the honor; and I owe him the same service now, when it has become one which many reckon dangerous." When leaving prison for the Revolutionary Tribunal, where he was to receive sentence, he made a mis-step, and remarked, "It is a bad sign: a Roman would have turned back” (C'est de mauvais augure: un romain serait rentré chez lui). The sentence was death. Lockhart ("Life of Napoleon") puts the same words into the mouth of Napoleon, whose horse stumbled and threw him to the ground, as he was about to cross the Niemen, on the expedition to Russia, June 24, 1812. MALHERBE. [François de Malherbe, a French lyric poet; born at Caen, about 1555; served in the League; composed his first work, 1587; enjoyed the patronage of Henry IV.; died 1628.] Improve your style, sir! You have disgusted me with the joys of heaven. On his death-bed, to a priest who spoke with more earnestness than elegance. An hour before his death, he roused himself to correct his nurse's grammar. The Marquis de Favras, a French officer who was executed on a charge of conspiracy, in 1790, said to the sheriff who showed him the sentence of death, "You have made three mistakes in spelling" (Vous avez fait, monsieur, trois fautes d'autographe). Victor Hugo quotes it verbatim in "Marion Delorme," V. 7, where Saverney corrects the mistakes, and signs his name to his own death-warrant. Rameau, the French musical composer, fatigued with the long discourse with which the priest accompanied the last offices, found strength enough to ask, "What is all that you are singing to me out of tune?" (Que diable venez-vous me chanter là? Vous avez la voix fausse !) It was Rameau, who, in a visit to a belle dame, threw her lap-dog out of the window, because he barked out of tune. Duclos, a witty French writer, dismissed a tiresome curé named Chapeau, with a pun on his name: "I came into the world without breeches: I can leave it without chapeau!" (Je suis venu au monde sans culotte : je m'en irai bien sans chapeau!) MARIA MANCINI. [A niece of Cardinal Mazarin; born in Rome, 1640; attracted the attention of Louis XIV., who wished to marry her, but was prevented by her uncle; after marrying Prince Colonna, she obtained a divorce from him, and became a nun; died about 1715.] You weep, and you are the master! This saying relates to an episode in the early life of Louis XIV., his love-affair with the beautiful niece of Cardinal Mazarin. There is no doubt of the sincere attachment of the king, who made serious proposals for her hand. For the moment Mazarin was dazzled by the prospect of an alliance of which history would have afforded no parallel. That moment passed, he sacrificed his personal interests to those of the kingdom, which demanded the alliance with Spain, by the marriage of Louis XIV. to Maria Theresa, daughter of Philip IV. Mazarin, therefore, compelled his niece to leave the court, and romance has embellished her departure. According to the accounts common to the contemporary memoirs, Maria, in her despair, turned to the king for the last time, and said, "You love me; you are king; and I go." In a romance of the period, "Le Palais Royal," 1680, Louis is seen throwing himself at the feet of the cardinal, crying, and calling him father; while the niece, turning back as she stepped into the carriage, says to her lover, who seems more dead than alive, with the first grief of his life: "You weep; you are king; and yet I am unhappy, and I go." The novel dryly adds, "The king really came near dying for grief at this separation; but he was young, and in the end consoled himself, according to all appearance." The memoirs of Mme. de Motteville reduce the scene to its correct limits: "Their parting was not without tears, his as well as hers; nor could he be indifferent to the words she could not refrain from uttering, as it is said: "You weep, and you are the master!'" (Vaus pleurez, et vous êtes le maître !) Racine, composing by order the tragedy of "Bérénice " to celebrate the catastrophe of another affair of Louis XIV., thought it àpropos to recall to the monarch his earliest passion; and inserted the famous phrase, at the expense, says Fournier, of a bad line. Thus in Act IV., Scene 5, Bérénice, who repre very sented both Maria Mancini and Henrietta of England, says to Titus, the Roman Louis, -- "Vous êtes empereur, Seigneur, et vous pleurez!" LORD MANSFIELD. [William Murray, Earl of Mansfield, a British lawyer and orator; born at Perth, Scotland, 1704; educated at Oxford; called to the bar, 1731; solicitor-general, 1743, and entered Parliament; attorney-general, 1754; chief-justice of the King's Bench for more than thirty years from 1756; raised to the peerage in that year; died 1793.] The air of England has long been too pure for a slave, and every man is free who breathes it. In the case of James Somersett, a negro, who was carried from Africa to Jamaica, and sold there. Being brought by his master to England, he claimed his freedom by a writ of habeas corpus; and, after a hearing before the lord chief justice, was discharged. "Every man," said Mansfield, "who comes into England, is entitled to the protection of English law, whatever oppression he may heretofore