Lever's, Harrison Ainsworth's, Bulwer Lytton's, Disraeli's, Anthony Trollope's, Miss Braddon's, Charles Reade's, Wilkie Collins's, and three or four of these still keep the public ear, are still read with more or less of interest and of admiration. But their power is on the wane; and all of them put together do not exercise the sovereignty of Scott and Dickens. These men swept the boards. Hardly anyone else was read when these men were at their desks. Now everyone is read, and read apparently with a languid sort of interest. Who is the new master to be? What is the new style that is to charm the world with its magic and to throw everything else into the shade?

THE origin of an interesting and popular book is always a subject of interest, and this is my apology to Mr. Hepworth Dixon for suggesting that he may have taken the hint of his pleasant and suggestive work upon the Swiss in their own homes from Charles Dickens. "The newspapers seem to know as much about Switzerland," says Dickens in a note to Douglas Jerrold, from Cremona, in the autumn of '44, "as about the Esquimaux country. I should like to show you the people as they are here or in the Canton de Vaud-their wonderful education, splendid schools, comfortable homes, great intelligence, and noble independence of character." This is precisely what Hepworth Dixon has done in his sketch of the Swiss, and done with such picturesque and characteristic intelligence and power that I should like to anticipate his biography by asking whether the idea was his own or taken from this hint of Dickens. Dickens would certainly be the first to recognise his own thought in The Switzers.

MR. ALGERNON SWINBURNE has a theory that only men of patrician birth can be poets. It is, I believe, a mere whim. Perhaps Dante, Alfieri, and Byron may be set down as patricians. But these are almost the only men whose names suggest themselves on the spur of the moment, and scores of poets of the highest genius but of plebeian birth rise to the tip of the tongue. Horace, Petofi, Beranger, Burns--what sort of a pedigree had any of these men to produce at the Heralds' College? Neither Shakespeare nor Milton can be said to be men of the patrician order. They were representatives of the middle class, of the class which in every country has produced the truest poets, the keenest and profoundest thinkers, the greatest statesmen. All the best poetry that has been produced in this country, the poetry that will live, has been written by men as free from a pedigree as Burns. What pedigree had Wordsworth, Coleridge, Southey, Moore, Crabbe, Keats, Tom Hood, or even Scott, except the pedigree which he improvised out of his own imagination? They all belonged to the yeoman and merchant class. Byron and Shelley were the only two who were entitled to bear arms. No; genius is not in the blood. It often turns up like wild honey in strange places.

ALL questions of political economy resolve themselves into psychological problems. The demand of the agricultural labourer for more pay and shorter time is an example under observation at this moment. Can the labourer succeed? Independently of partisanship or sympathy, it would be an interesting study to watch, with philosophic intent, the process and the result. There is, of course, no social science, properly speaking, in the agitation. The men have not carefully considered the relation in which they stand to demand and supply. They have not determined whence the enhanced wages are to come. They have not said, there are three factors—the market price of produce, the farmers' profits, and the landlord's rent, and the additional wages must be derived from the first, the second, the third, or from all three. They go upon their wants and upon the apparent fact that the farmer cannot do without them; and though the country is familiar with the theory that the quotations of corn are ruled by those of the foreign supply, the unionist labourer never for an instant pictures to himself the tenant-farmers deserting the land in a body, and carrying their capital to other fields of employment. Whether or not the movement goes on, results of that sort will probably not happen. The parties will be ruled at every stage of the conflict by notions quite other than those laid down by MacCulloch. Will the most consistent and enduring notion prevail? or will farmers, landlords, and labourers, be helpless instruments carrying out unknowingly the inexorable laws of political economy?

