JUDGMENTS IN VACATION

JUDGMENTS IN
VACATION

BY
HIS HONOUR JUDGE
EDWARD ABBOTT PARRY

Author of “Dorothy Osborne’s Letters,” “Life of Macklin,”
“The Scarlet Herring,” “Katawampus: Its Treatment and Cure,”
“Butterscotia,” etc.

LONDON
SMITH, ELDER, & CO., 15 WATERLOO PLACE
Manchester: SHERRATT & HUGHES, 34 Cross Street
1911

[All rights reserved]

TO THE RIGHT HONOURABLE LORD ALVERSTONE
LORD CHIEF JUSTICE OF ENGLAND
THIS VOLUME IS
BY KIND PERMISSION
DEDICATED IN AFFECTION AND RESPECT
BY
THE AUTHOR

CONTENTS.

PREFACE.

To a sane world one must offer some few words of excuse for writing judgments in vacation. One has heard of the emancipated slave who invested his savings in purchasing a share in another slave and of the historical bus-driver who made use of his annual holiday to drive a bus for a sick friend. And so it is with smaller men. One gets so used to giving judgments upon matters, the essence and properties of which one really knows very little about, that the habit remains after the sittings are over into the vacation. And on that rainy day, when golf and the more important pursuits of life are impossible, one finds oneself alone with pen, ink and paper, and thoughts that voluntarily move towards written judgments. And there is this excuse, that a Judge of a County Court can offer which would not be possible to his ermined brother—or should it be cousin, a poor relation had best be careful in claiming relationship—of the High Court. If we have any lurking desire to write our judgments, we shall not find leisure or opportunity to write them in term time. There is such a vast number of cases to try that judgments must be given forthwith, relying on authority perhaps rather than accuracy for the kindly manner of their reception. Well do I remember a great Judge giving a parting word of advice to a friend of mine on the Northern Circuit who preceded me to the County Court Bench: “Better be strong and wrong than weak and right.” The wisdom of the world is on the side of this epigram, and demands that all judgments of real importance should be given forthwith and spoken rather than written. Thus that most influential arbitrator in the larger affairs of Englishmen, the umpire in the cricket field, is never allowed to write his judgments.

It must be a pleasant thing to listen for many days to the learned arguments of the ablest minds at the bar, noting down here and there an added thought of your own which is to find a place in the ultimate judgment which some days hence you will write at leisure in your study surrounded by the reports and text books necessary to give weight to your written word. A poor Judge of the County Court can have no such refinement of pleasure. Does Bill’s cat trespass in Thomas’s pigeon loft, at Lambeth or Salford?—the twenty-five shilling claim is argued in unison, certainly without harmony, until a skilful adjudication is planted right between the disputants in a breathless pause in their contest, and they are whirled out of Court speechless and astonished at the result to revive the wordy argument in the street or to join their voices in maledictions of the law and all her servants. How far otherwise in the High Court? Should some millionaire’s malkin, some prize Angora of Park Lane, slay the champion homer of a pigeon-flying Marquis—what a summoning to the fray of Astburys and Carsons. How thoughtfully through the long days of the hearing would learned counsel “watch” on behalf of the London County Council. What ancient law concerning pigeons and cats would be disentombed by hard-working juniors and submissively quoted to the Bench by their leaders as matter “which I am sure your Lordship remembers.” And then how interesting to write down the final just word of the Law of England on cats and pigeons, and to read it amid a reverent hush of learned approval, and finally to bring down the curtain on the comedy, justifying the hours and treasure that had been expended to obtain the judgment you had written, with some such tag of learning as:

“Deliberare utilia mora utilissima est.”

I am by no means suggesting that these delays of the law would be useful in inferior Courts, or that Judges of the County Court have the wit and ability to write judgments in term time of value to the world. Inferior as they necessarily are in equipment of learning and worldly emolument to the Judges of the High Court, they can only take a humble pleasure in believing that they administer justice at least as indifferently.

But if you are driven to writing judgments in vacation, there is this to be said for it, that you can choose your own subject upon which you will deliver your words of wisdom, you are not forced to listen to arguments pro and con before retiring to the study with the text books, and you are bound by no precedents governing your thoughts and driving your ideas along some mistaken lane that you know in your own heart leads to No Man’s Land. Nor are you tied down to the narrow, courtly and somewhat pompous language in which it is the custom of the judiciary to publish their wisdom.

