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very splendidly printed and adorned, by collecting examples of the absurdity and bad taste of the men whom Kirkton venerates; and has certainly so contrived his commentary, that we rise from the perusal of it, if we have not sufficient information to deteet its unfairness and its fallacy, with opinions just the opposite of those which Kirkton was anxious to establish. He has, in one word, if we may venture to use the expression, mistaken the outer garment of the Covenanters for the Covenanters themselves, and because it is not quite so fashionably shaped as a polished man, such as he is, would have it to be, he concludes that neither moral worth, political integrity, nor true piety, can be found under it.

Whilst we give Mr S. credit for his diligence and research, we are astonished that he has wholly overlooked those recent works which have detail ed the history of the Reformation and the Church of Scotland, and investigated the biography of the Father of both; had he perused them, he would probably have withheld some of his quotations; he would have avoided some errors into which he has fallen; and he would, unquestionably, in various other respects, have been better qualified for the task which he has undertaken.

In his biographical notice of Kirkton, he speaks of this covenanting divine with little respect; and he has prefixed to the history two sermons, to shew the wretched, and not very decent, style of his preaching. There are, no doubt, passages in these discourses which could not be delivered to a modern audience; but there is a vast deal more good sense than we find in many discourses of the bishops who lived about the same period; and whether we be right in this or not, we cannot see what end was to be served by swelling the volume with the serOf Kirkton we will form our opinion from his history; and if it establish, as it unquestionably does, the respectability of his talents, it follows, that any peculiarity in his mode of preaching must be ascribed, not to deficiency in him, but to the taste, bad enough we allow, of the age in which he lived.

mons.

There is added to the history an account of the murder of Archbishop Sharp, by one of the persons who were

engaged in it. This atrocious deed, to which the tergiversation and the cruelty of the primate instigated some furious men driven to desperation, must be viewed with abhorrence; and, let it not be forgotten, that there is decisive evidence of its having been so viewed by the great body of the Presbyterians. In relation to Sharp, we have only room further to say, that the feeble attempt to vindicate him, made by the editor of Kirkton, is just about as hopeless as it is annecessary; for we do think that the Episcopalians need not scruple to resign the archbishop to the richly deserved censure of the Covenanters, his primacy having been more fatal to Episcopacy than it was even to Presbytery.

We cannot close this article with-" out a few words in relation to the Tales of my Landlord, so much connected with the present subject, and to the deep interest excited by which we suspect that we owe the publication both of Kirkton's history, and of the commentary so preposterously attached to it. The title of this fasci nating work exempts the author of it from the obligation of accuracy, as to the history upon which his tale is founded, and we do not think that he is amenable at the bar of criticism for the colouring spread over the incidents so admirably interwoven in his story, provided no other charge can be brought against him. But all tales, whether historical or not, ought to have a salutary tendency; if they be calculated to mislead our moral judgment, they cannot be too severely censured. Upon this score we cannot acquit the author of the Tales of my Landlord. He has certainly, as is indeed admitted by friends and foes, sought to hold up to ridicule the whole body of Covenanters, and to invest their opponents with a gallantry and generosity of spirit which are very apt to captivate general readers. Now, as the Covenanters, with all their faults, did resist despotism, and their earthly persecutors did what lay in them to entail it upon their country, there is some danger that we associate the cause of the Presbyterians with the men who supported it, as he has painted them, and may thus vastly undervalue the freedom which it is our duty, and should be our happiness, to revere.

But we do not regret that the Tales

were published, because we are persuaded, that the curiosity which they have excited, and which graver works would not have raised, graver works alone now will satisfy; and although, no doubt, many readers of the Tales will, after getting a new novel, think no more of the Covenanters, yet there are not a few who will seriously inquire what they actually were, and how they really conducted themselves. We anticipate from this inquiry the hap piest results; for whilst the errors and crimes of some of the Covenanters will be discovered, their merit upon the whole will be duly appreciated, and what is of much more consequence than any opinion respecting them, the view of the misery and oppression to which they were subjected, will kindle that pure love of liberty to which we owe our invaluable constitution, and which we must cherish in the rising generation, if that constitution is to be transmitted to our children.

The Lament of Tasso. By Lord BYRON. 8vo. Murray, London, 1817. THERE are few situations more affecting, or more calculated to impress the mind of a poet, than that which Lord Byron has made the subject of this short effusion. A bard who ranks with the greatest of modern times, shut out from the world, nature, and liberty, in the abode of frenzy, among beings who retain the human form, but in whom the divine image within is almost wholly obliterated-and all for love, too daring, inspired by an object raised so high by fortune, as never to admit a thought of her becoming his,-present a concurrence of events that must awaken the deepest interest. Some recent critics, in the course of indefatigable researches into Italian literary history, have raised doubts, whether this hopeless despised passion was really the grand source, or even any source, of the miseries of Tasso. Without investigating this question, we shall only say, that the reigning belief, be it true or false, is the only one to which a poet can poetically adhere; and it was, therefore, out of the question for Lord Byron to admit any doubts on the subject. According to this belief, the situation, without any aid from fancy, affords full scope for that intense force

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gate,

Which nothing through its bars admits, save day

And tasteless food, which I have eat alone
Till its unsocial bitterness is gone;
And I can banquet like a beast of prey,
Sullen and lonely, couching in the cave
Which is my lair, and it may be-my
grave."

