der it in its original object and creation, or in its mediæval phase. The explanation would seem to be historical only, not logical.

When the Church had destroyed the hæres, and had set up the executor, her lawyers busied themselves to find analogies between the two. One analogy was obvious, both of them had the management of the general estate. The executor was therefore loco hæredis. If he intermeddled, he should be under an obligation to complete the administration, and not at will divest himself of it. But here all true analogy ceased, as our readers have seen from our previous remarks. The canonists, however, thought not: they proceeded further, and they fearlessly applied to the executorship, without logic or pity, the principle of the transmissio hæreditatis, which they found in such texts of the civil law as the following:

"In omni successione, qui ei hæres extitit, qui Titio hæres fuit, Titio quoque hæres videtur esse, nec potest Titii omittere hæreditatem."

"Ex antiquâ regulâ quæ voluit hæredem hæredis testatoris esse hæredem." 3

"Hæredis appellatio non solum ad proximum hæredem, sed et ad ulteriores refertur; nam et hæredis hæres, et deinceps hæredis appellatione continetur."4

This transmission of the inheritance is just and natural, for it means no more than the vesting of a beneficial interest in property, whether the hæres or a legatee took it, and is therefore no more than such a legitimate consequence of property as every age and clime beyond the savage state has recognised. But whilst property is clearly transmissible to a man's representatives, office is as clearly personal and untransmissible. After the hæres, however, was dead and harmless, the Church dressed up the executor in his garments and decorated him

1 So Lyndewode calls him, cap. Statutum, verb. Intestatis. But Mr. Justice Blackstone (Treatise of Equity, book iv. part 2), in a style of reasoning since adopted by the clowns at Astley's, observes, "The executor is like the hæres in the Civil Law, only he takes nothing to his own use."

2 Dig. lib. xxix. tit. 2, p. 7. 4 Dig. lib. 1. tit. 16, p. 65.

3 Cod. lib. vi. tit. 24, p. 14.
5 De Fresquet, vol. i. P. 415.

with his properties, and as she had her own way in those days, she finally pronounced the executor and the hæres to be one and the same, and undistinguishable; a doctrine which is devoutly believed in the present age. We have said enough, we think, to show that the transmission of the executorship is no true element of it, whether we regard the office as derived from the testator or the ordinary, but is an intrusive and adventitious addition, highly condemnable on grounds of public policy and a just attention to private interests. We think that this mischievous perversion of law should now be repealed; for as a principle, it is contradicted by its history, and is unsupported by its rationale. H. C. C.

ART. VI.-SKETCHES OF THE IRISH BAR, &c. &c. By W. H. CURRAN, Esq. 2 vols. 8vo. London, 1855. H. Colburn.

IN

N our last number appeared a brief notice of some of the more prominent characteristics of the Irish bar, as displayed in Mr. Sheil's Sketches. A few more pages may, perhaps profitably, if not amusingly, be set aside for a continuation of the same subject in connection with the Sketches of Mr. Curran, which treat of persons who were contemporaries at the bar with the former-named author, and with the originals of his portraitures. This work, however, though containing various passages of vigorous and striking delineation, does by no means present the highly-finished pictures that Mr. Sheil's pencil gave us the colouring is less rich and less varied, the accessories are fewer and less carefully elaborated, the light and shadows are managed with less skill; and besides this, very nearly one-half of the book is occupied with matters having no relation whatever to bar or barristers, judges or juries. A lengthened memoir of Chief Baron Woulfe stands first in the gallery, and when compared with some of the full-lengths that

follow, will be found, we think, most strikingly to illustrate the disadvantage at which an intended likeness is taken from memory, as compared with the almost self-evident truthfulness of air which belongs to the traits and touches that a master of his art catches and dashes in when painting from the living subject. Though written by an early friend and life-long companion, yet, being written within these few months for the purpose of the above-named publication, and long since the decease of the Chief Baron, this sketch is far less racy of the Irish soil-savours far less of the reality, as it strikes us, than do many of the "counterfeit presentments" which follow, and which first appeared when the originals were in full life, and were unconsciously exhibiting in the Four Courts, and in society day by day, their attitudes, studied or natural, their habits of thought and action, their modes of address, their forms of speech, "the rest of their acts and all that they did," to be then and there chronicled and delivered to the public and posterity.

Stephen Woulfe, of a Roman Catholic family, was born in 1786, and after graduating at Trinity College, Dublin, was called to the Irish bar in Trinity Term, 1814. In the long vacation of the next year he travelled on the Continent, 66 through France into Geneva, Switzerland, Italy," as he expresses himself, in one of his letters, taking the Tyrol on his way home. home. He He says, "I think you might travel from Paris to Geneva for seven napoleons, from Geneva to Milan for seven more, and to Venice for three :" and this is nearly all that he seems to have had to communicate to his friend of his impressions during his tour, although in the course of it he had seen probably as many cities as the wise Ulysses in his rambles. A year or two after this his frame began to exhibit the harassing symptoms of feeble organization, taking sometimes the form of tendency to disease of the lungs, and then of other maladies with one or other of which he had to contend for the rest of his days. Nevertheless, in 1819, he is found plunging into the midst of "the Catholic controversy," in a pamphlet which won him the countenance of Plunkett and the praise of Burke, and which Lord Grenville pronounced to be, "in his opinion, the ablest piece of political writing that had appeared