have suffered, and whatever may be the color of his skin: 'Quamvis ille niger, quamvis tu candidus.'" Cowper versified the decision: : 20 State Trials, 1. "Slaves cannot breathe in England; if their lungs The Task, II. 40. Chief-Justice Taney, of the Supreme Court of the United States, giving the opinion of the court adverse to the petition of Dred Scott, a slave who had been carried by his master from Missouri into Illinois, thence to the Territory of Wisconsin, and back to Missouri, asserted that "for more than a century before the Declaration of Independence, the negroes had been regarded as beings of an inferior order, and altogether unfit to associate with the white race either in social or political relations, and so far inferior that they had no rights which the white man was bound to respect." The greater the truth, the greater the libel. A maxim of the law in vogue at the time of the English trials for malicious libel, while Mansfield presided over the King's Bench, but not to be found ipsissimis verbis in any of his published decisions. Mr. Christian, in a note to "Blackstone's Commentaries," IV. 150, says, "The words of Lord Mansfield, 'The greater truth, the greater libel,' which his enemies wished with much eagerness to convert to the prejudice of that noble peer's reputation as a judge, were founded in principle and supported by very ancient authority." The maxim is said to have originated in the Star Chamber. Chancellor Kent, in People v. Creswell, 3 Johnson, 363, says, "The prohibition to the defendant, in criminal proceedings, to give the truth of an alleged libel in evidence, first received authoritative sanction in a court of common law by the nisi prius decision of Lord Raymond in 1731, in Francklyn's case, 17 State Trials, 626. The doctrine never extended in its scope beyond criminal cases." In the report of the nisi prius case of The King v. Woodhull, 20 State Trials, 902, Lord Mansfield said to the jury, "My brother Glynn has admitted that the truth or falsehood of a libel, whether public or private, however prosecuted, is out of the question." "At this assertion of Lord Mansfield," the report adds, "every man in court was shocked. Serjeant Glynn was astonished, and, on application made to him instantly by several of the counsel and his friends to contradict Lord Mansfield's assertion, Mr. Glynn, with that honest diffidence natural to him, asked them, 'Good God! did I admit any thing like what Lord Mansfield says? Did I, in any incorrectness in the expression, or by any mistake, use words that could be so misunderstood or misinterpreted?' From the lord chief justice's words in this or in some other and unreported nisi prius case, the doctrine of that day may have become attached to his name, as a doggerel verse shows to have been the case : "old Mansfield, who writes like the Bible, Says, 'The more 'tis a truth, sir, the more 'tis a libel.'" Lord Campbell, in his "Life of Mansfield," reviewing the celebrated criminal libel trials of this time, says, "For half a century longer the maxim prevailed, The greater the truth, the greater the libel,' until the passage of Campbell's Libel Bill, 1845, permitting the truth to be given in evidence, and referring it to the jury to decide whether the defendant was actuated by malice or not." Justitia fiat, ruat cœlum. In the case of John Wilkes, 1768, Lord Mansfield, reversing the sentence of outlawry passed upon Wilkes in his absence, for writing and publishing No. 45 of The North Briton" in 1764, said, "The constitution does not allow reasons of state to influence our judgment. God forbid it should! We must not regard political consequences, however formidable they might be; if rebellion was the certain consequence, we are bound to say, 'Justitia fiat, ruat cælum.?" These words are placed in quotationmarks in the printed report of the case; but their origin is unknown. Wherever used, even before Mansfield's time, they appear without the sanction of a name. The Emperor Ferdinand I., brother and successor of Charles V., had a motto, the authorship of which contemporaries attributed to him,-"Fiat justitia, pereat mundus," — which, like Mansfield's quotation, may be translated, "Let justice be done, though the heavens fall;" and Luther had a maxim, "Law must take its course, though the heavens fall" (Das Recht muss seinen Gang haben, und sollte die Welt darüber zu Grunde gehen). "Do well and right, and let the world sink," says George Herbert ("Country Parson," chap. xxix.). A line of Corneille has been already quoted (v. p. 35),— "Tombe que moi le ciel,” etc. Joseph Jekyll, the witty barrister, declined an invitation to dine at Lansdowne House, because he was engaged to meet the judges. During dinner, part of the ceiling of the dining-room of Lansdowne House fell down: Jekyll, when explaining his absence, said, "I was asked to ruat cœlum, but dined instead with fiat justitia." — Oddities of the Law. In the same case of The King v. Wilkes, Mansfield said, "But it is that popularity which follows, not that which is run after; it is that popularity which, sooner or later, never fails to do justice to the pursuit of noble ends by noble means." |