And in the zenith of his fame subdued, And now in meads of gleaming asphodel, The phantom pleasures of his life delude.

Yet still 'twixt thee and Tenedos there pours
Just as of old the trough of angry sea,
And on the oozy sand still breaks and roars,

As when the black keels lined the yellow lea.
And still the pines of Ida wave aloft

Their tuneful, scented, dove-embow'ring shade; And 'neath them twilight broods as grey and soft, As when of yore the shepherd Paris stray'd With glad Enone; while their bleating flocks Grazed the wild thyme bright with ambrosial dew;

And lovers piping 'neath th' o'ershadowing rocks
Laded with love the breezes as they flew.
Still Simois wanders 'mid his voiceful reeds,
And Xanthus rolls his slender length along,
Telling the story of thy mighty deeds,

In lagging accents of a tearful song.
All these, O Troy,-thy streams and woody hill,
Thy barren beach whereon the long ships lay,
Thy famous isle-th' invaders haunt--are still ;
But Priam's Ilion hath pass'd away.

Hath pass'd, I said; thy mem'ry ne'er can fade!
The muse hath won thee from the dead again;
A golden glory crowns for aye thy shade;
Thou livest, O Troy, forever unto men!

R. T. NICHOLL.

FRIE

RIENDS, countrymen, and alms-givers -especialy alms-givers !-I beseech you to procure forthwith, read, mark, and inwardly digest, a gem of a book, entitled 'The Confessions of an Old Alms-giver, or Three Cheers for the Charity Organization Society.' Published by William Hunt, London. It is a gem of a book, in the first place for its excellent common sense and practical suggestions, some of which, indeed, will make the ordinary soft-hearted but thoughtless alms-giver stare. If they will only lead him to think, in future, before acting incontinently on the motto 'bis dat qui cito dat,' they will do a real service, both to him and the objects of his misplaced charity. It is a gem of a book, too, because of the genuine, unadulterated humour which runs through it, from beginning to end, playing like iridescent light around otherwise dry prosaic details, and making the little volume so entertaining that he or she who takes it up is not likely to leave any of it unread, from the preface to the conclusion. The unaffected quaintness and unforced humour, reminding one of the old English humourists, is a refreshing contrast to

the mingling of flippancy, irreverence, and coarseness which, in the main, passes for humour among our near neighbours, and infects our own newspapers.

But I am digressing as much as it is this author's habit to do, who, as he says, can 'no more write straight than a crab can crawl straight,' and who, as he also says, 'contracted a curvature of the mental spine,' from having, 'as early as his seventh year or thereabouts, got hold of that rambling, shambling, slanting-dicularly constructed volume, that crab among books, "Tristram Shandy." And, partly in consequence of this 'mental curvature,' and of the odd and unexpected turns of thought to which it leads, the reader will, notwithstanding the gloomy views of human nature which it opens up, be beguiled into not a few hearty laughs as he listens to the naive 'confessions.' 'Well! and what about the author's practical suggestions?' enquires. some utilitarian friend at the Table, who doesn't want amusement so much as information. Let me premise, before mentioning some of them, that the author can claim some reasonable right to speak with

confidence on the subject, seeing that, being a retired officer of some fortune and leisure, he, some twenty years ago, 'determined,' as he tells us, to devote myself systematically to efforts among the poor, in the way, not of a mere amiable relaxation to be used like a flute or a novel, but of a downright vocation,whereunto I should give myself as unreservedly as though I were bound by a contract and in receipt of salary.' Such a man may claim a hearing with some grace, when he boldly asserts that without organization, alms-givers, whether banded together or acting apart, may soon grow to be more wholesale corrupters of their species than they which be evil-doers by profession.'

He comes down

with all the force of his sledge-hammer of a pen, on alms-giving without thorough investigation, of the lamentable effects of which he gives many illustrative instances; on yoking together-for the promotion of hypocrisy and imposture-of spiritual and temporal relief; and, in general, on all unorganized charity.' Canada is, no doubt, not yet nearly so corrupted as London by this amiable but mischievous influence, yet there are few benevolent souls among ourselves who will not be the better for reading the chapter on Overlapping,' and that on 'Alms-giving as an Inoculator.' As to the latter, the author says and would that lazy-benevolent people would take it to heart!- Few alms-givers have probably the least suspicion how rapidly they may, with the matter of the disease of pauperism, inoculate whole circles as yet non-pauperized, by a single act of bounty indiscriminately performed, or, if not indiscrimately, at least, without a sufficiently accurate knowledge of all the facts.' And the following will appeal to the experience of many who have shared the thankless task of connexion, officially, with any organized charity. 'I would that those who are so wonderfully au fait at pitying the sorrows of 'poor old men,' would reserve a little compassion for poorer committee men, at least when connected with a Charity Organization District Board. For example, some generous person gives us-say ten shillings, and thereupon sends a whole shoal of cases, not for enquiry merely, that were sensible enough, but for 'relief,'-yea, and if the whole be not forthwith relieved, probably at the rate of a pound a head on

