If our neighbours over the water read (as we hope many of them will) these little sketches of an English village, drawn in their own language, if not by one of themselves, yet by one who is evidently no stranger to their national sympathies, and who writes manifestly with the kindest feelings towards both, it is well, perhaps, that they should bear in mind that it is a picture purposely taken under a sunny aspect. Rural England is not all Arcadia. All English landladies, even in the country, are not Mrs Joneses, nor are all English families as hospitable as the Masons. There are villages where there is no “Miss Mary” to teach the children or to talk sentiment. There are less fascinating “strangers’ guides” which could take him into the public-houses and the dancing-rooms as well as to rural fêtes and lectures, and show him what goes on there. But while we are far from claiming to be judged by our bright side only, we are glad that foreigners should see our bright side sometimes. It has not been too often painted in French colours; and we trust they will give the present artist’s work a fair hanging in their National Gallery. LORD MACKENZIE’S ROMAN LAW.[3] It has sometimes been suspected that, in the noble delineation of the Roman character ascribed to Anchises in the sixth book of the ‘Æneid,’ Virgil was induced, by unworthy motives, to depreciate unduly the oratory of his countrymen as compared with that of the Greeks; and undoubtedly the inferiority of Cicero to Demosthenes, as a mere forensic pleader, is not so clear or decided as to demand imperatively from a Latin poet the admission there unreservedly made by the blunt and almost prosaic expression, “Orabunt causas melius.” Possibly, however, it was the poet’s true object, by yielding the most liberal concessions on other points, to enforce the more strongly his emphatic assertion, not merely of the superiority of the Romans in the arts of ordinary government, but of their exclusive or peculiar possession of the powers and faculties fitted for attaining and preserving a mighty empire. It is certain that he has justly and vividly described the great characteristic of that people, and the chief source and secret of their influence in the history of the world, when he makes the patriarch exclaim,— “Tu regere imperio populos, Romane, memento; Hæ tibi erunt artes.” In aid of the high moral and intellectual qualities which led to their success as the conquerors and rulers of the world, it is most material to notice the structure and genius of the language in which the Roman people expressed and embodied their political, legislative, and judicial determinations. Every national language is more or less the reflex of the national mind; and in no instance is this correspondence more conspicuous than in the case we are now considering.