“To argue the matter on the legal points in opposition to the disinterested and well-reasoned despatch of the French Minister was a hopeless task. In an elaborate state-paper, Mr Seward, the American Secretary of State, professed to rest the surrender of the Commissioners upon a mere technicality—that there had been no formal condemnation of the Trent by a prize-court; but, apart from this point of form, the seizure was indefensible on the merits as a flagrant violation of the law of nations; and if the principle was not so frankly acknowledged by Mr Seward as it ought to have been, some allowance must be made for a statesman who was trammelled by the report of his colleague, Mr Welles, the Secretary of the Navy, approving of Captain Wilkes’s conduct, and still more by the necessity of adopting a policy directly contrary to the whole current of popular opinion in the Northern States.” The law of marriage and of divorce is very fully treated by Lord Mackenzie, and the peculiarities of the different European systems are well pointed out. The subject, however, is too extensive and important to admit of being incidentally noticed; and we shall confine our extracts here to a single passage describing a Roman form of cohabitation less honourable than matrimony, and such as we trust is never likely, to be legalised among ourselves:— “Under Augustus, concubinage—the permanent cohabitation of an unmarried man with an unmarried woman—was authorised by law. The man who had a lawful wife could not take a concubine; neither was any man permitted to take as a concubine the wife of another man, or to have more than one concubine at the same time. A breach of these regulations was always condemned, and fell under the head of _stuprum_. In later times the concubine was called _amica_. Between persons of unequal rank concubinage was not uncommon; and sometimes it was resorted to by widowers who had already lawful children and did not wish to contract another legal marriage, as in the cases of Vespasian, Antoninus Pius, and M. Aurelius. “As regards the father, the children born in concubinage were not under his power, and were not entitled to succeed as children by a legal marriage; but they had an acknowledged father, and could demand support from him, besides exercising other rights. As regards the mother, their rights of succession were as extensive as those of her lawful children.