an average, aye, and relieved according to the subscriber's own notions of the form relief should take, which are ofttimes identically those which the Society was founded to discourage, lo! such generous subscriber is at once brought to the conclusion that the Society is a "swindle," and that he or she cannot conscientiously-what a many-coloured chameleon is conscientiousness-subscribe to it any longer.' And those who know something of the suffering caused to the deserving poor by careless or dishonest rich employers, in keeping back, for their own convenience, hard-earned wages, will thoroughly enjoy the castigation which the author administers 'to those my blameworthy fellow-countrymen and women who pay not on the spot for what the poor, whether as laundresses, needlewomen, women, shoemakers, jobbing-tailors, or otherwise, do for them.' In the concluding, or rather the penultimate chapter, 'Unorganized Charity is earnestly entreated to make her will and die,' and a form of bequest is obligingly supplied to her, modelled. on the celebrated one of Don Quixote, to whom the said Unorganized Charity is not inaptly compared.

In conclusion, let all our friends at the Table possess themselves of this book, and when they have read it themselves, let them lend it to all their charitable friends. They will find in it many more pearls than in so brief a space I have been at all able to indicate. Let me, in parting, commend the following to the friend who lately discoursed so pathetically on the 'vested interests' of liquor-sellers :-

'But lo, the drink-party have a vested interest, to meddle with which were confiscation! But are there no vested interests save theirs? Have their customers none in their own social and everlasting well-being? Which are of the longer duration? The interests of the drink-merchants? Surely not-they are but life-interests at longest. longest. But, and if the Legislature say, "Ah, but if people like to drink and be damned they must have the opportunity,'tis one of the prerogatives of civil liberty with which we may not interfere" be it so. But how about the jus tertii? I am no teetotaller any more than the Bible. But neither am I a drink-totaller, and I cannot, for my life, see why the latter class are to have it all their own way, and claim a vest

ed right to demoralize in this world (to say nothing of damning in the next) whole masses of their fellow-countrymen at my expens. I say at my expense, for who, in the long run have to pay the piper but the ratepayer and the charitable? Why the Bungs of England any more than the Thugs of India should be thus favoured I cannot divine. If either have the better claim, surely the Thug has it, for the Thug only kills the body and seizes the watch and purse, and after that hath no more that he can do; but the Bung, in hosts of cases, is a murderer of soul, body, and estate'

-The little village of G- is a very peculiar place. In default of anything better to chat about, let me tell you of two of its local celebrities. I was trying to catch the train there one evening, and missed it by three minutes, and being a stranger to the place, I enquired at the station if that was the last train.

The station-master, regarding me with an air of sorrow not unmixed with pity at my ignorance, informed me that it was. I ventured to persist and ask if a freight train wouldn't come along soon. He allowed that it was possible, but, with an evidently growing opinion that my ignorance was waxing criminal in its proportions, added that I couldn't go on it without an order from the traffic manager. He then appeared to dismiss in: from his mind, and positively started when I ventured to ask him what inn I had better go to. Little did I know my man; little did I guess the amount of Spartan firmness, of Rhadamanthine impartiality locked up in his manly breast! Oracularly he spoke, as though the whole well-being of the X Railway Company depended on his conduct on this trying occasion. 'There are four inns in the village,' quoth he, but we never recommend one more than the others.' Admire with me that regal'we,' indicative at once of superiority to the petty grades of innkeepers, and a just desire to preserve the suffrages of all four hosts! He now regard ed me as extinguished, and closed his wicket, as much as to say, the exhibition of the great and good is over for the evening; depart, oh sinful wayfarer, in peace! I could not, however, resist the temptation to see his manly countenance again, and once more applying my knuckles, asked, out of pure deviltry, which was the way to the vil

lage? I fancied I could detect a slightly snappish tone in his voice as he pointed to the door, but perhaps I was mistaken.