There is something more pleasing in the farewell which he takes of the long and pleasant task that the Jerusalem had afforded him; and extreme delicacy in the manner in which the name of Leonora is first introduced.

"My-pleasant task is done :My long-sustaining friend of many years! If I do blot thy final page with tears, Know, that my sorrows have wrung from

me none.

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he is immured appear to be described with an energy truly extraordinary:

“This vast lazar-house of many woes? Where laughter is not mirth, nor thought the mind,

Nor words a language, nor ev'n men mankind;

Where cries reply to curses, shrieks to blows,

And each is tortured in his separate hell For we are crowded in our solitudesMany, but each divided by the wall, Which echoes Madness in her babbling moods;

While all can hear, none heed his neighbour's call

None! save that One, the veriest.wretch of all,

Who was not made to be the mate of these."

The following description of the gradual preparation of the principle of love within his heart, and its sudden unfolding at the view of the object, appears drawn with extraordinary interest.

It is no marvel-from my very birth My soul was drunk with love-which did pervade

And mingle with whate'er I saw on earth; Of objects all inanimate I made

Idols, and out of wild and lonely flowers, And rocks, whereby they grew, a paradise, Where I did lay me down within the shade Of waving trees, and dreamed uncounted hours,

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By grief, years, weariness-and it may be A taint of that he would impute to meFrom long infection of a den like this, Where the mind rots congenial with the abyss,

towers

Though I was chid for wandering; and the Adores thee still;-and add-that when the wise Shook their white aged heads o'er said

me, and

Of such materials wretched men were made,

And such a truant boy would end in woe,
And that the only lesson was a blow;
And then they smote me, and I did not
weep,

But cursed them in my heart, and to my haunt

Returned and wept alone, and dreamed. again

The visions which arise without a sleep. And with my years my soul began to pant With feelings of strange tumult and soft pain;

And the whole heart exhaled into One Want,

But undefiled and wandering, till the day I found the thing I sought, and that was

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And battlements which guard his joyous hours

Of banquet, dance, and revel, are forgot,
Or left untended in a dull repose,
This this shall be a consecrated spot!
But Thou-when all that Birth and Beau-
ty. throws

Of magic round thee is extinct-shalt have One half the laurel which o'ershades my grave.

No power in death can tear our names

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Upon the whole, this little piece wants the interest arising from narrative, and from any detailed picture of female attractions; but within its limits it contains as much that is pleasing and affecting, as any other composition of this distinguished poet.

G

Reports of some Recent Decisions, by the Consistorial Court of Scotland, in Actions of Divorce, concluding for Dissolution of Marriages celebrated under the English Law. By JAMES FERGUSSON, Esq. Advocate, one of the Judges. 8vo. pp. 470. Constable and Co. Edinburgh, 1817.

THE volume now before us contains a very able discussion of a most interesting and important question of international law;-the question, we mean, Whether the Consistorial Court of this country does or ought to possess the power of dissolving marriages contracted in England, on account of adultery committed in Scotland?

In Scotland, marriage is held to be merely a civil contract, constituted by the consent of the parties, and dissoluble by the Consistorial Court on proof of adultery. In England, on the other hand, marriage cannot be constituted by the mere consent of the parties; it requires the intervention and benediction of a priest, and, when once constituted, cannot be dissolved by judicial sentence. In the event of infidelity in either of the parties, all that the Consistorial Court of England can do, is to pronounce sentence of separation a mensa et thoro;-the higher remedy of divorce a vinculo matrimonii can only be obtained by a Legislative act, which it is both difficult and expensive to procure.

The Consistorial Court of Scotland has, for time immemorial, possessed the power of dissolving marriage; and till lately, it exercised that power, with out scruple, in the case of all persons found within its jurisdiction, whether Scotch or English, and whether the marriage had been celebrated in Scotland or in England. The attention, however, of the Judges of our Consistorial Court, was lately attracted, in a very particular manner, to the nature of English marriages, and to the question, whether they ought to be held dissoluble in a Scotch court, by the following circumstances: In the first place, actions of divorce, for the dissolution of English marriages, had become very numerous; In the second place, Lolly, an Englishman, who had married in England, after having been divorced by the Consistorial Court of Scotland,

was tried for bigamy, and found guilty; the twelve judges having delivered an opinion on a reserved case, "that a marriage, solemnized in England, was indissoluble in any other way than by an act of the Legislature" and, in the third place, the Lord Chancellor, after making a speech which indicated that he doubted strongly of the power of the Consistorial Court of Scotland to dissolve English marriages, remitted the case of Lindsay and Tovey to the Court of Session to reconsider that point. These circumstances arrested the attention of the Commissaries, and pointed out to them the extreme danger of dissolving English marriages. They could not help viewing, with pain, the circumstance, that notwithstanding their sentence, parties marrying again in England were held to be liable to punishment for bigamy. The result was, that they bestowed upon the question the most deliberate consideration, and came to the conclusion, that they had no power to dissolve marriages contracted in England, between English parties, merely on their being found and cited in Scotland to an action of divorce.

