last useless consultation upon the treatment of their patient. Over the head of the couch flutters a winged demon, such as Retzsch delights in designing, who, when the last breath exhales, and Mahomet the Second 'trapassa' from his earthly tenement, seizes in grim triumph the helpless soul of his victim, as it issues from the dying lips in the likeness of a newborn child. Gavisus est quidem infernus perditi sodalis adventu. To balance all the abuse which the vigorous and orthodox Caoursin makes it his pleasure and duty to heap on the Great Turk's devoted head, let us refer to the grand simplicity of Mahomet's epitaph, which there is every reason to suppose he drew up for himself. The man who conquered with his own right hand two empires, twelve kingdoms, and three hundred cities, inscribed on his tomb no word in record of so many victories. Not what he did, but what he tried to do, and failed in doing, stands written above his dust. • I designed to conquer Rhodes, and subdue proud Italy.' It brings back at once the Actum, inquit, nihil est, nisi Pœno milite portas of the great Carthaginian conqueror. A trait of similar character is recorded of Mahomet's great predecessor Saladin; who, before his death, ordered his standard-bearer to carry round the streets of Damascus the winding-sheet in which he was soon to be wrapped, crying aloud as he went, See here all that the great Saladin, conqueror of the East, carries off with him of all his conquests and treasures.' This again is the moral of Expende Hannibalem,'-a moral which will bear much repetition, not among the followers of El Islam alone, or the philosophical worshippers of the Roman Pantheon. Saladin and Mahomet the Second did not wait for a Giaour satirist to point the moral for them. Here we may draw the curtain: for the death of Mahomet was the safety of Rhodes. Scarcely more than a year from this date elapsed, before Misach Palæologus, again restored to court-favour and greatness as a partisan of Bajazet, was treating with D'Aubusson's ambassadors respecting the jealous safekeeping of the unfortunate Prince Zizim.* Precellentissimus Princeps noster was the head of the Order As a friendly diplomatist he found more favour in Caoursin's sight than as a hostile general. The monstrum horrendum informe ingens of the siege changes upon a nearer view into 'vir quidem per'humanus ac facundus.' for twenty years more; but the rest of his acts, and the remaining portion of Caoursin's Chronicle, belong to a fresh period of history. Let us leave Rhodes to repair her damaged walls, and cultivate to their former trimness and beauty her spoiled vineyards and gardens; while the knightly champions of St. John of Jerusalem still talk over among themselves, and recount to Mary Dupuis for our benefit, their perils and their preservation non sine Dei pietate ac divino nutu. ART. VI.-1. Report of the Select Committee of the House of Lords on Railways, together with the Minutes of Evidence taken before the Committee. 1846. 2. Private Bills and Business of the House of Lords.- Proposed Resolutions. The Lord Brougham and Vaux. 1846. Reprinted 1854. 3. Reports from the Select Committee of the House of Commons on Private Bills; together with the Minutes of Evidence, Appendix and Index. 1846 and 1847. 4. First and Second Reports from the Select Committee (House of Commons) on Railway Acts Enactments. 1846. 5. Reports of Select Committees (House of Commons) on Private Business and Business of the House. 1851 and 1854. 6. Standing Orders of both Houses of Parliament. 1854. WE E are told in Sir Simonds D'Ewes' Journal of the Parliaments of Queen Elizabeth,' that when in one Session applications for individual exemptions from the general law had been rather freely listened to, so that sixty-seven Private Bills for this purpose were presented for the Royal Assent, the Sovereign peremptorily rejected all but nineteen of them. A return made in 1847 shows, that during the first ten years of her present Majesty's reign there were no less than 2697 petitions for Private Bills, and that 2220 Local, Personal, and Private Acts of Parliament received the Royal Assent, or nearly double the number of the Public General Statutes passed during the same time. In the joint Minute of Messrs. Anstey and Rogers in the first Report of Mr. Bellenden Ker on the Proceedings of the Board for the Revision of the Statute Law, the number of Private Acts is estimated at 14,268; and to complete this large collection of special laws he enumerates 9285 Local and Personal Acts, and 2473 of the Public Acts which are merely of a local and personal nature. The recent Session has added 271 to the list, so that there are in all 26,297 Local, Personal, and Private Acts of Parliament which control, qualify, or dispense with the general law. It has now become almost impossible to calculate the amount of property, or the number of individuals, locally or personally subjected by so many thousand statutes to exceptive laws: but the Special Acts which relate to railways alone are shown by recent returns to control property to the extent of upwards of 350,000,000l. sterling, and to regulate the transit over at least 8000 miles. If the inquiry were extended to the case of turnpikes, towns improvements, piers, docks, harbours, and other public works, gas, water, insurance, banking, and other companies, regulated by special Acts of Parliament, it would appear that our modern system of private legislation has created exemptions from the general law of the land, exceeding in point of number, and outweighing in operation, the privileges, liberties, franchises, seignorial rights and exemptions, royal grants and concessions of the worst period of arbitrary rule and corrupt government. We purposely use the term 'modern' in speaking of private legislation, for it is of very recent growth. Of the 26,000 local, personal, and private statutes already referred to, a very inconsiderable number date earlier than the eighteenth century; a very large proportion have received the Royal Assent in the present reign. It has been reserved to our times to witness the encouragement of evils, which were supposed ages ago to have been put an end to, with the suspending and