still exist; it is desirable that they should be understood to remain in force, but great care is evidently necessary not to force them upon transactions which, if the meaning of the rule is to be observed, ought really to be exceptions.'

And again:

'Can it then be said that a contract by which he consents to the transfer of the business of making guns and ammunition for foreign lands to an English company, with whom he undertakes not to compete so long as the old trade is flourishing in their hands, is against the policy of English law? So to hold would surely be to reduce to an absurdity the law of restraint of trade. I answer the question in the words of Lord Nottingham in the Duke of Norfolk's case: 'Pray let us so resolve cases here, that they may stand with the reason of mankind, when they are debated abroad."

Lord Bowen was a great admirer of Lord Justice Mellish, whom he considered the best arguer he had known at the Bar. Like his great predecessor, Lord Bowen found no difficulty in dealing with Equity appeals, though he would playfully describe himself as a neophyte or a proselyte at the gate. In truth, to a trained mind. endowed with legal apprehension, it comes easy to understand and appreciate any system of jurisprudence, even where the details may be unfamiliar. It is, therefore, to be regretted that Lord Bowen did not live regularly to take part in the Judicial Committee in the decision of appeals from our dependencies, in which almost every civilized system of jurisprudence is to be found.

Virgil's polished majesty and perfection of form had great attractions for Bowen's literary taste, and he was tempted to amuse his leisure by attempting the impossible. In the year 1887 he published his translation of the Eclogues and first six books of the Aeneid. In his preface he says that 'a translator of Virgil into English verse finds the road along which he has undertaken to travel strewn with the bleaching bones of unfortunate pilgrims who have preceded him.' Of Dryden's translation he says, 'The silver trumpet has disappeared, and a manly strain is breathed through bronze;' and of Professor Conington's, 'The sweet and solemn majesty of the ancient form is wholly gone.' He selected a metre of his own invention. His lines are hexameters, with the substitution of a single syllable for the final dissyllable, each pair of successive lines rhyming. This is not the time or the place to enter upon a critical judgment of Bowen's own translation. It may be that to endeavour to present Virgil in an English garb is too heroic a task. Many of the lines, particularly in the Eclogues, have a beauty of their own. Reference may, for example, be made to the lament for Daphnis in the Fifth Eclogue.

It is also known to some of his friends that Bowen, like other men of literary genius, from time to time sought expression of his thoughts in poetry. His lyrical verses are graceful and finished, like everything he did, and not seldom touched by the divine spark from Heaven. If Bowen had not been a lawyer, he might have been a poet, as he might have been a good many other things. The writer is permitted to transcribe the following specimen :

Go, Song, and fall at Silvia's feet, and say,
Thou art not Love,-but from some frozen sky
That knows not of Love's name nor of Love's way,
Hast fluttered idly to her door to die.

Shake from thy plumes, before thou meet her eye,
All passion-veil thy gaze, forget thy pain,

And, if she take thee on her heart to lie,

Become a thing of beauty, a soft strain

Filling her dreams with music. Should she deign
To ask what bird in what enchanted grove
Taught thee a note so tender, swear again,
By all thou holdest dear, it was not Love;
Else will she drive thee, Song, into the night,
And lost my toil will be, and thy delight.

In 1887 Lord Bowen contributed an article on 'The Administration of the Law' to 'The Reign of Queen Victoria,' edited by Mr. Humphry Ward. The article contains an interesting historical retrospect, in a popular form, of the constitution and procedure of the Courts and the administration of the law at the beginning of the reign, and a full and accurate account of the changes and reforms since made in every department, including, of course, the great changes made by the Judicature Act, 1873, and the amending Acts. It will have a permanent value for every student of legal history in England.

Lord Bowen took a great interest in legal education and the promotion of the study of law, and was for some years an active and useful member of the Council of Legal Education. On the reconstitution of the Council a few years back he desired to extend its work, so as to include all who desired to study law, whether students of the Inns of Court or not. He was also a warm supporter of the movement for creating a great School of Law in London, through the agency of the Inns of Court. Lord Bowen chafed under the restricted conditions by which the work of the Council was confined, and ultimately resigned his seat on it.

Of Charles Bowen as a friend the present writer will not speak in this place. Sunt lacrimae rerum. In society his social charm, his courtesy, his playful wit, and the interest of his conversation, endeared him to a large circle. Bowen never wrote or said an unkind or ill-natured thing of anybody and never lost a friend. Not by temperament a man of high spirits, he was sometimes full

of fun, and was not above poking fun from the Bench at some of his old friends at the Bar. His wit was free from sarcasm. It was

a polished phrase, a happy simile, or an ingenious turn to a quotation or a story. He once described some ladies, who had been climbing in Switzerland, as solving the problem which had perplexed the minds of the Schoolmen, of how many angels could stand on the point of a needle.