There is this further to be said about judgments written in vacation. No one is bound to listen to them, no shorthand writer has to strain his ear to take them down, no editor of the Law Reports has to disobey his conscience to include them in the authorised version of the law; and, best of all, no Court of Appeal can either reverse them or lessen their authority by approving them. Indeed, it is only in one attribute that judgments in vacation seem to me scarcely as satisfactory as judgments delivered in term time. With the latter costs follow the event.

Many of these papers have appeared in print before. The oldest of them, Dorothy Osborne, appeared in the English Illustrated Magazine as long ago as April 1886, and I have reprinted it in the belief that many of Dorothy’s servants may like to read the little essay that led to my receiving from Mrs. Longe her copies of the original letters and her notes upon them, whereby the full edition was at length published. The quotations in it were taken from Courtenay’s extracts in his “Life of Temple.” In reprinting the article here I have only amended actual errors and misprints. In the paper on “An Elizabethan Recorder” the spelling has been modernized. In reproducing the article on “The Insolvent Poor” which was published originally in the Fortnightly Review in May 1898, it has not been thought necessary to modernize all the instances and figures that were then used. Unhappily the situation of the Insolvent Poor is no better to-day than it was in 1898, and the argument of that day remains unaffected by any reform. “Kissing the Book” was published before the recent alteration in the law, but even now the custom is not extinct, and the folk-lore of it may still be entertaining. I have to thank Messrs. Macmillan for leave to reprint the paper on “Dorothy Osborne,” and my thanks are also due to the proprietors of the Fortnightly Review, The Cornhill, The Manchester Guardian, The Contemporary Review, The Pall Mall Magazine, and The Rapid Review, for their leave to reprint other papers.

EDWARD A. PARRY.

‘THE BOX OFFICE.’

Ah! let not censure term our fate our choice,

The stage but echoes back the public voice;

The drama’s laws, the drama’s patrons give,

For we that live to please must please to live.

—Samuel Johnson.

I have a vague notion that I wrote this paper on the Box Office in some former existence in the eighteenth century, and that it was entitled ‘The Box Office in relation to the Drama of Human Life,’ and that it was printed in the Temple of the Muses which was, if I remember, in Finsbury Square.

But it is quite worth writing again with a snappy, up-to-date modern title, and in a snappier, more up-to-date and modern spirit, for as I discovered, to my surprise, in talking the other day to a meeting of serious playgoers, the Box Office idea is as little understood to-day as ever it was. All great first principles want re-stating every now and then, and the Box Office principle is one of them, for, like many of the great natural forces which govern human action, it seems to be entirely unappreciated and misunderstood.

Speaking of the actor and his profession, I pointed out that the only real test of merit in an actor was the judgment of the Box Office, and that therefore an actor is bound to play to a Box Office and succeed with a Box Office if he wants to continue to be an actor.

The suggestion was received with contempt and derision. No artist, I was told, no man of any character would deign to think of so low a thing as the Box Office. All the great men of the world were men who had had a contempt for the Box Office, and the Box Office is, and must in its nature be, a lowering and degrading influence. This opinion seemed so widely held that I decided to hold an inquest upon my original suggestion, and the result of this, I need hardly say, was not only to confirm me in the view that I was entirely right, but to convince me that my neighbours were sunk in the slough of a dangerous heresy, in which it was my duty to preach at them whilst they slowly disappeared in the ooze of their unpardonable error.

There is something essentially English in the very name of the institution—the Box Office. About the only thing an average Box Office cannot sell is boxes. When it begins to sell boxes the happy proprietor knows that, in American phrase, he has ‘got right there.’ But every sane manager, every sane actor, and all sane individuals who minister to the amusement of the people, close their ears to the wranglings of the critics and listen attentively to the voice of the Box Office. The Box Office is the barometer of public opinion, the machine that records the vox populi, which is far nearer the vox Dei than the voice of the expert witness.

