THE ROMANCE OF THE OLD REPORTS. By Francis J. Hagax. AN English author has lately labored to show that Blackstone, like another black individual, is not as black as he is painted. To perform the same task, however feebly and incompletely, for those treasures of truth and justice, those invaluable repositories of our rights and wrongs, the old reports and commentaries shall be to me a labor of love. The law is pre-eminently a science of prec edents. A solemn decision becomes an authority for all future cases in which the facts are analogous, and even equity is as firmly bound by precedents as the pagan gods were by the decrees of destiny. The necessity of preserving authentic records of judicial proceedings for future guidance was recognized in the earliest ages, and those documents to-day are among the oldest ex tant. Their claim upon our notice does not merely rest upon an idle veneration for an tiquity. The abstract and eternal principles of right are forever the same whether en cumbered by the oppressive appendages of feudal tenures or applied to the refinements of modern property, and we are compelled to go back to them for the authority by which we enjoy our most valued privileges and prerogatives. The man of general cul ture, as well as the legal student, will find in them an abiding charm, the tragedian, ma terials for his loftiest lucubrations, the his torian, authentic memorials of their time, and the defamer- of the law a speaking contra diction in the unbending integrity and lofty morals with which the courts were inspired. Dry, abstract and uninteresting as the law is said to be, the man of imagination will find the old reports.abounding in pathetic incidents, displays of/dpep feeling and soul-subduing situations. Within untiring spirit they have painted, in all their multiform manifestations,
triumphant truth and hideous hydra-headed wrong, but painted them with such art, such dextrous skill, in colors softening so deli cately down, that Justice herself is puzzled to tell where the separate hues begin or end. The man who believes himself hurt by his neighbor's tongue will labor long and wisely before he finds out whether he be really hurt or not. They contain the most authoritative evi dence of those customs and usages which constitute our common law and upon which the whole system of our jurisprudence is based, which have stood the test of time, and are destined to guide the most distant posterity. Those customs and usages have come down to us through all the vicissitudes of change, conquest, subjugation and rebel lion; they have perpetually prevailed under the painted Britons, the military despotism of the Romans, the forays of Picts and Scots, the incursions of Danes and Angles, the Heptarchy of the Saxons and the conquest of the Normans. They were not the work of a single man or nation. They were the gradual growth of many centuries and were established by many precedents until they became principles " to which the memory of man runneth not to the contrary." Who were the reporters and preservers of the prehistoric precedents? Our law is a venerable institution and its foundations rest in the past deeper than we can penetrate, but by the few feeble rays of historic light we dimly discern, enshrouded in the mist of the dawn, a mysterious race of reporters — the Druids. I hazard a bold hypothesis, but it is historically tenable. In his commentaries Caesar informs us that the administration of the laws was entrusted to the Druids, as well as the matters of their mysterious faith. Their religious tenets
