not until the reign of Hen. VIII. that tithes became impropriate, and that therefore to talk of an impropriation being presumed upon an enjoyment of 600 years, is an absurdity. The fact is that, in the case referred to, the endowment of the vicarage was in the year 1253, from which we presume Mr. Coventry has caught up a vague notion about something which hap pened nearly 600 years ago.

Under the head of colonial property our author observes, that all statutes up to 1763, except such as are of a local or political nature, are considered binding on the colonies.—In opposition to this dictum, Lord Mansfield has stated, in Rex v. Vaughan, 4 Burr. 2500, that "no act made after a colony is planted is construed to extend to it without express words showing the intention of the legislature to be that it should."

Much is said as to searching the Sheriff's office for elegits and executions upon judgments against the land, even where the debtor has only an equitable or trust estate, as by the 29 Car. II. c. 3, judgments affect those lands of which the debtor is cestui que trust at the time of execution sued; but it is sufficient to say that what is here recommended cannot in practice be acted upon, as no prudent Sheriff will allow his office to be searched for executions, and this for a very obvious reason.

The following sentence is unintelligible. It is affirmed that "a search in the registry-office for judgments, though not altogether novel, is considered by the officers as unusual, and as affording incomplete evidence of the object sought." We beg to say, in opposition to what is insinuated in this sentence, that in register districts those judgments only can be binding which are duly registered, that the officers of the Register Office for Middlesex disclaim any such doctrine as that stated above; and we are at a loss to see upon what principle Mr. Coventry could suppose that a search could be dispensed with.

Purchasers might often incur considerable risk in acting upon the doctrine at p. 264, that old mortgages, after thirty or forty years, may be presumed to be satisfied if the mortgagor has been in undisturbed possession more than twenty years; oftentimes it happens that a mortgagor remains in undisturbed possession for more than twenty years, while the old mortgage is still subsisting. This presumption therefore cannot be safely made as stated by Mr. Coventry.

Mr. Coventry has also given currency to an error which has several times been corrected. It is very well established that a person born on the 4th of Jan. 1805 will be of age on the morning of the 3d of Jan. 1826; i. e. the moment after twelve o'clock on the night of the second; the law not taking notice of fractions of a day, and each day being reckoned inclusive.1 The contrary, however, is thus stated by Mr. Coventry :

"In a curious case noticed in my collection of opinions, and which I have also seen in print, it appeared that a lady of large property was engaged to be married on the very day she came of age; but a doubt arose under the following circumstances, whether the day fixed on would not find her in her minority. It appeared that she was born after the house-clock had struck-and while the parish clock was striking-and before St. Paul's had begun to strike-twelve on the night of the 4th of January, 1805. The question was, whether the young lady was born on the 4th or 5th of January. The opinion runs thus:-This is a case of great importance and some novelty, but I do not think I should be much assisted in deciding it by reference to the ponderous folios under which my shelves groan. The nature of testimony is to be considered with reference to the subject to which it is applicable. The testimony of the house clock is, I think, applicable only to domestic, mostly culinary, purposes. It is the guide of the cook with reference to the dinner hour, but it cannot be received as evidence of the birth of a child. The clock at the next house goes slower or faster, and a child born at the next house the same moment may, according to the clock at the next house, be born on a different day. The reception of such evidence would lead to thousands of inconsistencies and inconveniences. The parochial clock is much better evidence, and I should think that it ought to be received if there were no better; but it is not to be put in competition with the metropolitan clock; where that is present, it is to be received with implicit acquiescence. It speaks in a tone of authority, and it is unquestionably testimony of great weight. I am therefore of opinion that Miss Emma G. was born on the 4th of January, 1805, and that she will attain her majority the instant St. Paul's clock strikes twelve on the night of the 3d of January, 1826.' "'

11 Salk, 44; 1 Ld. Raym. 480; 2 Ld. Raym. 1096; 1 Keb. 589.

2 Query, if St. Paul's clock were taken down or out of order a tthe time? Query again, whether the authority of the Horse Guards clock be not greater than that of St. Paul's?

Judging solely from internal evidence, we should say that this opinion is Mr. Coventry's own, and that." the ponderous folios" are also compilations by himself, or he certainly might have derived some assistance from them. But whoever the opinion-giver may be, and though, like the metropolitan clock, he speaks in a tone of authority, he is clearly wrong; for Miss Emma G. attained her majority the instant after the clock paramount struck twelve on the night of the 2nd of January. He thus made the young lady wait no less than twenty-four hours, and probably caused her to sin against St. Paul's axiom, that it is better to marry than to burn. There are two other curious cases bearing some sort of analogy to the above, which we shall mention, to enable Mr. Coventry to place them in his collection with the confidence derived from having seen them in print. In the one, it is said to have been decided that a man born on the 29th of February, in leap year, was not of age till his twenty-first birth-day, i. e. not until he was eighty-four years old; in the other, that a man born on a dies non, as Sunday, was, in legal construction, never born at all. We are not able to refer to the authorities, but the reader may depend on their being equally authentic with Mr. Coventry's. Indeed, if the above opinion be not his own, it was probably composed as a quiz.