A life of singular beauty and usefulness has been abruptly closed, and the world has suffered the loss of one who combined in so rare a degree nobility and simplicity of character with intellectual power. Admiratione te potius quam temporalibus laudibus et, si natura suppeditet, similitudine decoremus. Is verus honor, ea conjunctissimi cujusque pietas.'

HORACE DAVEY.

SIR

II. SIR JAMES STEPHEN AS A LEGISLATOR.

(IR James Fitzjames Stephen will be remembered in England rather as a great writer on law than as a great lawyer or as a great judge. In India he will be remembered as a great legislator. His tenure of office there was exceptionally fertile in legislation, especially in codification. It produced the Criminal Procedure Code of 1872, the Evidence Act, and the Contract Act.

The law member who took his seat in the Governor-General's Council at the end of 1869 was fortunate in arriving at a time when a definite task was expected of him, a task which he was specially qualified to undertake. For more than a quarter of a century the comprehensive scheme of Indian legislation which the Directors' despatch of 1834 sketched out, and on which Macaulay and his colleagues laboured, seemed destined to pass into the limbo of unrealized projects. It was partially revived by the appointment, in 1853, of an Indian law commission to work in England. It was still further revived by the reform of the Indian legislature after the Indian Mutiny of 1857, and by the sense of a need for improved administration which arose out of the events of that mutiny. The reformed legislative council enacted a Code of Civil Procedure in 1859, Macaulay's Penal Code in 1860, and a Code of Criminal Procedure in 1861. In the last of these years the Indian Law Commission was reconstituted in England, and numbered among its members such distinguished men as Robert Lowe and the late Lord Justice James. The new Commissioners directed their attention to the codification of substantive law, and sent out to India several drafts of codifying measures. But they were dissatisfied with the slow rate of progress which was made in giving effect to their proposals, and resigned in 1870. Sir Henry Maine had by that time passed into law one of their Bills, the Indian Succession Act, and had introduced two others, the Evidence Bill and the Contract Bill, but had been obliged to leave these as legacies to his successor.

If the Law Commission of 1861 had survived longer, it is doubtful whether their relations to Mr. Fitzjames Stephen would have been altogether harmonious; but there can be no doubt that he sympathized with their impatience of legislative delays. The time of his arrival in India seemed exceptionally propitious to codifying experiments. A quarter of a century ago codification

was more in the air than it is now. Perhaps it would not be disrespectful to the shade of David Dudley Field to suggest that he had not yet been found out. His draft Codes seemed to show the possibility of doing for English law what had been done for Continental law. They had not yet been taken seriously by the legislatures of Western States. They had not yet been dissected by successive generations of Professors. The Indian Law Commissioners of 1861 borrowed from them largely, and not always critically. Many gobbets of undigested Field went out to India in the Contract Bill; too many of them still remain in the Contract Act 1.

And if the time for codification had arrived, so also had the man. Probably no one ever believed more absolutely in the utility and in the practicability of codification than Fitzjames Stephen. The two most potent influences on his mind were those of Bentham and Carlyle. From the former he derived the conviction that all law might, and should, be embodied in a series of brief propositions, logically arranged. By the latter he was inspired with the belief in the strong man as the best maker of laws. He threw himself into his Indian work with characteristic ardour and intensity. He attacked it with grim joy, with fierce delight. His strong will overbore all obstacles. His capacity for hard work was unrivalled. Problems which to the ordinary mind are repulsive from their complexity and technicality possessed for him a singular fascination. The jungle of Indian administrative law was im

a paradise, free from the drawbacks of repose. The two most obvious tasks before him were the Evidence Bill and the Contract Bill. Both of these he revised and passed into law. But there were not only new Codes to enact, there were also existing Codes. to amend and recast. He added some new sections to the Penal Code. He took to pieces and with infinite labour re-enacted the Criminal Procedure Code of 18592. One of the charms of codification to his mind was that there was no finality about it. It opened up a vista of. unending labour. He would have liked to repeal and re-enact each of the leading Codes at the expiration of moderately short intervals, say of ten or fifteen years. Nor was his legislative activity confined to the great Codes of procedure and substantive law. With the invaluable aid, and mainly through the instrumentality, of Mr. Whitley Stokes, he expurgated and consolidated large portions of the Indian Statute Book. He

[I have found it necessary to comment on some of these in the course of Tagore Lectures, now published, which I delivered at Calcutta last winter. -Ed. }

2 His select committee on this measure used, as he tells us, to sit for five hours a day, and for five days a week.