and custom of England.' Not only was this control by Parliament necessarily effective in practice, but it does not appear that the clergy repudiated it in principle, though of course they endeavoured to prevent particular applications of it which they disliked. Thus there can be no doubt that the Canon Law was accepted in the ecclesiastical courts on the authority not of the State but of the Church, nor, on the other hand, that it was the authority not of the Church but of the State which gave to the law so accepted coercive force.

1

We are now in a position to understand the expressions 'the law of Holy Church,' 'the law Divine,' 'the law ecclesiastical,' which we find in our statutes and law books. We are also able to see how a law fitly described in such language can at the same time be called 'the King's ecclesiastical law,' ' part of the law of the land,' even ' part of the general law of England, of the Common Law.' We need not spend many words in reminding our readers of the later history, of the statutory authority given by the Act of the Submission of the Clergy to the mediæval Canons, so far as they did not conflict with the law of the realm, and of the Canons of 1604, which do not bind the laity directly since Parliament has never confirmed them. This, then, is the law of the Church': basis of Roman or Western Canon Law; the medieval English Canons and Constitutions; the Canons of 1604, with a few later additions; all these modified and supplemented by a great mass of parliamentary legislation with the consent or acquiescence of the Church, and illustrated by judicial decisions.

Nothing is easier than to propound on paper either of

In that wider sense which embraces all the ancient and approved customs of England which form law, including not only that law administered in the Courts of Queen's Bench, Common Pleas, and Exchequer, to which the term Common Law is sometimes in a narrower sense confined, but also that law administered in Chancery and commonly called Equity, and also that law administered in the Courts Ecclesiastical, that last law consisting of such canons and constitutions ecclesiastical as have been allowed by general consent and custom within the realm.'-Lord Blackburn in Mackonochie v. Penzance,' Law Reports, Appeal Cases, 6, 446.

the two extreme theories: either that it is part of the eternal and indefeasible prerogative of the Church that no jot or tittle of its law can be touched without its express synodical consent, or on the other hand, that there is no such thing as a law of the Church, and that all that a Churchman has to do in order to ascertain his duty is to consult the statute book. Unhappily for the ease of mankind, great questions are not to be thus summarily disposed of. We hope that we have shewn that each of these theories leads to impossible consequences, and that the true doctrine can be stated only in terms much less precise. Such a statement will have to distinguish legal from constitutional and moral right, and will recognize that the relation of Church and State law varies according to the circumstances of the time, and in particular according to the degree in which it can be truly said that the secular legislature represents the laity of the Church; that thus language which may be correct enough in one age becomes false in another. This being so, it is plain that the question cannot be answered merely by reference to precedent, and that though it may have been, and was, possible in other times, and under other conditions, to admit to an undefined extent the right of Parliament to modify Church law, it is so no longer. Churchmen of to-day must, as it seems to us, acknowledge that Parliament has ceased to be a body from whose sole authority they can in conscience accept Church law; and the result follows that so long as, under the present conditions, Parliament legislates for the Church, it must be with the assent of the Church regularly expressed. What provision should be made for securing that representation of the Church laity which Parliament no longer affords, is a question upon which we cannot enter now.

We will take leave to conclude with a word upon the question which has been the immediate occasion for this article. The Deceased Wife's Sister's Marriage Act, as ultimately enacted, sufficiently regards the principles which we have endeavoured to maintain. In altering the civil law of marriage it respects the law of the Church. It requires no Churchman either to do anything which the law of the

Church forbids, or to leave undone anything which the law of the Church enjoins. It does indeed, allow (without requiring) the clergy to celebrate, and to permit the celebration of, marriages unlawful by ecclesiastical law. In other words, it takes from a particular rule of the Church the sanction of punishment. In view of the fact that the Act was passed not only without any consent on the part of the Church but against her strong opposition, we cannot conceive how it can be said to be anything but wrong, as well as' disloyal,' for a minister of the Church to avail himself of this permission to violate the law of the society of which he is an officer. Important as is the change in the civil law of marriage in itself, we conceive it to be even more important that the question which it has been the occasion of reviving, as to the relation between the laws of Church and State, should be honestly faced, and that the impossibility of recognizing the right of Parliament, composed as it now is, to alter the law of the Church by its own sole authority, should be clearly perceived and plainly declared.

ART. III.-A NEW EDITION OF EVELYN'S DIARY.' The Diary of John Evelyn. With an Introduction and Notes by AUSTIN DOBSON. Three volumes. (London : Macmillan & Co., 1906.)