Should any of our readers feel inclined to accuse us of undue rigour or unfairness in any of these observations, we only request them to suspend their judgment until they have perused the work itself, or at least referred to the following pages, when they may judge for themselves whether we might not have dragged into open day many other strange positions and legal mis-statements, which are much better suited to the shade. We allude more particularly to such passages as page 10, where we are told that a fraud may be practised with a reversion a year old as well as with one of thirty years standing; or pp. 58, 59, where the exploded doctrine that second cousins are not allowed to intermarry is absolutely assumed to be true; or p. 61, the section relative to exchanges and partitions; pp. 74 to 81, as to the description of parcels in a recovery or fine, to which doctrine, as stated in the text, the case cited is directly opposed; p. 87, where a statement occurs that estates for life cannot be limited to un

born children, to which the cases of Beard v. Westcott, 5 B. & Ald. 801, and Hayes v. Hayes, 4 Russ. 311, will furnish the legal reader with an answer; p. 129, as to covenants for production of deeds; p. 149, as to the presumed surrender of leases; and also, pp. 248 and 249, 264 and 296, in which last reference we find this sentence occurring in speaking of access between husband and wife-" Now, proof of the hus band's continuance in the narrow seas for a twelvemonth together, would, in all probability, be held good evidence of non access." Lastly, the Index is short and bad, a sad failing in a practical work.

We had hoped that some former observations of ours might not have been altogether thrown away upon Mr. Coventry; but, as was once observed in somewhat coarser terms by the late Mr. Abernethy, there are some men whom it is vain to physic, and we believe this gentleman to be one of them. We have devoted so many pages to him, with the view of putting inexperienced country practitioners on their guard. In London, his books have long found their level, and no books could find a lower one.

ART. VIII.-PUBLIC RECORDS..

3

An Account of the most important Public Records of Great Britain, and the Publications of the Record Commissioners, together with other Miscellaneous, Historical, and Antiquarian Information. Compiled from various printed Books and MSS. By C. P. Cooper, Esq. 1832. IF it has ever happened to any of our readers to be asked by a foreigner for whose acquirements and knowledge he had any respect, in what English author he shall find an accurate and worthy history of England, he will not have forgotten the embarrassment and the lowering of his national pride which his inability to answer the question satisfactorily must have occasioned him. For boys, Goldsmith's or Sir James Mackintosh's slight sketches might suffice; for superficial students, Hume would answer the purpose; and some insulated portions of our annals have been admirably treated by authors among

whom for accuracy Mr. Sharon Turner stands most eminent; but where can the philosophical and critical inquirer find the English history written as that of such a nation deserves to be recorded. It has long been the boast of antiquaries, that the public records of this country are more numerous, au thentic, and valuable, than those of any other civilized modern nation. More than a century ago, Bishop Kennett—no mean authority in such matters-said, in the course of a speech he delivered in the House of Lords, "I will presume to assert that no nation has been so happy in preserving so vast a multitude of their muniments and records as our English nation has been. From the time of the Norman Conquest (as they call it), which is near 700 years, we have more original manuscripts and papers of our political and historical affairs, than any one nation, perhaps than all the nations in Europe have." From such materials, and by the help of such alone, can a fitting history of this country be composed; and yet they have been hitherto so kept as to be almost wholly useless to the public, whose property they are. They lie scattered about in various and distant repositories; their existence known to but few, their contents accurately by none. Access to some of them is denied; to others granted only on payment of heavy fees and under circumstances which are extremely unfavourable to the purposes for which an inspection of them is desired; while, to make the injustice of such a system still more flagrant and intolerable, it is kept up at enormous expense, and is made a source of shameless abuse to a few sinecurists, to whom the custody of these documents has been committed.

The public attention has often been called to this subject, but hitherto in vain. In the volumes which form the subject of the present article we see, for the first time, anything like an earnest and sincere attempt to remedy the defects and to correct the evils which have been the subject of so much serious and well merited censure. Thirty years ago a Record Commission was nominated, consisting of men of high rank and reputation, and who might have been, with great reason, believed to be as much interested as any other persons in the community in the preservation of the public records, and in making them as useful as they might become under a judici