I saw this model station-master next morning. He had put on, as it were, an extra coat of holiness during the night. His conduct with regard to giving change filled me with admiration. He evidently regarded his small drawerful of silver as sacred, a trust fund not to be broken into to satisfy the carnal necessities of would-be passengers wishing to break a two dollar bill. The more energetic travellers were driven to make fearful and complicated calculations and exchanges between themselves, getting into inextricable confusion over them and finally retiring to glower at each other in silence from opposite corners, each with the firm conviction that the others had cheated him out of fifteen cents. A large and simple-minded party of country folks evidently believed they would never get off at all. Their forlorn hope, a fat old dame, had gone up smiling in the innocence of her heart, and returned crushed. Every two minutes thereafter another of the party returned to the charge, after much pressing,no one person daring the deadly breach twice. At last, just as the train was whistling outside, the last man succeeded in convincing Rhadamanthus that he must have got change enough by this time, and got his tickets and the hatred of the official at the same time.

But this is forestalling matters. I walked through the peculiarly winding ways of G-, and finally picked out my hostelry. It was a corner house; the rooms were all lop-sided and angular, the bar being an irregular pentagon, and the little back room where I washed my hands before tea (with a watering-pot for water-jug) was an acute angled triangle. But if the house was peculiar, so was its landlord, so were its guests. They sat dumb and mumchance, smoking round a huge coffin-like stove. Once the landlord ventured the remark that Pat had gone to and that he and

6

new comer was a Grit, mine host an ardent admirer of Sir John A. Their arguments were decidedly amusing. The innkeeper's The innkeeper's style of persuasion was as follows: You lie. I tell you so to your face. When a man lies, I always do.' To whom the liar, No, John; I don't think you would call me a liar; I may be mistaken, but-'Ah! but I do say you are a liar!' and so on. The Grit certainly had the best of the argument, both in reasoning and in temper,but it was evident that the rest of the audience considered the landlord, with his knockdown blow of you lie,' clinched the victory at each stage of the battle. After ranging all over the fertile fields of scandal, and making a brilliant excursus into British Constitutional History, which would have astonished the text-writers, the visitor knocked the ashes out of his pipe and retired, pursued by a closing asseveration of his mendacity, which in this case appeared to be the landlord's mode of construing the old adage as to the manner in which to

'Welcome the coming, speed the parting guest.' Sombre silence fell again upon the scene. I am inclined to believe that that controversy goes on every evening, and that when one of the combatants dies, the other will go and smoke his pipe over the grave, and not survive him long.

-The other day there was a gathering of lawyers and lawyers in embryo in one of our cities, to hear a lecture from a shining light in their profession, the title of which might have led many of them to expect that he would grapple fairly and earnestly with some of the knotty questions of legal morality, and to hope for some real and practical advice that would go down into the details of their every-day work. They listened reverently to vague generalities. and irreproachable truisms, which, although they occupied some three columns in the newspaper report, may be summed up as inculcating that it is good to be honest, industrious, and careful in the practice of law, as in other branches of life, and, on the whole, profitable. It is instructive to outsiders, if not altogether flattering to the profession, to see so much amiable eloquence expended to meet the assumed necessity of impressing this upon them. Besides these moral maxims with a slight legal flavour, which I am glad to accept as I

At

formerly accepted my parents' dicta that story-telling and profanity are undesirable, there was a great deal in the lecture about the nobility of the Law, and the elevating influence of its study, which, although fully borne out by the authorities,' sticks in my perverse throat, as it has always done. Circumstances have made it my fate, or privilege, to hear and read much in eulogy of the Law, its study and its practice. the feet of a professional Gamaliel, from professional works, and from professional friends I have sought to imbibe a spirit of due reverence for it all, and to lay the flattering unction to my discontented soul, that, if not over palatable, legal lore is at any rate mentally profitable and morally improving. I have failed. Avowedly, Í am not impartial. But the reasons of my failure must take their chances on their merits.

Let me premise that I am not here looking at the Law as a matter of business. It is a very fine business; if I doubted that I should not look at the Law at all. It is upon the plea that its study is noble, elevating, or intrinsically beneficial to a man, as a rational (over and above a bread-winning and dollar-accumulating) being, that unhesitatingly I join issue.