Before discoursing of the Box Office in its widest sense, let us return for a moment to the case of the actor. Here the Box Office must, in the nature of things, decide his fate. It is the polling booth of the playgoer, and it is the playgoer and not the critic who decides whether an actor is great or otherwise. Why do we call Garrick a great actor? Because the Box Office of his time acclaimed him one. Davies tells us how his first performance of Richard III. was received with loud and reiterated applause. How his ‘look and actions when he pronounced the words,

Off with his head: so much for Buckingham,

were so significant and important from his visible enjoyment of the incident, that several loud shouts of approbation proclaimed the triumph of the actor and satisfaction of the audience.’ A modern purist would have walked out of the playhouse when his ear was insulted by Cibber’s tag; but from a theatre point of view it is a good tag, and I have always thought it a pity that Shakespeare forgot to set it down himself, and left to Cibber the burden of finishing the line. The tag is certainly deserving of this recognition that it was the line with which Garrick first captured the Box Office, and it is interesting that the best Richard III. of my generation, Barry Sullivan, always used Cibber’s version, for the joy, as I take it, of bringing down the house with ‘so much for Buckingham.’ Shakespeare was so fond of improving other folk’s work himself, and was such a keen business man, that he would certainly have adopted as his own any line capable of such good Box Office results.

Throughout Garrick’s career he was not without critics, and envious ones at that; but no one to-day doubts that the verdict of the Box Office was a right one, and it is an article of universal belief that Garrick was a great actor. Of course one does not contend that the sudden assault and capture of the Box Office by a young actor in one part is conclusive evidence of merit. As the envious Quin said: ‘Garrick is a new religion; Whitfield was followed for a time, but they would all come to church again.’ Cibber, too, shook his head at the young gentleman, but was overcome by that dear old lady, Mrs. Bracegirdle, who had left the stage thirty years before Garrick arrived. ‘Come, come, Cibber,’ she said, ‘tell me if there is not something like envy in your character of this young gentleman. The actor who pleases everybody must be a man of merit.’ The old man felt the force of this sensible rebuke; he took a pinch of snuff and frankly replied, ‘Why faith, Bracey, I believe you are right, the young fellow is clever.’

In these anecdotes you have the critic mind annoyed by the Box Office success of the actor, and the sane simple woman of the world laying down the maxim ‘the actor who pleases everybody must be a man of merit.’ And when one considers it, must it not necessarily be so? An actor can only appeal to one generation of human beings, and if they do not applaud him and support him, can it be reasonably said he is a great actor? If he plays continually to empty benches, and if he never makes a Box Office success, is it not absurd to say that as an actor he is of any account at all?

So far in the proceedings of my inquest it seemed to me clear that in setting down the Box Office as the only sound test of merit in an actor, my position was indisputable. Of course, there were, and are, Box Offices and Box Offices. Cibber, Quin, Macklin, and Garrick appealed to different audiences from Foote. An actor to-day has a hundred different Box Offices to appeal to, but the point and the only point is, does he succeed with the Box Office he attacks? Moreover, the more Box Offices he succeeds with and the greater the public he can amuse, the better actor he is. Garrick knew this when, in the spirit of a great artist, he said: ‘If you won’t come to Lear and Hamlet I must give you Harlequin,’ and did it with splendid success.

How was it, then, when the thing seemed so clear to my mind, there should be so many to dispute this Box Office test? The more one studied the attitude of these unbelievers, the more certain it seemed that their unbelief arose in a great measure as Cibber’s and Quin’s had arisen, namely, from a certain spirit of natural envy. It is obvious that not every one of us can achieve a great Box Office success, and that many men who live laborious lives, without much prosperity of any kind, not unnaturally dislike the success that an actor appears to attain so easily. But the suggestion that Box Office success is or can be largely attained by unworthy means is, it seems to me, a curious delusion of the envious, insulting to the generation of which we are individuals, inasmuch as it suggests that we are easily deceived and deluded, and exhibiting unpleasantly that modern pessimism that spells—or should we more accurately say smells?—degeneration. Garrick’s career is an eloquent example of the fact that a great Box Office success can only be attained by great attributes used with consummate power, and that pettiness and meanness, chicanery and bombast are not the methods approved of by the patrons of the Box Office.

Of course it will be said by the envious ‘This man is a great success to-day, wait and see what the next generation think of him.’ But why should a man act or paint or write for any other generation but his own? Common sense suggests that many men can successfully entertain their own generation, but that only the work of the rare occasional genius will survive in the future. Luckily for all artists of to-day, this is and always was a law of Nature; equally fortunate for artists of the future, that nothing that is being done to-day is in the least likely to interfere with the workings of that law in days to come.