We do not mean to enter into a detail of the particular cases reported in the volume now before us. It is our intention merely to give a general view of the questions discussed relative to the dissolution of English marriages in Scotland. We refer those who may wish more information to the book itself, and have no hesitation in saying, that, from a perusal of the reports it contains, and from the valuable appendix with which it is accompanied, they will receive much gratification and instruction upon a subject embracing a variety of the most important questions of international law.

The first question to which the Commissaries directed their attention seems to be, Whether an Englishman, who had been married in England, and who had come to Scotland without any intention of taking up a permanent residence, became amenable to the Consistorial Court of Scotland in an action of divorce? Although this is not the most general and important question discussed in the volume under review, yet it is one of considerable difficulty. In Scot land, there are two kinds of domi

cile; the one real, where the party has made Scotland the place of his permanent abode; and the other presumptive, assumed by a fiction of law, from a forty days' residence in it. The object of this presumptive domicile appears to be, to found jurisdiction against foreigners in ordinary civil suits. It does not seem to alter the nature of the obligations incumbent upon him, or the duties he ought to perform in his own country. Hence, the Commissaries seem to have thought, that, as marriage is indissoluble in England, except by an act of the Legislature, the parties could not, by removing to Scotland for a short time, acquire a domicile, to the effect of entitling the Consistorial Court of this country to convene them before it, for the purpose of dissolving a marriage, which, by the laws of the country where it was constituted, and to which the parties must be held to have had reference, was indissoluble. As to marriages constituted in England, the parties stood bound to fulfil the obligations incumbent on them only in that country, and hence redress fell to be sought according to the law of the place where they stood bound to perform their engagements. Accordingly, they found in the case of Tewsh, that, as the defender had not taken up a permanent residence in Scotland, they had no jurisdiction to dissolve his marriage, which had been contracted in England. The Court of Review, however, entertained a different opinion of this question. The Judge of that Court (the Court of Session) who remitted the case to the Commissaries, with instructions to alter their judgment, held, that the relation of husband and wife is a relation acknowledged by the law of nations, that the duties and obligations incident to that relation, as recognised by the law of Scotland, and the right to redress wrongs thence arising, attach on all married persons living within the territory subject to that law, without regard to the place where their marriage may have been celebrated, and that the right and duty of the Consistorial Court to administer justice in such a case over persons not natural-born subjects, arose from their voluntarily rendering themselves amenable to the laws of the country, by living within its territory at the time of citation.

But the great question which seems to have engaged the chief attention of the Commissaries, and which is most amply discussed in these reports, is, Whether the Consistorial Court of Scotland have power to dissolve a marriage celebrated in England, between English parties domiciled here? It is impossible to give a correct abridgment of the able opinions of the Commissaries on this very important question; but the general outline may be stated thus:-There is a radical difference betwixt the law of England and of Scotland as to marriage and divorce. In England, marriage is indissoluble by judicial sentence. The question must be decided either according to the law of domicile, or the law of the place of contract. In a question of this kind, the lex domicilii is not a safe rule of decision. There is a wide difference betwixt a domicile sufficient to found a jurisdiction, and a domicile sufficient to regulate the decision of a question of permanent situation. The real domicile of the parties is in England,the domicile acquired in Scotland is merely sufficient to found jurisdiction. If the law of domicile, therefore, is to be the rule, the question falls to be decided according to the principles of the English law. The preferable rule, however, by which to decide the question, is the law of the place of contract. The principle of comitas, in virtue of which foreign contracts are expounded according to the law of the country in which they are entered into, ought to extend the length of inducing the Court to decline to do what the courts of England could not do. The genius of the law both of England and Scotland favours the perpetuity of marriage; hence there is nothing in the law of Scotland to prevent the Court from respecting the indissoluble quality of an English marriage. The law of nations is acknowledged in Scotland to regulate all foreign contracts; and there is nothing in the nature of a marriage contract to prevent the application of that principle. As to expediency, it is quite obvious that it is hostile to the interference of the Cout with marriages contracted in countries where they are held to be indissoluble by judicial sentence. An opposite construction would amount to a public invitation to all married persons in the sister kingdom, tired of their union,

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