examine the time table of their lecturers will see what a large amount of time is wasted, but it is that when he has reached the lecture-room he will hear in many cases worse matter than he could have read at home. The truth is, that the old system of lecturing is a mere remnant of the medieval university system, and requires now very material alterations to adapt it to modern wants.

We have been led into these remarks by Dr. Tomkins's observations on the importance of an attempt being made by a lecturer to do something to evoke the sympathy and arouse the ardour of his pupils. His remarks apply with special force to the teaching of Roman law. This subject, in England at least, has been so little treated of that the beginner will for a long time find invaluable help from attendance at lectures, if the lectures are of the right kind.

Of Dr. Tomkins's book it is impossible to speak at any length. But we commend it earnestly to those who wish to make themselves acquainted with Roman law as it exists to-day. Roman law has never ceased to be a system in actual practice. The barbarians who conquered the Eastern and Western empires were in turn conquered by the legal genius of their captives. The codes of the victors, incorporating usually a good deal of customary law pertaining to the conquering races, were yet in the main Roman. Those

of Theodoric II. and of Lothair, the Lex Romana Visigothorum, the Breviarium Alaricianum, and of Alaric II. laid the foundations of the legal systems of every country in southern and central Europe. Roman law in some European countries forms the Common Law of the country, speaking like our Common Law when the Statutory Law is silent; in regard to the indigenous law of Germany, it occupies "not only the position of an auxiliary supplemental code, which becomes silent when Statutory Law speaks, but it has moreover entirely supplanted many peculiar Germanic juridical doctrines and institutions." It is of this modern Roman law that Dr. Tomkins's book treats. The learned authors

have founded their compendium on the treatises of Puchta, Von Vangerow, Arndts, Franz Moehler, and the Corpus Juris civilis..

The publication of each of these three books opens - a distinct field in the progress of legal education, and is an evidence that the profession will soon have in their hands works which will place them on a level with those possessed by law students in France and Germany. As an instrument of legal education Roman law stands pre-eminent, not merely because it can be mastered as a whole in a way in which no other legal system can be mastered, but because it forms the basis of almost every system of jurisprudence in Europe and America, and has, even in its modern form no less than its ancient, formed the subject of comment by the most able jurists whom the world has produced. As complete believers in the historical method of study we are glad to give the heartiest welcome to M. Ortolan in his English dress, and to the excellent edition of Gaius, while, as tending to make the dry bones live, we are glad to see in English, for the first time, a treatise on "Modern Roman Law."

ART. XI.—THE LAW OF COMPENSATION FOR CLOSED CHURCHYARDS.

Q°

UESTIONS of considerable interest, not only to the profession but to the public generally, have been recently decided upon the matter which is the title and subject of this article, and as it appears to us that there is some discrepancy, or variance, between the decisions upon it of the Court of Chancery and of the Court of Common Pleas on the one hand, and those of the Court of Queen's Bench on the other, we propose to consider all those decisions together, being only four in number, with a view to enabling the reader upon a comparison of all of them to form his own opinions with regard

to the consistency or inconsistency of each. Of the four decisions two have been in the Court of Chancery, one in the Court of Common Pleas, and one in the Court of Queen's Bench. The question for decision has been slightly different in each of them, having sometimes been the principle of the assessment of the compensation, sometimes the person entitled, and sometimes the proportions in which different persons are entitled, to the compensation payable by public bodies for the old and long disused churchyards, taken by them in the exercise of the usual compulsory powers of purchasing and taking lands. The case in the Queen's Bench was Stebbing v. The Metropolitan Board of Works (23 L.T. Rep., N.S., 530-535), that in the Common Pleas was Hilcoat v. The Archbishops of Canterbury and York (10 C.B., 327) and those in the Court of Chancery were In re St. Pancras Burial Ground (L.R., 3 Eq., 173-392) and Campbell v. Mayor and Corporation of Liverpool (L.R., 9 Eq., 579-586) together with the subsidiary cases of Ex parte the Rector of Liverpool (23 L.T. Rep., N.S., 354), and Ex parte the Rector of St. Martin's, Birmingham (23 L.T. Rep., N.S., 575-577). It will be more convenient, and also more conducive to perspicuity, to commence with the decisions in the Court of Chancery first.