There is undoubtedly a tendency—and probably there always has been a tendency—to infer that because a man is rich therefore he is lucky, and that a man who is successful is very likely a dishonest man; indeed, it seems a common belief that to gain the verdict of the Box Office it is necessary to do that which is unworthy. This idea being so widely spread, it appears interesting to study the Box Office in relation to other scenes in the human drama. What part does it play, for instance, in literature or art or politics?

Of course, a writer or painter is in a somewhat different position from an actor. He can, if he wishes, appeal to a much smaller circle, or, in an extreme case, he can refuse to appeal at all to the generation in which he lives and make his appeal to posterity. The statesman, however, is perhaps nearer akin to the actor. Let us consider how statesmen and politicians have regarded the Box Office, and whether it can fairly be said to have exercised a bad influence on their actions.

And as Garrick is one of the high sounding names in the world of the theatre, so Gladstone may not unfairly be taken as a type of English politician, and it is curious that the whole evolution of his mind is chiefly interesting in its gradual discovery of the fact that the Box Office is the sole test of a statesman’s merit, that the vox populi is indeed the vox Dei, and that the superior person is of no account in politics as against the will of the nation. As in the theatre, so in politics, it is the people who pay to come in who have to be catered for. In 1838, Gladstone was as superior—‘sniffy’ is the modern phrase—about the Box Office as any latter-day journalist could wish. He complimented the Speaker on putting down discussions upon the presentation of petitions. The Speaker sagely said ‘that those discussions greatly raised the influence of popular feeling on the deliberation of the House; and that by stopping them he thought a wall was erected—not as strong as might be wished.’ Young Mr. Gladstone concurred, and quoted with approval an exclamation of Roebuck’s in the House: ‘We, sir, are, or ought to be, the élite of the people of England, for mind; we are at the head of the mind of the people of England.’

It took over forty years for Gladstone to discover that his early views were a hopeless form of conceit, and that the only test of the merit of a policy was the Box Office test. But when he recognised that the élite of the people were not in the House of Commons, but were really in the pit and gallery of his audiences, he never wearied of putting forward and explaining Box Office principles with the enthusiasm, and perhaps the exaggeration, of a convert.

Take that eloquent appeal in Midlothian as an instance:

We cannot (he says) reckon on the wealth of the country, nor upon the rank of the country, nor upon the influence which rank and wealth usually bring. In the main these powers are against us, for wherever there is a close corporation, wherever there is a spirit of organised monopoly, wherever there is a narrow and sectional interest—apart from that of the country, and desiring to be set up above the interest of the public, there we have no friendship and no tolerance to expect. Above all these and behind all these, there is something greater than these: there is the nation itself. This great trial is now proceeding before the nation. The nation is a power hard to rouse, but when roused, harder and still more hopeless to resist.

Now here is the Box Office test with a vengeance. Not in its soundest form, perhaps, because the really ideal manager would have found a piece and a company that would draw stalls and dress circle as well as pit and gallery. For Bacon says: ‘If a man so temper his actions as in some of them he do content every faction, the music will be the fuller.’ But Gladstone at that time had neither the piece nor the company for this, and, great artist as he was, his music did not in later years draw the stalls and dress circle; but having mastered the eternal Box Office principle, this did not disconcert him, for he knew that of the two the pit and gallery were sounder business for a manager who wanted to succeed in the provinces and was eager for a long run.

This recognition by Mr. Gladstone of the Box Office as supreme comes with especial interest when you consider that his education and instinct made it peculiarly difficult for him to appreciate the truth. Disraeli jumped at it more easily, as one might expect from a man of Hebrew descent, for that great race have always held the soundest views on questions of the Box Office. As a novelist, the novels he wrote were no doubt the best he was capable of, but whatever may be their merits or demerits, they were written with an eye to the Box Office and the Box Office responded. His first appearance upon the political stage was not a success. The pit and gallery howled at him. But this did not lead him to pretend that he despised his audience, and that they were a mob whose approval was unworthy of winning; on the contrary, he told them to their faces that ‘the time would come when they would be obliged to listen.’ A smaller man would have shrunk with ready excuse from conquering such a Box Office, but Disraeli knew that it was a condition precedent to greatness, and he intended to be great. He had no visionary ideas about the political game. As he said to a fellow-politician: ‘Look at it as you will, it is a beastly career.’ Much the same may be said in moments of despondency of any career. The only thing that ultimately sweetens the labour necessary to success is the Box Office returns, not by any means solely because of their value in money—though a man honest with himself does not despise money—but because every shilling paid into the Box Office is a straight testimonial from a fellow-citizen who believes in your work. Disraeli’s Box Office returns were colossal and deservedly so—for he had worked hard for them.

