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Rh Jurisprudence (so revolting to the taste when considered as the arbitrary jargon of a philosophical theory), would possess sufficient attractions to excite the curiosity, when considered as a necessary passport to a knowledge of that system, which so long determined the rights of the greatest and most celebrated of nations.

“Universal grammar,” says Dr Lowth, “cannot he taught abstractedly; it must be done with reference to some language already known, in which the terms are to be explained and the rules exemplified.” The same observation may be applied (and for reasons strikingly analogous) to the science of Natural or Universal Jurisprudence.

Of the truth of this last proposition Bacon seems to have been fully aware; and it was manifestly some ideas of the same kind which gave birth to Montesquieu’s historical speculations with respect to the origin of laws, and the reference which they may be expected to bear, in different parts of the world, to the physical and moral circumstances of the nations among whom they have sprung up. During this long interval, it would be difficult to name any intermediate writer, by whom the important considerations just stated were duly attended to.

In touching formerly on some of Bacon’s ideas concerning the philosophy of law, I quoted a few of the most prominent, of those fortunate anticipations, so profusely scattered over his works, which, outstripping the ordinary march of human reason, associate his mind with the luminaries of the eighteenth century, rather than with his own contemporaries. These anticipations, as well as many others of a similar description, hazarded by his bold yet prophetic imagination, have often struck me as resembling the pierres d’attente jutting out from the corners of an ancient building, and inviting the fancy to complete what was left unfinished of the architect’s design;—or the slight and broken sketches traced on the skirts of an American map, to connect its chains of hills and branches of rivers with some future survey of the contiguous wilderness. Yielding to such impressions, and eager to pursue the rapid flight of his genius, let me abandon for a moment the order of time, while I pass from the Fontes Juris to the Spirit of Laws. To have a just conception of the comparatively limited views of Grotius, it is necessary to attend to what was planned by his immediate predecessor, and first executed (or rather first begun to be executed) by one of his remote successors.

The main object of the Spirit of Laws (it is necessary here to premise) is to show, not, as has been frequently supposed, what laws ought to be,—but how the diversities in the physical and moral circumstances of the human race have contributed to produce diversities