Here it can only be asserted, but proor abounds, that the Law of England-and, consequently, the great body of Canadian law-ranks as the most backward branch of English intelligence. It is a system built up of the errors and patchings of centuries, unwieldy, incoherent, unequal, and obscure. The law of real property, improved as it has been, is acknowledged by all but those who profit by its intricacies, to be an anachronism, a survival from the days of Feudalism so utterly unfitted to our times that it is a burden on our shoulders instead of a light to our feet. A recent writer in the Nineteenth Century says: 'Every one is aware that the law relating to landed property is the standing disgrace of English Law. After many attempts to simplify it, it remains as complicated as

ever.

The reason of this is that the law relating to land is irrational in itself." Yet the Real Property Commission nibbles off an excrescence here, and smooths a difficulty there, without once going to the root of the matter. These are truisms as regards England. Improvements have.

6

The

me the nobility appears to be in the reformer and not in the thing he reforms. Leaving the study, let me glance at its elevating influence' on the student. industrious apprentice,' putting aside as trivial or as a disturbing element, nearly all interest in the great problems of our day, resolutely expends the best of his energy and time at the important stage of his life generally covered by his studentship-when his mind is still malleable, but taking its final 'set'in the acquirement of a mass of undigested and lifeless facts, facts almost valueless in any broader connection than their mere professional use. He devotes himself to learning which has been eloquently described as 'of a character calculated to narrow the compass of one's mind, to direct it to the consideration of mere technicalities, to entangle it in the meshes of minute verbal distinctions and mathematical preciseness; and, generally, to contract its sphere of sympathy with animate and inanimate Nature.' The mind has to go through a course of subjection to authority, the very essence of law-study, just at a period when it should wrench the sceptre from authority, and prove all things that are provable. The spirit of our age is scientific; it requires us to have a better foundation for our convictions than any high-handed 'judgment;' stronger proof than any oath or affidavit. The discipline of legal study runs in the very teeth of the spirit of verification ; and, while studies mould the mind, even nolens volens, the consistent law student delivers himself up unreservedly to the effects of that discipline. It leaves him time for little else; scarcely a breath of the mighty Zeit-Geist can penetrate to his intellectual prison; and he must indeed be firm of will and warm at heart if he be not left behind the age, with a fatal warp in his mind, and his sympathy with progress choked amid the dust of ancient precedents.' He has sworn fealty to dingy paper instead of to never-fading Nature; he stores up painfully details of Man's errors, selfdoctoring, and self-quackery, rather than details of Nature's majestic and unswerving laws. The only branch of Law which goes out and takes its place in the advancing line of scientific thought, that is, philosophical jurisprudence, finds no place in the regular Canadian course. It is regarded by the majority of Canadian lawyers much as

been made in some particulars in this country. How much they have left undone that should be done has been ably pointed out, last month and on previous occasions, by a contributor to the Monthly. But, allowing the utmost benefits that can accrue from these improvements in their practical application, Canadian real property law, founded as it is on that of England, and necessitating for its comprehension an intimate acquaintance with that of England, stands or falls with it as a 'noble study.' Our Common Law procedure is full of dead bones of details that should be buried with things put away as nationally childish; ghosts of ancient fictions that should be laid, for once and for a L Why is it that this condition of things is being changed so slowly? Because subtleties, countless minutie of detail, hair-splitting distinctions, reservations, contradictions, utterly exasperating to the lay understand ing, make up arcana, by keeping jealous watch and ward over which a profession believes it is maintained and waxes great. It is not less than a right, and it is now not beyond hope, that Englishmen should have the law of England simplified, codified, and written down in plain English, that he who runs may read; instead of jumbled into a patchwork puzzle, tangled, twisted, and wrapped up in barbarous jargon. But this is 'not in the interest of the profession!' or, as downright Prof. Blackie, of Edinburgh, says, speaking of a former generation, of 'the oligarchy of lawyers, who strangle the rights of the present with the fictions of the past.' Consequently law is studied empirically and unintelligently; walled up for professional profit, as much as possible out of the reach of the tide of progress which is carrying all else before it. Nevertheless it must soon yield to the influence and become a progressive science, instead of remain ing a fossilized mystification. Already we have giants clearing away the rubbish Sir Henry Maine, Sir James F. Stephen, Sheldon Amos, and others, following out the work well begun by Bentham and Austin. The medieval monstrosity will die hard; but die it must. This is the study in which I fail to see nobility. If the names I have just mentioned be quoted against me, and it be argued that there is nobility in it, when entered upon with the determination of aiding in its reform, I can only say that to