straitly charged and required to be very diligent apprehending all such persons as are faulty in this kind, either in stealing, selling, buying, enveigling, purloining, conveying, or receiving children so stolen, and to keep them in safe imprisonment till they may be brought to severe and exemplary punishment. It is further ordered, that the marshals of the Admiralty and the Cinque Ports do immediately make strict and diligent search in all ships, and vessels upon the river, and at the Downs, for all such children, according to such directions as they have, or shall receive from the committee of the Admiralty and Cinque Ports." The few reports we have of English cases of kidnapping are too profusely dressed up with technicalities to permit us to see the naked facts. Shower reports the case of Lees v. Dassigny, the 34th of Charles II. An English common-law reporter never condescends to know the year of the Christian era; he knows only that of the king's reign, and if he had to mention the foundation of the Turkish empire, he would mark it as the 28th Edward I.; while the discovery of America would as undoubtedly be an event of the 8th Henry VII. When we turn to our chronological tables, we find that the 34th of Charles II. means the year 1682. How far the pleadings throw any light on the adventures of the youth who had been kidnapped and sent abroad, the reader may judge from a fair specimen:--"They sue an _homine replegiando_ in the name of the young Turbett; and after an _alias_ and a _pluries_, they get an _elongatus est per quendam Philippum Dassigny infra nominatum_. This was to the Sheriff of London, whereas the defender never lived in London, but at Wapping, in Middlesex," &c. The effect of the pleading, of which this is the commencement, was, that the accused might be bailed, "and on security to bring home the boy in six months, death and the perils of the seas excepted, he was discharged on bail. In Trinity term the boy came home, and being brought into court was delivered to the father; but they never proceeded." Sir Thomas Raymond gives us the further information, that the kidnapper was a merchant trading to Jamaica, and that the victim "was a scholar at Merchant Taylor's school, and a hopeful young youth."[11] An act of King William's reign shows that the offence was still prevalent, by imposing penalties on the masters of vessels leaving people behind in "his Majesty's plantations or elsewhere." It appears to have been almost solely for the foreign market that kidnapping was practised in England. The cultivated and populous character of the country, the power of the laws, and the perpetual vicinity of a kind of parochial municipalities, probably rendered the forcible seizure and imprisonment of individuals within the country too difficult and dangerous an operation to have been frequently accomplished by force; though the fatal facilities for confinement in lunatic asylums may