sufficient to obtain for Gentilis a place in the front rank amongst the jurists of his age. In 1586, through the interest of Walsingham, Gentilis was selected to accompany Horatio Pallavicino on an Embassy from Queen Elizabeth to the Elector of Saxony, and it was through the influence of the same statesman, that he was called home from the Saxon Court in 1587, and was appointed Regius Professor of Civil Law in the University of Oxford. This episode of his life is disclosed by himself, in his dedication of a work printed in 1587, of which a copy is preserved in the Library of All Souls' College, Oxford, and which Professor Holland believes to be almost unique.* In the following year Gentilis published his first Commentary "De Jure Belli," which was followed by a second and a third Commentary on the same subject in 1589, each of which bears prefixed to it a dedication to Robert Devereux, Earl of Essex, who was at that time high in the favour of Queen Elizabeth. These Commentaries must be carefully distinguished from his subsequent and more complete treatise "de Jure Belli.” They originated, in fact, in what was termed the Oxford Act. The Sheldonian Theatre did not at that time exist, and the Act, in other words, the Annual Academic Ceremony of solemnly conferring the degree of Doctor in the various faculties was celebrated in the church of St. Mary the Virgin. On this occasion it was amongst the duties of the Regius Professor of Civil Law to preside at the disputations of the candidates for the degree of Doctor in that Faculty, and to deliver afterwards an address, and it would appear from a letter written by Gentilis to Sir John Bennet, in June 1588, which Professor Holland has published in his Preface, that Gentilis, instead of the common-place subjects, selected the Right of War, as the topic for his afternoon oration after

* The work is entitled "Alberici Gentilis, J. C. Prof. Reg. Disput. decas prima." It was printed in London by John Wolf, in 1587, and is dedicated to Walsingham. It is enumerated by Dr. Reiger, in his list of the works of Gentilis.

the Law Disputations, and he resumed the subject twice in the following year. The "Commentationes de Jure

Belli" are the more finished form, in which the substance. of these Orations was given to the public. The first appeared in 1588, the year of the defeat of the great Spanish Armada, the second and third in 1589. Benigni states that a complete edition of the three Commentaries was published at Leyden in 1589. We ourselves possess a copy of the three Commentaries, published as a continuous work by John Wolf of London in the year 1589, which appears not to have come under the notice either of Benigni or of Professor Holland. It is, we think, rather a subject of regret that these Commentaries, or perhaps we ought to term them "Commentations," have been preserved, for they are mere "prolusions," and they may mislead persons into whose hands they may fall, into supposing that they are the tests by which the merits of Gentilis, as compared with those of Grotius, are to be measured; whereas the work on the Right of War, upon which the fame of Gentilis mainly rests, was for the first time published in Hanover, in 1598, ten years after his first Commentation had appeared in London. The title of the latter work is "De Jure Belli libri tres," and this is the work which has been recently reprinted at the press of the University of Oxford. Gentilis has, without doubt, incorporated into it all that was valuable in the three Commentations, but the subject of them has been thoroughly redigested by him, and the soil as it were has been both refreshed and retilled. The Commentations are only now of interest as exhibiting the germ of an idea, which has been developed in its mature state in the later and more complete work.

We must not omit to notice the Treatise "De armis Romanis et Injustitia Bellica Romanorum Libri Duo,” which was printed at Hanover in 1599, and was dedicated by Gentilis to the Earl of Essex, and to which Emerico Amari pays a tribute of respect in the passage of his work

above alluded to. A more interesting relic, however, in our opinion, is a volume which was published at Hanover in 1613, after the death of Albericus, by his brother Scipio Gentilis, at that time famous as a Professor of the Civil Law in the Academy of Altdorf, and which the latter dedicated to Don Baldassar Zunica, the Ambassador of Spain to the Emperor. It would appear that during the last three years before his death, which took place in 1608, Albericus, with the consent and permission of King James I., acted as the official adviser in the legal affairs of the Spanish Embassy in London, and advocated the causes of Spanish subjects, which came before the English Courts. Many of these causes involved questions of Maritime Prizelaw, which arose out of the war carried on between Spain and Holland, and which came before the English Courts in consequence of Dutch captors bringing their prizes, from stress of weather or other accident, into English ports. The work is divided into two books, of which the first contains the results of consultations and sometimes of forensic arguments, drawn up by Gentilis on subjects of Maritime Prize; the latter, on the other hand, is concerned with. questions of law of a more general character, and with matters of forensic practice. The work is entitled "Alberici Gentilis Hispanicæ Advocationis Libri Duo." There are four known editions of this work. The earliest, which has been already mentioned, was published at Hanover, in 1613. Another edition is said by Benigni to have been published at Francfort in the same year. We ourselves possess an edition published at Amsterdam, in 1661, and a fourth edition is mentioned as having been published in the same city in 1664. The historian of Maritime Prize Law will find many interesting questions discussed in this work, which were at that time novel and perplexing, but to which an answer is now readily forthcoming from most books, which treat systematically of Maritime Prize. The claim of the owner of goods captured within the maritime jurisdic