When you come to think of it seriously, the Box Office principle in the drama of politics is the right for that drama’s patrons to make its laws, a thing that this nation has contended for through the centuries. Indeed, there are only two possible methods of right choice open: either to listen to the voice of public opinion—the Box Office principle—or to leave affairs entirely to the arbitrament of chance. With sturdy English common sense we have embodied both these principles in an excellent but eccentric constitution. We allow public opinion to choose the members of the House of Commons, and leave the choice of members of the House of Lords entirely to chance. To an outside observer both methods seem to give equally satisfactory results.

In political matters we find that for all practical purposes the Box Office reigns supreme. No misguided political impresario to-day would plant some incompetent young actor into a star part because he was a member of his own family. We may be thankful that all parties openly recognise that any political play to be produced must please the pit and gallery, and that any statesman actor, to be a success, must play to their satisfaction. No one wants the stalls and dress circle of the political circus to be empty, but it would be absurd to let a small percentage of the audience exercise too great an influence on the productions of the management.

As in politics, so in business, for here no sane man will be heard to deny that the Box Office test is the only test of merit. If the balance sheet is adverse, the business man may be a man of culture, brain-power, intellect, sentiment and good manners, but as a business man he is not a success, and Nature kindly extinguishes him and automatically removes him from a field of energy for which he is unfitted. It is really unfortunate that one cannot have a moral, social, and literary Bankruptcy Court, where, applying the Box Office test, actors, authors, artists, and statesmen might file their petitions and be adjudged politically, or histrionically, or artistically bankrupt, as the case might be, and obtain a certificate of the Court, permitting them to open a fried-fish shop, to start a newspaper, or to enter upon some simpler occupation which, upon evidence given, it might appear they are really fitted for.

It is the vogue to-day for those claiming to possess the literary and artistic temperament to shrink with very theatrical emphasis from the Box Office. They point out how the Box Office of to-day overrules the Box Office of yesterday, forgetting that the Box Office of to-morrow may reinstate the judgment of the inferior Court. Even if the Box Office is as uncertain as the law, it is also as powerful as the law. Of course a painter or writer has the advantage over the actor—if it be one—of appealing to a smaller Box Office to-day, in the hopes of attracting a large Box Office to-morrow. A man can write and paint to please a coming generation, but a man cannot act, or bring in Bills in Parliament, or bake or brew, or make candlesticks for anyone else than his fellow living men. Not that, for myself, I think there have ever been many writers or artists who wrote and painted for future generations. On the contrary, they wrote and painted largely to please themselves, but in so far as they cared for their wives and children, with an eye on the Box Office, and in most cases it was only because their business arrangements were mismanaged that their own generations failed to pay to come in. These failures were the exception. The greatest men, such as Shakespeare and Dickens, were immediate Box Office successes—others were Box Office successes in their own day, but have not stood the test of time. Nevertheless, it is something to succeed at any Box Office, even if the success be only temporary. Every man cannot be a Prime Minister, but is that any reason why he should not aspire to a seat on the Parish Council? When one turns to the lives of authors and artists, one does not find that the wisest and best were men who despised the test of the Box Office.

Goldsmith had the good sense to ‘heartily wish to be rich,’ but he scarcely went the right way about it. One remembers Dr. Johnson sending him a guinea, and going across to his lodgings to find that his landlady had arrested him for debt and that he had changed the guinea for a bottle of Madeira. Dr. Johnson immediately makes across to the bookseller and sells the ‘Vicar of Wakefield’ for sixty pounds. The Box Office test absolutely settled the merit of the book in its own generation, and from then until now. One may regret that Goldsmith reaped so poor a reward, and that is what so constantly happens, not that the Box Office test fails to be a true test at revealing merit, but that, owing to superior business capacity, a very inferior author will for a time reap a bigger reward than a better author. This is generally the result of bad business management, and the cases even of authors and artists who are not discovered in their own lifetime, and are discovered by future generations, are rarer than one would suppose. It is an amusing modern craze among the cognoscenti to assess the ability of a writer or an artist of to-day by the mere fact alone that he has few admirers of his own generation.

