and sisters of the said Sir John being confirmed executors to him, pursue one Beaton, factor in Paris, for payment of 20,000 pounds addebted by him to the said umquhile Sir John, who, suspending upon double poinding," &c.

Perhaps enough has been said to exemplify the dauntless nature of M. Michel's researches. It is impossible to withhold admiration from such achievements, and I know that, in some quarters, they are deemed the highest to which the human intellect can aspire. But I confess that, to my own taste, the results of M. Teulet's labours are more acceptable. True, he does not profess to give the world an original book. He comes forward as the mere transcriber and editor of certain documents. But in the gathering of these documents from different quarters, through all the difficulties of various languages and alphabets, in their arrangement so as to bring out momentous historical truths in their due series, and in the helps he has afforded to those who consult his volumes, he has shown a skill and scholarship which deserve to be ranked with the higher attainments of science. Reference has already been made to his volume on Queen Mary. Among not the least valued of the contents of any good historical library, will be six octavo volumes containing the correspondence of La Mothe Fénélon, and the other French ambassadors to England and Scotland during the latter years of Queen Elizabeth's reign, for which the world is indebted to M. Teulet's researches. The

book at present especially referred to is a reprint, with some additions, of the papers—at least all that are worth having-which were previously an exclusive luxury of the Bannatyne Club, having been printed in three quarto volumes, as a gift to their brethren, by certain liberal members of that Club. These papers go into the special affairs of this country as connected with France and Spain from the beginning of our disputes with our old ally down to the accession of James VI. In the hands of the first historian who has the fortune to make ample use of them, these documents will disperse the secluded and parochial atmosphere that hangs about the history of Scotland, and show how the fate of Europe in general turned upon the pivot of the destinies of our country. It is here that, along with many minor secrets, we have revealed to us that narrow escape made by the cause of Protestantism, when the project on the cards was the union of the widowed Queen Mary to the heir of Spain, and those political combinations already referred to as centering round the interests and the fate of the Queen of Scots, which led to the more signal and renowned escape realised in the defeat of the Armada.

Chapter V.

Relics of the League in Scots Habits and PracticesThe Law-The Bonnet Vert and the Dyvour's Habit -The States-General and the Three Estates-The Huguenots and the Covenanters-Religious Architecture-The Chateau and the Castle-The Eguimené and the Hogmanay-The Fêtes des Foux and the Daft Days - French Education and Manners.

THE long and close connection with France could

not fail to leave some specialties in the constitution and social condition of Scotland. A glance at these may prove curious, and may also be instructive as showing how far a political alliance with a nation essentially differing in character will go, in changing the fundamental nature of a people.

However much the infusion of Scots blood into her veins may have affected the inner life of France, in externals the great central territory, the inheritor of Roman civilisation, was naturally the teacher—

the rude northern land the pupil. France thus infused into Scotland her own institutions, which, being those of the Roman Empire, as practised throughout the Christian nations of the Continent, made Scotsmen free of those elements of social communion—of that comitas gentium—from which England excluded herself in sulky pride. This is visible, or rather audible, at the present day, in the Greek and Latin of the Scotsmen of the old school, who can make themselves understood all over the world; while the English pronunciation, differing from that of the nations which have preserved the chief deposits of the classic languages in their own, must as assuredly differ from the way in which these were originally spoken.

The Englishman disdained the universal Justinian jurisprudence, and would be a law unto himself, which he called, with an affectation of humility, "The Common Law." It is full, no doubt, of patches taken out of the 'Corpus Juris,' but, far from their source being acknowledged, the civilians are never spoken of by the common lawyers but to be railed at and denounced; and when great draughts on the Roman system were found absolutely necessary to keep the machine of justice in motion, these were entirely elbowed out of the way by common law, and had to form themselves into a separate machinery of their own, called Equity.

Scotland, on the other hand, received implicitly from her leader in civilisation the great body of the

civil law, as collected and arranged by the most laborious of all labouring editors, Denis Godefroi. There came over also an exact facsimile of the French system of public prosecution for crime, from the great state officer at the head of the system to the Procureurs du Roi. It is still in full practice,

and eminently useful; but it is an arrangement that, to be entirely beneficial, needs to be surrounded by constitutional safeguards; and though there has been much pressure of late to establish it in England, one cannot be surprised that it was looked askance at while the great struggles for fixing the constitution were in progress.

Saying that Scotland took from France the civil law entire, supersedes all particulars as to the similarity of the forms of the administration of justice in the two countries, unless one were writing an extensive work dedicated to the comparative anatomy of the civil law as exemplified in both. In such a pursuit the closest parallel might be found in books without any resemblance whatever in practice. It was long an almost necessary qualification for the bar in Scotland, that one had studied the civil law abroad. There are, perhaps, lawyers old enough to remember when the saying of some Continental civilian of the sixteenth or seventeenth century, Viglius Zuichemus, Rittershusius, Puffendorf, Noodt, Voet, and the like, might be cited just as aptly as a decision a few years old, in some case about a breach of warranty in the insurance of a vessel, or the im