by the labour of their own hands. If they did so, it was no doubt a gross heresy; but whether it deserved the castigation it received from St. Augustin's proselytes, may be a question in polemics.

When any of the Romans or Saxons who invaded the island fell into the hands of the Britons, before the introduction of Christianity, they were handed over to the Druids, who sacrificed them with pious ceremonies to their goddess Andraste. These human sacrifices have done much injury to the druidical character amongst us, who never practise them in the same way. They lacked, it must be confessed, some of our light and also some of our prisons. They lacked some of our light, to enable them to perceive that the act of coming in great multitudes with fire and sword to the remote dwellings of peaceable men, with the premeditated design of cutting their throats, ravishing their wives and daughters, killing their children, and appropriating their worldly goods, belongs not to the department of murder and robbery, but to that of legitimate war, of which all the practitioners are gentlemen and entitled to be treated like gentlemen. They lacked some of our prisons in which our philanthropy has provided accommodation for so large a portion of our own people, wherein, if they had left their prisoners alive, they could have kept them from returning to their countrymen and being at their old tricks again immediately. They would also, perhaps, have found some difficulty in feeding them, from the lack of the county rates. . .

The people lived in darkness and vassalage. They were lost in the grossness of beef and ale. They had no pamphleteering societies to demonstrate that reading and writing are better than meat and drink, and they were utterly destitute of the blessings of those schools for all,' the house of correction and the treadmill."

The dictum of Judge Buller, that a man was entitled to beat his wife with a stick as thick as his thumb, appears to have been based on an early Welsh law:

If a wife speak an ireful word to her husband, such as wishing drivel upon his beard, or dirt in his teeth, or call him a cur, she is to pay him three kine camlwrw, for he is lord over her; or if she like it better, to be struck three strokes with a rod of the length of the forearm of her husband and

of the thickness of his long finger, and that wheresoever he may will excepting her head.-Laws, 436.

Cats seem to have been an object of legal solicitude. If a man parted from his wife, he was to take away only one, and leave the rest.

Whoever shall sell a cat, is to answer for her not going a caterwauling every moon, and that she devour not her kitten, and that she have ears, eyes, teeth, and nails, and being a good mouser.- Dimetian Code, 283.

The exportation of corn was prohibited.

Three things that are not to be conveyed to a foreign country, without the permission of the country and the lord: gold, books, and wheat.-Laws, 655.

In one of the Codes is a version of the logic by which the worth of a man is fixed, which our readers may recollect in the old English ballad of King John and the Abbot of Canterbury, and also in Bürger's Poems. The king says

"Tell me to one penny what I am worth."

The clown answers

"For thirty pence our Saviour was sold
Amonge the false Jewes, as I have bin told,
And twenty-nine is the worth of thee,

For I thinke thou art one penny worser than hee."

In the Dimetian Code :

Twenty-four pence is the worth of the blood of every kind of persons; thirty pence was the worth of the blood of Christ, and it is unworthy to see the blood of God and the blood of man appraised of equal worth; and therefore the blood of a man is of less worth.-Dimetian, 247.

Among the Anomalous Laws, however, the following question is asked and answered:

Is there any blood of greater worth than twenty-four pence? There is the blood of a foetus.-Laws, 407.

The following may be received as a sample of the "Triads." The three mighties of the world: a lord, a brave, and a non-entity; the reason is, a lord is like a stone along the ice, and a brave is an idiot, and an idiot is not to be ruled in anything against his will; and a person who is a non-entity is one without any property, and therefore property cannot be exacted where there is none.-Laws, 406.

Three futile expressions which, uttered in court, do not avail: denial before a verdict; premature objection; remembrance and pleading after judgment.—Dimetian Code, 215.

There are three worthless milks: the milk of a cat; the milk of a bitch; and the milk of a mare. Since there is no satisfaction made on account of them.-Dimetian Code, 215. There are three excitements to revenge: screaming of female relatives; seeing the bier of their relation, and seeing the grave of their relation without atonement-Dimetian Code, 216.

The three vexations of the wise are ebriety, adultery, and bad temper.- Dimetian; also Gwentian Code, 384.

Three private intercourses which the king is to have without the presence of his judge: with his wife; with his priest, and with his mediciner. -- Dimetian.

There are three secrets better to be disclosed than ̧c concealed treason and losses to the lord; waylaying and a person killing his father or his mother, if disclosed in confidence. -Dimetian.

