no better test than this work supplies, to judge of a young man's fitness to excel in the profession of the law. If he read it with coldness and apathy, lay it down without reluctance, and return to it as a task, we should tell him frankly, that he had mistaken his vocation, that the stuff was not in him out of which a lawyer could be made; and we should advise him to seek some other more congenial employment. But if he take it up with eagerness and close it with regret, study diligently the didactic portions, and read the eloquent passages with sparkling eyes and glowing cheek, we should joyfully encourage him to persevere; we should confidently predict his future eminence; we should see already within his grasp, the laurel of the advocate and the ermine of the judge.

We take leave of Mr. Hoffman with sincere acknowledgments for the pleasure which his work has afforded us, and assure him that it will give us much gratification to hear from him again. We hope that he will continue to enrich the jurisprudence of our country, with those harvests which his years of study and reflection have given him.

ART. V. Histoire de la Vie et des Euvres de Raphael. Par M. QUATREMÈRE DE QUINCY. Third Edition.

Paris.

MDCCCXXXV. 8vo. Pp. 460.

A GOOD history of the art of painting is still a desideratum. Lanzi's, which is the best, and indeed the only one that deserves the name, is a very dull book to the general reader, and a perplexing one to such as seek for an accurate knowledge of the subject. In all such inquiries a strict chronological order is the most simple and satisfactory. Lanzi's arrangement into schools, and epochs of schools, is one that leaves no clear notion of the general progress of the art. The same artists reappear at long intervals, as by changing their places of residence they are, at different periods of their lives, considered as belonging to the different schools; and the reader is so often led backward, to take up the beginning of the art in a particular city, that all interest in the subject, as a whole, is lost. What we want to know first, and distinctly, is, by what steps the art has risen from rudeness to its highest point of excellence, and how it has declined. When we have acquired clear and well fixed notions on this point, and have learned readily to refer each name to its appropriate period in the general history, we can advantageously consider the subject as divided into classes, according to the place or manner of the artists. The same deficiency has often struck us in elementary books of political history. Many persons never acquire a clear idea of the general progress of the human race as one family, because they have read the histories of different nations separately, instead of first reading one general account of the whole, or those of different countries taken together during the same periods. Read in this way, history of all sorts wants the warp that should connect it into a consistent fabric.

Lanzi's work contains a great mass of valuable facts and learned research; but another and more important deficiency than that just named, is, that it is composed in the spirit of an antiquarian, and not of a lover of the art. Much space is taken up in the discussion of doubtful but unimportant facts, and in an enumeration of mere names of persons and paintings, of which we learn, after all, nothing but the names. tenths of the artists recorded there, and whose works, wherever

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known, are pointed out and described, have produced no effect upon the progress of the art; nor is it often illustrated by any anecdotes connected with their labors or life. The work is very complete of its kind; but it leaves abundant room for such an author as M. de Quincy, to write a new and delightful history of the art; of which the book before us, as well as his life of Michel Angelo, should be portions.

We do not remember to have read any thing on the subject so interesting. And it is not a subject on which it is easy to write an agreeable book; because, however interesting the works of art are in themselves, they hardly admit of verbal description or criticism, addressed to those who are not already familiar with them. M. de Quincy complains of this difficulty; but he has surmounted it successfully by combining the personal character of Raphael so closely with his works, that we read the descriptions of his paintings rather as illustrations of the man, than as the principal objects of the book. The most profound and delicate criticism, thus applied, seems but a kind of biographical anecdote.

It may be remarked, in passing, that there is another reason which should deter a writer from attempting to describe in detail works of art, beside the difficulty of conveying any just notion of them by words. For it is as difficult to describe nature as art; and yet the attempt is, in one case, often agreeable, and in the other always tiresome. We follow the traveller through real, and the romancer through imaginary scenes, with interest; but Scott himself could not make a mere description of a Claude or a Raphael any thing but a skippingplace. The pleasure derived from description, consists not so much in any knowledge we acquire by it, as in the exercise to which it stimulates the imagination, in forming for itself a picture of the thing described; and the imagination demands truth, as the basis of all its visions. There must be at least a temporary belief that the thing imitated is a reality, and not itself an imitation. A drawing of a statue, however beautiful, is inferior in interest to one that represents life directly, though far less perfect in its proportions. For the same reason, a painting from a scene of the acted drama, though wholly free from the appearance of representation, fails to excite the same interest it would, if we did not know it was from a play. We do not mean, that works of art may not suggest the noblest sentiments, and thus be the occasion of the finest