dispensing authority of the Crown, with the prerogative vagaries, the exclusive grants, the arbitrary acts of the Tudors and the Stuarts. Private statutes and constitutions have ever been treated by jurists as an anomaly - LAWS ex vi termini having a general and not an individual operation. Our system of private laws resembles in several points that of the privilegia and beneficia which at different periods of the Roman history had such various operation. In both instances the practice began with extraordinary and anomalous proceedings being resorted to for effecting private injury, punishment, or ruin; and in our own country, as under the Empire, the system of State concessions has grown up to confer on privileged bodies powers and immunities which are opposed to general right and the welfare of the community. In the oration pro domo (c. 17.) Cicero has a bitter invective against the practice of private legislation (to which he was himself a victim); and in his treatise de legibus (iii. 19.) he more deliberately denounces the system: Majores in pos terum providisse; in privos homines leges ferre noluerunt — id est enim privilegium quo quid est injustius? cum legis hæc vis sit, scitum est jussum in omnes.' Like the privilegia crudelia et perniciosa bewailed by the Roman orator, our own Private Acts were originally designed to confer not a benefit but an injury. The Acts of attainder of the period of the Wars of the Roses successively dealt in the most summary way with the lives, the fortunes, the honours and estates of the adherents of those who lost the vantage ground, the party who came off victorious being, by the omnipotent authority of Parliament, free to gratify their revenge, uncontrolled by the trammels, the forms, or the doctrines of law. The earliest parliamentary attainder-that of the Duke of Clarence, in the reign of Edward IV.-is generally fixed upon as the origin of our system of Private Acts; and in the authorised edition of the Statutes at large the distinction between Public and Private Statutes is first made in the reign of Richard III., when the titles of eighteen Private Acts are given. These are in truth highly characteristic of a system essentially bad; we take them from the Table of Private Acts in the second volume of the Statutes at large. 1. Titulus Regius, under which Title all the Reasons and Allegations devised to prove the King to be true and undoubted Heir to the Crown, are set forth at large, and the same allowed, ratified, and enacted by the Lords and Commons, and his Brother's Children made Bastards. 2. An Act for the King to have the Lands and Possessions of Henry, Duke of Exeter, and of the Duchess, his Wife. 3. An Act for the Attainder and Conviction of Henry, Duke of Buckingham, John, Bishop of Ely, William Knevitt, John Rushe, Thomas Nandike, Henry, Earl of Richmond, Jasper, Earl of Pembroke, George Browne, Thomas Lewkenor, Knight, John Gulford, and many more. 4. An Act to enable the King to make Grants of the Possessions of the Persons attainted. 5. An Act for the Attainder of the Bishops of Ely, Sarum, and Exeter. 6. An Act against Margaret, Countess of Richmond. 7. An Act for the Attainder of Walter Roberd. 8. An Act for the Archbishop of Canterbury to enjoy the Rent of 117. 12s. per Annum out of the Manor of Ifielde. 9. An Act to reverse the Attainders made by King Henry the Fourth against Thomas Percy, Earl of Worcester, and Henry Percy, Earl of Northumberland. 10. An Act for Viscount Lovell to have and enjoy the Manors of Thorpe, Waterville, Alwinkle, Achirch, and Chelviston, in the County of Northampton, &c. 11. An Act for James Tirrel, and Anne, his Wife, Daughter and Heir of John Arundell, touching the Lands of Arundell, being now attainted. 12. An Act for the Provost and Fellows of the College of Saint Andrew of Neathercaster, in York, for the enjoying of Forty Acres of Land, upon Part whereof the College is builded. 13. An Act for Confirmation of Letters Patents made by King Edward the Fourth to the College of Fodringbey. 14. An Act for the City of Canterbury, touching the Aldermanry Lands, and Alderman of Westgate, and other things in the City of Canterbury. 15. An Act of Restitution of John Durrant of Colleweston to all his Lands and Tenements. 16. An Act for the Inhabitants of the Town of Crowland to have the Games and Marks of Swans. 17. An Act touching the Executors of John Don, Mercer of London. 18. An Act that the King shall have Wardship of Lands holden of the Duchy of Lancaster by Knight Service, notwithstanding the Trust put in other Persons.' It will be seen that the private legislation of Parliament at this period hardly extended further than the passing Acts of Attainder and special statutes for altering the descent of honours and estates; we find no instances of special Acts giving arbitrary authority to mere private bodies, such as are now so freely conceded no special immunity or dispensation even given to individuals froin the ordinary law of the land. At this period, indeed, the special interference of Parliament was not very often demanded for such objects. The general laws which protected the property and the persons of Englishmen were deemed too delicate objects to be specially dealt with or modified for the immediate advantages of corporations and companies, and the prerogative lawyers anciently contended for an inherent right in the Crown to grant all other special immunities which were then deemed necessary, and to concede personal exemptions from the operation of merely prohibitive laws. There are certainly a great many instances to be found of this power of specially dispensing in favour of individuals, with prohibitive laws, being exercised by the Crown from the reign of Henry III. up to the revolution of 1688, whilst no records exist of similar dispensa-. tions by Act of Parliament. The petitions to the Legislature appear in early times to have prayed all kinds of relief; and the diligent antiquary may find among our ancient records samples of such petitions which were summarily referred, not to select committees, but to the several courts where they were properly determinable. In a Parliamentary roll of the time of Edward I., reciting that the people |