In the case of the St. Pancras Burial Ground it was held by the present Lord Chancellor (when Vice-Chancellor) that the persons who had been entitled before the closing of the burial ground to receive the burial fees on account of interments made in the churchyard, notwithstanding that they had ceased from the date of the closing thereof, that is to say, for over ten years, to receive any such fees, were nevertheless entitled to receive anew, or rather in lieu of the old burial fees, the full amount of the dividends or income of the purchase or compensation money, paid for a part of the old churchyard taken by a certain railway company in the years 1863-4, for the purposes of their railway. The material parts of the Lord Chancellor's judgment when stated in brief are as follows:

"If the burying ground had not been closed when the property was taken by the railway company, I should have ordered the money to have been invested in consols and the income to be paid to the same persons as had theretofore received the burial fees. But the ground having at the date of the purchase by the company and for some time previously thereto been closed by an Order in Council, it was in a state of complete suspension quà burying ground at the date of the purchase. The Order in Council under which it was closed against burials operates as an inundation might have done, which would have rendered the burial ground unproductive until the water was drawn off, or drained off, from it. And if a railway company had taken it while in this unproductive state, they would have taken it subject to the rights thereto, or interests therein of the persons entitled to the burial fees; for the inundation, although it had depreciated, had not destroyed the land itself and those rights and interests therefore would have survived the flood; in other words, the disqualification having been removed by whatever cause (whether Act of Parliment or other act), the land would have remained as before subject to the old rights and interests."

Again, in the case of Campbell v. Mayor and Corporation of Liverpool, Vice-Chancellor Malins held, and chiefly upon the authority of the St. Pancras Burial Ground case, that the Corporation of Liverpool, notwithstanding that it had originally been itself the grantor of the land forming the burial ground in question in the case, and notwithstanding also that by a like Order in Council to that before mentioned such land had in effect, or practically, ceased to be a burial ground, that is to say, was become divested of the uses for which it had originally been given, was nevertheless not entitled by reason merely of the practical determination of those uses to repossess again as by reverter of their old estate the land which had some time thereinbefore been a burial ground, but that on the contrary the fee simple of the land forming the burial ground remained in the original grantees of the Corporation and their successors, and could only be regained or re-acquired by the Corporation upon the usual terms of

purchase or the payment of a fair equivalent. And the same Vice-Chancellor, in the two subsidiary cases of Ex parte the Rector of Liverpool and Ex parte the Rector of St. Martin's, Birmingham, before mentioned, awarded in each of them to the rector for the time being, as the person theretofore entitled to the burial fees, the full amount of the dividends accruing upon the investment of the purchase-money, the dividends being taken in each case to represent and to be in lieu of the burial fees; and the circumstance that for a series or succession of years there had by reason of the closing of the burial grounds been no payments at all made to the rector on account of the burial fees, did not appear to the ViceChancellor to be at all material to the question which was before him for decision, although he indeed remarked that the rector had had a windfall.

Turning now from the decisions of the Court of Chancery in this matter to the decisions of the Courts of Common Law, we shall consider first the case of Hilcoat v. Archbishops of Canterbury and York, and secondly, or lastly, the case of Stebbing v. The Metropolitan Board of Works, the former of those cases being the decision exclusively relied on by the plaintiff, and also exclusively quoted by the defendant, in the latter case. In Hilcoat's case, Wilde, Chief Justice of the Common Pleas, in affirmance of the verdict of a jury held in effect that the plaintiff Hilcoat, as incumbent of a certain church and owner of certain consecrated property adjoining, was entitled in respect of his said twofold interest to obtain from the defendants, the Archbishops, such a sum of money as would represent a fair proportion of the purchase money for such land paid or payable by a certain local railway company to the Archbishops; and that his proportion of such compensation money ought to be fixed or ascertained upon the following principle, that is to say, the property taken by the company was to be regarded as having eo instanti-upon the taking of it become divested of its spiritual character, and re-invested with its original secular one, and