THERE is not much revelation in current events. We know our contemporaries too well to be greatly astonished at anything they may do. This is, perhaps, the reason why there is more suggestiveness in old records than in new. A tavern bill of the sixteenth century, or an indictment in legal form against a public offender of the times that are dead and gone, contains hints regarding the natural history of the human animal which we should look for in vain in corresponding documents bearing date of the present month. But this is not all the difference. Common statements of facts do not bear now quite the same character which they bore some generations ago. It has fallen to my lot to attend vestry meetings in these degenerate days, and to hear the churchwardens' accounts read; but the items somehow have had none of the flavour that belong to those of similar records of a few hundreds of years gone by. I have before me a handsome-looking book which, though very recently from the press, and wearing a modern dress, would have delighted the hearts of some of my contributors of three quarters of a century ago. It contains in print a complete reproduction of the churchwardens' accounts of the parish of St. Michael, Cornhill, in the City of London, from the year 1456 to 1608. This history in little of a hundred and fifty years has been sent me by Mr. Alfred James Waterlow, for several years one of the churchwardens of that parish, by whom the book has been printed as a labour of love. Not a single year's account is absent, and the documents are full of items of that peculiarly suggestive character to which

I have referred. In the accounts produced at the Easter meetings held in the City of London three or four weeks ago I do not think there were any such entries as the following. Lawrence Walker's account, 1605 :— "Geven to a poor scholler who was a strainger ijs vjd." George Rodgers's account 1608: "Paid to Browne's wife for kepinge of the child wch was lefte at Mr. Vanaker's door the last winter, and for clothes for the same child iijs;" "Allowed unto Tittle by consent of the vestry for his expenses against the man that stole the booke of Marters ixs." Who was the poor scholar, a stranger, on whom the excellent churchwarden had compassion to the extent of two shillings and sixpence out of the church funds? What was the subsequent history of the foundling picked up at Mr. Vanaker's door? These dry debtor and creditor statements are the raw materials of romance. They speak for themselves, and I will not moralise on them, but quote half-a-dozen more items at random before I close the book. 1595: "Paid for the afternoones knell of a Duche gentlewoman xvjd;" "Paid for a caryenge awaie a poore boy that laye under a stall ijd." 1589: "Paide by order of a vestrye for thinges necessary for a mayden childe taken upp about the condyt in Cornehill xiijs iijd” “Paid for nursinge the same childe ix weeks xij." 1584: "Paide for the buriall of a poore man whiche dyed in the pulpett iiijs ijd." 1564: "Paide to the good man Hallye for a childe that was left in Sir Wm Harper's entrye xij;" "Paide to the olde blynde man at his departinge in mone ij.” 1559 "Paid to the Ringers when the Quene came to the Tower ijs." 1558 "To the auditors of this accounte to drinke xx"." paid for writing and engrosyng up of this accounte xxd."

1447: "Item

"BARRISTERS, &c." AND "OUR LAWYERS."

He

THE Editor of the Gentleman's Magazine has courteously invited me to reply to a critique on my article on Barristers. He adds, however, that I must confine myself to the very short space allowed me. I am therefore under the disadvantage of dancing a fandango in a cheeseplate. Moreover, I seldom read criticism, and such reply is hardly wanted, my assailant having misread my meaning. He is, however, merciful, if strong, and reprints my name nearly forty times. also adds that I wrote "The Gentle Life," and am sore with the Lawyers. I plead guilty to the first atrocity, but not to the second. I reverence the Bar, and count many Barristers as friends. I debated their function only. Is the age grown so picked that men may not say that barristers are not langels without raising the horsehair wigs of Slimbag and Briefless and causing a flutter in the dovecote of stuff gowns? Born of the Law, son and brother of lawyers, at one time educated (if partially) for the law, I read “Noy's Maxims"-that "thing of beauty"—and found therein that there was "no wrong without a remedy." This truth (?) rose like the Temple fountain in the dry desert of the musty law, and I believed it; but in the world I found thousands of wrongs unremedied by law, and Holbein's Death-Dance, wherein Der

