Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 03.pdf/562

 523

POETRY AND THE LAW. IN an article recently published in the "Green Bag," a long list was given of poets and authors who had been in some way connected with the law. At first thought it would seem that no two callings could be more diverse in every respect than Poetry and the Law; and such being the case, it is curious to see how close the connection has been from earliest times between them. Lord Coke, the great English lawyer, boasts that one of his works contains three hundred quo tations from the poets; and in another place observes that " verses were at the first in vented for the help of memory, and it standeth well with the gravity of our lawyers to cite them." The Greeks looked upon their poets as legal authorities; and it would ap pear that the poems of Homer were laid on the table of the courts of justice, together with the volumes of their law. The inferiority of the people of Salamis to those of Athens was determined simply on the authority of a passage in the sublime writer; and so when France and Spain disputed about their proper boundaries, the pages of Petrarch the poet were appealed to as a competent authority; and a similar authority was accorded to the Greek tragedians /Eschylus, Sophocles, and Euripides, by a law of the Athenians yet preserved. The Roman lawyer constantly appealed to the ancient poets as we should to a statute or a decided case; and quota tions from authors of this description are to be found even in their grave legislative ordinances. Much of the Roman law was reduced from a metrical poem; and we may still refer to the (ireek verses of Psellus the younger, for information respecting Roman jurispru dence. The reports of Lord Coke have in like manner been presented to us in a poeti cal version, while some of the State trials of England, which reflect so much light on her criminal law and its administration, have appeared in the shape of a series of poems.

The northern nations employed verse upon almost all occasions. This was especially the case with our Anglo-Saxon ancestors, whose lively imaginations contrasted singu larly with the rigor of their climate and the barbarity of their customs, so much so as to furnish something like evidence of their having sprung, as antiquarians surmise, from a race whose original residence was in i he warm, glowing regions of the East, — on the banks of the Indus or the Ganges. The an cient law of the men of Kent, by which land was exempted from the penalty of forfeiture when its owner committed a crime, was ex pressed in the rude distich, — "The father to the bough, The son to the plough." While in King Athelstane's grant to the good men of Beverley, which was inscribed beneath his effigy in Beverley Church, we perhaps have the form by which in old days the pious lord emancipated his slaves, — "Als free I make thee As heart may think Or eigh may see." Many of the laws of the Frisians and of the Welsh also assumed the same form, but their poetical structure would disappear in any thing like a close translation. Is there not, too, a real poetical rhythm, uncouth it may be, in the Anglo-Saxon legal proceedings? Listen to one party asserting his claim and the other stating his defence: "So I held it as he held it, who held it as saleable, and as I will own it — and never resign it — neither plot nor ploughland,— nor turf nor toft — nor furrow nor footlength — nor land nor leasowe — nor fresh nor marsh — nor rough ground nor room — nor wold nor fold — nor land nor strand — wood nor water." The other replies : " Do as I rede thee — keep to thine own — leave