THE Introduction to this fine edition of a noble book brings out with perfect clearness a fact already noticed by John Forster in his revised issue of Bray's Memoirs, which included both the Diary and the Private Correspondence of Evelyn, that the Diary 'does not, in all respects, strictly fulfil what the term implies.' Forster cannot have been mistaken in his conclusion that the Diary, as it must continue to be called, was' copied by the writer from memoranda made at the time of the occurrences noted in it,' and moreover 'received occasional alterations and additions in the course of transcription.' A careful reperusal of the text in its present reproduction serves to confirm a view differen

tiating Evelyn's Diary from a chronicle which, like that of Pepys, almost literally' walks hand in hand with time,' but nevertheless enhancing the value of many passages contained in it-matured observations rather than aperçus of the moment-as contributions to biographical and general history. When, under the date of May 28, 1656, Evelyn mentions as visitors to his garden at Sayes Court 'the Earl of Southampton (since Treasurer)' and 'the old Marquis of Argyll (since executed) '—which latter nobleman 'took the turtle doves in the aviary for owls '—he is merely indulging in a kind of annotation such as would not of itself change the Diary into 'Memoirs,' a term by which the writer himself on one occasion designates it.' Forster, however, also directed attention to the mistakesevident slips of memory-which indicated that the Diary was not a record of 'freshly remembered' incidents; thus Evelyn's last visit to the late Lord Chancellor' Clarendon is wrongly dated,' as is his dining in company with Colonel Blood on what would have been the actual morrow of his theft of the regalia from the Tower. The 'reflexions on things past,' bearing date May 31, 1672,' and suggested by the news of the death of the Earl of Sandwich in the battle of Southwold, or Sole Bay' (but Dr. Tanner has proved the two local appellations to be identical), might possibly have been inserted on the spur of the moment, though they must be allowed to reach a high level of characterdrawing; and such may also have been the case with regard to the retrospect of the circumstances of Clarendon's decline and fall. But as the reader proceeds with the last volume of the edition before us he can hardly fail to note a growing tendency of the diarist' to expand his records into summaries of episodes or periods, such as the memorable passage on the effects of the Revocation of the Edict of Nantes, or the account of the reception generally accorded to the accomplished fact of William and Mary's accession to the throne. On the other hand, in certain of the later entries, such as those under the date of April 24, 1692, • Ibid. p. 322.

1 Vol. ii. p. 365.
Ibid. pp. 347-8.

2 Ibid. p. 284.

Vol. iii. p. 110.

we seem to detect rough notes intended for expansion on some later opportunity, though indeed the opportunity never

came.

Thus, quite apart from differences of character and circumstance which are undeniable, but hardly more striking than are the resemblances in their opinions of men and things-so that a 'parallel' review of the lives and character of the two friends ought assuredly to be taken in hand by some leisured member of the Pepys Club-Evelyn's Diary cannot lay claim to the full freshness of immediacy which is the supreme charm of the journal of his rather younger and less long-lived contemporary. But, all the same, Evelyn's book, by whatever name we may call it, has qualities which have justly secured to it the position of an English classic; and seeing that, as in the case of all the 'best books' in any literature, the qualities which endear it to us are the qualities of the man who wrote it, none who love Evelyn's Diary and revere its author can fail to rejoice that it should have been reproduced in so worthy a form, and should have found an editor like Mr. Austin Dobson. Evelyn himself, we remember, could not abide slovenliness in the production of a book. Already as a young man he noted on a visit to Geneva' that 'here are abundance of booksellers, but their books are of ill impressions'; and, at a later date, he all but lost his temper (an occurrence in his case against kind') over the abominable misuse' which his essay on the First Book of Lucretius had suffered at the hands of the printer, and the negligence of the gentleman, well known for his ability,' who had with a too officious zeal undertaken to look over the proof-sheets with all exactness and care' during the author's absence." The outward form of the present edition of the Diary leaves nothing to be desired, and it is adorned with engravings

1 Vol. i. p. 34.

2 Vol. ii. p. 111. We have noticed hardly any misprints in Mr. Austin Dobson's edition. 'Charles I.' on p. 73 of vol. ii., note, should of course be 'Charles II.'; the perverse reading 'approaching' for ' reproaching,' vol. iii. p. 191, may be a slip of the diarist's own committing.

VOL. LXV.-NO. CXXX.

U