Imatges de pàgina
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INTRODUCTION.

IN presenting this second edition to the scrutiny and attention of the profession, if it may be deemed worthy of their notice, I cannot recur without grateful satisfaction to the manner in which the first was received, and the present has been called for; and as I then had great reason to solicit their favourable extenuation, I have no less earnest anxiety at this time to entreat their accustomed candour: the work will be found to have been much enlarged by the addition of most, if not all of the subsequent cases, to this period, which I have either found in the several reports, or which the kindness of some professional friends have communicated, and of others which have arisen in my own practice. That I might not extend the work too far, my desire of brevity has induced me to avoid the insertion of every case that has occurred; but all those which are the most material have been carefully noticed, and their principal points detailed; and

where

where any adjudication comprised the essential parts of other cases, I have avoided a separate recital of them as unnecessary; but as the arguments in charitable cases are of a nature more general and comprehensive than on most other judicial subjects, and as most of the decisions contain principles of a more enlarged and extensive use, I have been frequently induced to insert the whole, rather than to hazard a mutilated substance.

In thus forming a new work, I have, however, preserved the model of the old one; but the arrangement of which will, it is hoped, appear to have been considerably improved.

The establishment of monastic institutions is to be deemed the fruitful parent of our modern charitable uses, and in this part of my progress I could have indulged a fondness for research into antiquities, by conducting my reader through many a venerable ruin, and by marking the transitory splendour of human pride, did not the more practical and useful part of my labours frequently arrest my step, and place me in the centre of our own aula regis, where the administration of equity and justice, raised upon the unshaken basis of a trifold legislature, presents

a lustre

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