If one were to investigate the lives of great writers and painters, one would find, I think, that the majority wrote and painted for money and recognition, and that the one reward they really wished for was a Box Office success.

Dickens, who is perhaps the healthiest genius in English literature, writing of a proposed new publication, says frankly:

I say nothing of the novelty of such a publication, nowadays, or its chance of success. Of course I think them great, very great; indeed almost beyond calculation, or I should not seek to bind myself to anything so extensive. The heads of the terms which I should be prepared to go into the undertaking would be—that I be made a proprietor in the work, and a sharer in the profits. That when I bind myself to write a certain portion of every number, I am ensured for that writing in every number, a certain sum of money.

That is the wholesome way of approaching a piece of literary work from the Box Office point of view. But Dickens well understood the inward significance of Box Office success and why it is a thing good in itself. As he puts it in answering the letter of a reader in the backwoods of America:

To be numbered among the household gods of one’s distant countrymen and associated with their homes and quiet pleasures; to be told that in each nook and corner of the world’s great mass there lives one well-wisher who holds communion with me in spirit is a worthy fame indeed, and one which I would not barter for a mine of wealth.

Dickens’s Box Office returns brought him a similar message from hundreds and thousands of his fellow-men to that contained in the letter from the backwoods of America, and though in the nature of things such messages can only come in any number through the Box Office, Dickens understood the meaning of a Box Office success, and had too honest a heart to pretend that he despised it.

Thackeray was of course absolutely dogmatic on the Box Office principle. He rightly regarded the Box Office as the winnowing machine separating chaff from wheat. He refused to whimper over imaginary men of genius who failed to get a hearing from the world. One of the first duties of an author, in his view, was that of any other citizen, namely, to pay his way and earn his living. He puts his cold sensible views into the mouth of Warrington reproving Pen for some maudlin observation about the wrongs of genius at the hands of publishers.

What is it you want? (asks Warrington). Do you want a body of capitalists that shall be forced to purchase the works of all authors who may present themselves, manuscript in hand? Everybody who writes his epic, every driveller who can and can’t spell and produces his novel or his tragedy—are they all to come and find a bag of sovereigns in exchange for their worthless reams of paper? Who is to settle what is good, bad, saleable, or otherwise? Will you give the buyer leave in fine to purchase or not?... I may have my own ideas of the value of my Pegasus, and think him the most wonderful of animals, but the dealer has a right to his opinion, too, and may want a lady’s horse, or a cob for a heavy timid rider, or a sound hack for the road, and my beast won’t suit him.

One cannot have the Box Office principle more correctly stated than it is in that passage. Nearly all the great writers seem to be of the same opinion, and for the same reasons and without being such a ‘whole-hogger’ as Dr. Johnson, who roundly asserted that ‘No man but a blockhead ever wrote except for money,’ it seems undoubted that the motives of money and recognition have produced the best work that has been done.

Nor do we find that the painter is in this matter less sensible than his artistic brethren. The late Sir John Millais expresses very accurately the sensible spirit in which all great artists attend to the varied voices of critics as against the unanimous voice of the Box Office.

I have now lost all hope of gaining just appreciation in the Press; but thank goodness ‘the proof of the pudding is in the eating.’ Nothing could have been more adverse than the criticism on ‘The Huguenot,’ yet the engraving is now selling more rapidly than any other of recent time. I have great faith in the mass of the public, although one hears now and then such grossly ignorant remarks.

The artist then gives instances of public criticism in other arts with which he disagrees; but the only matter that I am concerned with is that in his own art, and for himself, he has arrived at the Box Office conclusion that the proof of the pudding is in the eating.

I have searched through many biographies in hopes of finding the writer or artist who was wholly uninfluenced by the Box Office. If he existed, or was likely to exist, he would be found, one would think, in large numbers among those well-to-do folk who had ample means and could devote their lives to developing their genius and ability solely for the good of mankind. It must seem curious to those who despise the Box Office to find how little good work is achieved by men and women who are under no necessity of appealing to that institution for support.