A mill and a wear and an orchard are called the three ornaments of a kindred, and those three things are not to be shared nor removed, but their produce shared between those who may have a right to it.-Venedotian, 87.

Three lengths of a barley-corn in the inch; three inches in the palm breadth; three palm breadths in the foot; three feet in the pace; three paces in the leap; three leaps in a land. The land in modern Welsh is called a ridge; and a thousand of the lands is a mile.-Venedotian, 90.

There are three things under cover in the palace: a mead vat, and a sentence and a song before it is shown to the king. - Dimetian, 222.

Three things which protect a person against a summons to pleadings: the shouting and sound of horns before a border country host; flood in a river, without a bridge and without a cobble; and sickness.-Gwentian; also Miscellaneous, p. 554.

Three persons who will reduce a country to poverty: a prevaricating lord; an iniquitous judge, and an accusing maer. -Gwentian, 385.

The "Ancient Welsh Laws" is one of the series of publica

Al

tions authorized by a vote of the House of Commons passed so far back as in 1822, under the title of the "History of Britain." The originator of this series, the late Mr. Petrie, died but a few weeks since, and did not live to witness the publication of even the first volume of his own portion. most simultaneously with the publication of the "Ancient Welsh Laws," the "Ancient Laws and Institutes of England, consisting chiefly of Anglo-Saxon Laws," were published: we had purposed to treat both together, but our limits are already exhausted, and the latter must be left for another opportunity. H. C.

ART. III.-LIFE OF SIR WILLIAM GRANT.

THE lineage and name of Grant are of the highest antiquity and consideration in Scottish annals. In a singular work published in 1795, intituled "Memoires Historiques, Généalogiques &c. de la Maison de Grant, tant en Ecosse qu'en Normandie, en Allemagne, en Suède, en Dannemarc, &c. par Charles Grant, Vicomte de Vaux," the author, a French emigré, but hearty clansman, traces the name by its etymology to the French Le Grand, and enumerates, among the worthiest modern scions of the house, "Monsieur William Grant, membre du Parlement Britannique." Lion King of Arms, he informs us, can certify the greatness of this powerful, ancient and numerous race. The descent from former renown to the obscure branch of the family, from which this great lawyer sprung, is like tracing a mighty stream into its creeks and shallows.

William Grant, descended from the Grants of Baldornie, ́ was born at Elchies, on the banks of the Spey, in Morayshire, in 1755. His father had been a small farmer in that county, but migrated soon after his birth to the Isle of Man, where he filled the office of collector of the customs. Both his parents dying when he was very young, the care of his education devolved on an uncle, a wealthy merchant of London, and afterwards proprietor of Elchies, who discharged his duty well. The boy William was brought up, together with a younger brother, who afterwards became a collector of customs at Martinico, at the grammar school of Elgin, and boarded

at the house of Mr. John Irvine, nephew to the minister. The grateful scholar contributed largely to the rebuilding of the school house thirty years later, when the "old house at home" required ample funds for its restoration. Having completed his schooling at the old college of Aberdeen, he was sent to pass two years at Leyden, which had not yet wholly lost its ancient renown, that he might perfect his studies in the civil law.

Our province of Upper Canada being supposed to offer an open and unoccupied field to a clever lawyer, to whom an early return for the little capital invested in his education was a pressing object, young Grant sailed for that country in the autumn of 1775, and arrived at Quebec just before the critical period when it was threatened with a siege by the American general Montgomery, and when, on the death of that general, Colonel Arnold attempted to take it by a coupde-main. There are several examples of eminent lawyers who have been previously distinguished in the military profession; "the same person," says an eloquent author, "may certainly, at different periods of life, put on the helmet and the wig, the gorget and the band, attend courts and lie in trenches, head a charge and lead a cause." It was reserved for le Chevalier Grant, however, to doff one head dress and don the other to perform both duties, military and legal-on the same day. He assisted at the fortifications, and was active in the labours of a volunteer. When the alarm from invasion ceased, and the harassed province was restored to comparative tranquillity, his duties as a lawyer were scarcely less multifarious. He had left England before completing the requisite number of terms for a call to the bar, but was appointed, by the fiat of the governor, Attorney General of Canada, an office of loftier sound than of real dignity or emolument. The preferment, for which indeed there were few competitors, was most happily bestowed, as none but firstrate talents could have extricated the administration of the laws from inextricable confusion. Strange to say, the municipal code, by which this conquered colony was to be governed, had not yet been decided. A proclamation of 1763, drawn up in the vague language of a soldier, provided for the administration of justice as near as might be" ac