Advocat flouts the poor as he pockets the gold of the rich client, a satire not yet outworn. Am I guilty of libel if I add that Mr. Chaffers is still alive, and that Sergeant Buzfuz, Sampson Brass, and Oily Gammon are accepted portraits of lawyers-drawn by barristers? But this last is fiction. Granted. Turn to history. Fielding, a barrister, rejecting his magistrate's fees as "the dirtiest money on the earth wrung from harlots;" Jeffreys, emptying the slang dictionary on innocent prisoners at the "bloody assizes;" Coke, his eyes flashing fire, yelling at the gallant Rawleigh "thou spider of hell," and doing him to death by command of James I. But this is past! Granted. Look around to-day; law universally dreaded as an enemy; a great judge bequeathing a solemn advice, 66 Suffer any loss rather than be dragged to law;" the Nestor of the Bench saying "No lawyer is competent to make his own will, no man fully understands his lease, no woman her marriage settlement." A pleader debating not the innocence or guilt of the accused, but the weakness of the judge, or the law, or the stupidity of the jury. Barristers paid for their power of cajolement; solicitors by the folio, the length not strength of their work; and until last January no proper examination for students at the Bar; in the law a taxing-master taking off one-third, one-half, two-thirds of solicitors' bills; barristers not allowed to recover their charges or fees. Had I space, I could say much more. In politics I find two great nations trembling lest they should be plunged in war by the shameful negligence of one Professor of Law on one side and the miserable astuteness (Mr. Bright calls it "attorneyship") of the other. Ruined in estate by clever jockeying attorneyship, I fee a great barrister who does not appear; I refresh him at half the fee, and yet have to fight—and lose—with a junior, thus paying nearly two hundred pounds for nothing. But I have yet a remedy—I can appeal to the last court the House of Lords-to three old gentlemen (two of whom have judged my case) aided by a stray bishop or so! But these are faults of the law, not of its exponents or professors. Be it so; but who makes and who upholds them; who tries to reform the law? Did Eldon, Stowell, or fifty others? Who consecrates and preserves them? Have we not nearly one hundred and fifty members connected with the law in the Commons? Are the benches of the Peers not crowded with law Lords? Did they or any barrister ever stir to do away with the Fleet Prison, or with the life-long curses of Chancery? The pen of a little boy who once tied up pots of blacking and saw the misery of his imprisoned father did more to aid the victims of such iniquities than any bewigged barrister, whether clad in silk or stuff. And must not they know of the useless, wasting, bankrupt-making, suicide-causing miseries of the law? And am I not, after all, the best friend of the Bar when I endeavour to plead, however weakly, for a higher, a nobler standard; for equity not law, or for a law which should be welcomed as a blessing, not dreaded as a curse; which should be resorted to by good men as a refuge, not used by knaves as an engine of oppression?

J. HAIN FRISWELL.

THE

GENTLEMAN'S MAGAZINE

JUNE, 1872.

SATANELLA.

A STORY OF PUNCHESTOWN.

BY G. J. WHYTE MELVILLE, AUTHOR OF "THE GLADIATORS," &c.

CHAPTER XXIII.

THE DEBT OF HONOUR.

AISY'S astonishment, on receiving by post those documents that restored him to the world from his vegetation in Roscommon, was no less unbounded than his joy. When he opened the registered letter, and bills for the whole amount of his liabilities fluttered out, he could scarcely believe his eyes. Then he puzzled himself to no purpose in wild speculations as to the friend who had thus dropped from the skies at his utmost need. He had an uncle prosperous enough in worldly matters, but this uncle hated parting with his money, and was, moreover, abroad, whereas the welcome letter bore the London post-mark. He could think of no other relative nor friend rich enough, even if willing, to assist him in so serious a difficulty. The more he considered his good luck, the more inexplicable it appeared; nor, taking his host into consultation, did that worthy's suggestions tend to elucidate the mystery.

In the first place, recalling many similar instances under his own observation, Denis opined that the money must have been hidden up for his guest long ago by his great-grandmother in a stocking and forgotten! Next, that the Prussian Government, having heard of the mare's performance at Punchestown, had bought her for breeding purposes at such a sum as they considered her marketable value. And, lastly (standing the more stoutly by this theory for the failure of VOL. VIII., N.S. 1872.

T T