pretensions might have had some plausibility; it might have been conceived and understood how, in conformity with the general principles of feudalism, a female, though excluded in her own person from a certain office or possession, might still serve as a link for transmitting a right to it to her male descendant. She might be held only as it were to step aside and allow him to take her place in a function which her sex was deemed to disqualify her from discharging. But the real weakness and inadmissibility of Edward's claim lay in the necessity he was under of qualifying this principle upon which he founded it by a limitation entirely opposed to the genius and spirit of the feudal system, and which would have made the law of descent a self-contradictory mass of confusion and absurdity. For, if a female universally might transmit a right which she could not herself exercise or enjoy to her male descendant, then in the present case, before Edward, who was the grandson, through a female, of Philip IV., would come all the existing and possible male descendants of the three subsequent kings, Louis X., Philip V., and Charles IV., all of whom left daughters, though no sons. To this conclusion the principle upon which Edward took his stand, stated broadly and without limitation, would incontrovertibly have led. He therefore drew an ingenious distinction, and maintained his own right as the son of the daughter of Philip IV. to be preferable to that of the son of any daughter of any of the kings that had since reigned, on the ground that he alone had been born in the lifetime of his grandfather. The novelty and gratuitous nature of this assumption would alone have formed its sufficient answer and refutation. But it was fraught with the most absurd and inconvenient consequences. If there be one principle which more than another may be said to belong to the essence of the feudal system of descent, it is that the position and rights of a line in relation to other lines are not to be affected by the date of the birth of any individual forming a link of it. Thus, no priority of birth can enable a nephew to come in before a son. So absolutely does this principle operate, that, even if there be no son in existence at the time of the death of a married man, his next relation does not inherit, or only inherits conditionally, till the time has passed within which it is possible that his widow should bring him a son. We had an instance in the case of the descent of the English crown on the death of the late king, William IV., when the present queen assumed the government at first only as it were provisionally, or with reservation of the rights of any possible unborn cousin. But the claim set up to the crown of France by Edward III., on the death of Charles IV., would have contravened this essential principle in the most flagrant and wholesale manner. It would have excluded in his favour more than half a dozen