tion of a neutral State to restitution of them, if brought into a port of the neutral State; what constitutes complete capture, so as to bar the right of postliminium; what portions of the sea are the maritime territory of a State; what constitutes piracy, as distinguished from an act of warfare; the incapacity of the piratical character to communicate a legal title to captured goods; the right of a neutral shipowner to his freight, when enemy's goods have been taken by a belligerent out of a neutral ship; the duty of restitution, when goods have been captured at sea after peace has been concluded, and many cognate questions, are discussed by Gentilis from the same point of view, from which they would be treated in a Court of Prize in the present day. But as regards the doctrine of contraband of war, and the exercise of the right of search, his platform is more favourable to neutrals than that, which is approved by the practice of nations at the present time. One of the perplexing questions of his day which awaited a final solution by Lord Stowell's judgment in the case of the Helena (4 Ch. Robinson's Reports, p. 3) was the validity of the title of merchants purchasing property in the ports of the Barbary Coasts, which had been captured by Barbary corsairs and confiscated "jure belli," according to their notions of right. There happens to be preserved, in the British Museum, amongst the Lansdowne MSS., Vol. 145, p. 302, a collection of legal papers, once the property of Sir Julius Cæsar, Judge of the High Court of Admiralty, and amongst them is a letter written by Albericus Gentilis to that Judge, during the course of a famous suit in the Admiralty Court, respecting certain goods captured from Venetian merchants by a Tunisian corsair, and which, having been purchased at Tunis by some English merchants and brought to England, were arrested in the Admiralty Court at the suit of the Venetian Ambassador. Gentilis, as it appears, was retained as advocate for the English merchants, and his consultation on their behalf, which is amongst the papers in that

collection, and is in his own handwriting, has a mournful interest, as it was probably the last consultation penned by himself. It is not signed by him, but it is indorsed on the back in a handwriting which we have been able to identify, by comparing it with a certain handwriting in the Black Book of the Admiralty, as the handwriting of William Hereward, the Registrar of the High Court of Admiralty: "D. Gentilis; his consultation in the cause of the Venetians, but for the English against them, ult. Junii, 1608." Gentilis, at the time when this indorsement bears date, was no more. His mortal career had terminated shortly before, on the 19th of June of that year, and his burial place has been ascertained, through the researches of Colonel Joseph Lemuel Chester,* to have been a vault within the Church of St. Helen's, Bishopsgate, near the place where the mortal remains of his father, Matthæus, had been previously interred. The "Gentili" Committee in England, as already stated, have recently caused a monument to be placed against the wall of St. Helen's Church, to commemorate the burial of Albericus therein.

With regard to the further resolution of the English Committee, the Executive body has exercised, in our opinion, a judicious discretion in selecting the treatise of Gentilis "De Jure Belli Libri tres" for republication at the Oxford Press. It is a work far in advance of the treatise of Balthazar Ayala, without any disparagement to the latter, for the Judge-Advocate of the Prince of Parma had a more limited object in view, than was before the eye of the Oxford professor. Ayala's work was intended for the lettered soldier rather than for the learned jurist or the philosophic statesman; so much so that Grotius, in remarking upon it, has observed: "Causas, unde bellum justum aut injustum

*It had long been matter of dispute whether Albericus died in London or in Oxford. Colonel Joseph Lemuel Chester, the learned editor of the Westminster Abbey Registers, London, 1876, has been enabled, from his singular familiarity with the Parochial Register Books of London and of Westminster, to put an end to any further doubt on the subject.