If I had been asked to name any writer of my own time who was absolutely free from any truck with the Box Office, I should, before I had read his charming autobiography, have suggested Herbert Spencer. For indeed one would not expect to find a Box Office within the curtilage of a cathedral or a laboratory. Religion and science and their preachers have necessarily very little to do with the Box Office.

But Spencer was not only a great writer, but a keen scientific analyst of the facts of human life. He could not deceive himself—as so many of the literary folk do—as to his aims and objects. Looking back on the youthful valleys of his life from the calm mountain slopes that a man may rest on at the age of seventy-three, he asks himself

What have been the motives prompting my career? how much have they been egotistic, and how much altruistic? That they have been mixed there can be no doubt. And in this case, as in most cases, it is next to impossible to separate them mentally in such a way as to preserve the relations of amount among them. So deep down is the gratification which results from the consciousness of efficiency, and the further consciousness of the applause which recognised efficiency brings, that it is impossible for anyone to exclude it. Certainly, in my own case, the desire for such recognition has not been absent.

He continues to point out that this desire for recognition was ‘not the primary motive of my first efforts, nor has it been the primary motive of my larger and later efforts,’ and concludes, ‘Still, as I have said, the desire of achievement, and the honour which achievement brings, have doubtless been large factors.’

It is very interesting to note that a man like Herbert Spencer recognises what a large part the Box Office played in his own work—work which was rather the work of a scientist than the work of a literary man.

In the modern education and in the Socialist doctrines that are preached, emulation, competition and success are spoken of almost as though they were evils in themselves. People are to have without attaining. Children and men and women are taught to forget that ‘they which run in a race run all, but one receiveth the prize.’ It is considered bad form to remember that there is a Box Office, that it is the world’s medium for deciding human values; and that to gain prizes it is necessary to ‘so run that ye may obtain.’

These old-world notions are worth repeating, for however we may wish they were otherwise, they remain with us and have to be faced. And on the whole they are good. Success at the Box Office is not only to be desired on account of the money it brings in, but because it means an appreciation and belief in one’s work by one’s fellow-men. In professions such as the actor’s, the barrister’s, the politician’s, and to a great extent the dramatist’s, and all those vocations where a man to succeed at all must succeed in his own lifetime, the Box Office is, for all practical purposes, the sole test of merit. The suggestion—a very common one to-day—that a man can only make a Box Office success by pandering to low tastes, or indulging in some form of dishonesty or chicanery, is a form of cant invented by the man who has failed, to soothe his self-esteem and to account pleasantly to himself for his own failure. A study of the lives of great men will show that they all worked for the two main things, popular recognition and substantial reward, that are summed up in the modern phrase Box Office.

It may be that in some ideal state the incentive to work may be found in some other institution rather than the Box Office. It is the dream of a growing number of people that a time is nearly at hand when the Box Office results attained by the workers are to be taken away and shared among those high-souled unemployables who prefer talking to toiling and spinning. Such theories are nothing new, though just at the moment they may be uttered in louder tones than usual. St. Paul knew that they were troubling the Thessalonians when he reminded them ‘that if any would not work neither should he eat,’ and he added, ‘for we hear that there are some which walk among you disorderly, working not at all, but are busybodies.’ St. Paul makes the sensible suggestion ‘that with quietness they work and eat their own bread.’ To eat your own bread and not someone else’s, you must work for it successfully and earn it. That really is the Box Office principle.

THE DISADVANTAGES OF EDUCATION.

“A merry heart doeth good like a medicine:

But a broken spirit drieth the bones.”

Proverbs xvii., 22.

The Professors of dry bones have broken so many spirits in their machine that they will not grudge me a laugh at their little failings. A mere “man in the street” like myself can do little more than call attention to some of the weaknesses of our educational system, well understanding that the earnest Schoolmaster knows far more about the disadvantages of education than anything he can learn from his surviving pupils. For my part I have never made any secret of the fact that from my earliest days I disliked education, and had a natural, and I hope not unhealthy, distrust of schoolmasters. Let it here be understood with the greatest respect to the sex that “schoolmaster” embraces “schoolmistress.” Most school-boys that I remember have had that attitude of mind, but many remained so long in scholastic cloisters that the sane belief of their youth, that the schoolmaster was their natural enemy, became diminished and was ultimately lost altogether. Indeed, there are few minds that undergo the strain of years of toil among scholastic persons without becoming dulled into the respectable belief that schoolmasters are in themselves desirable social assets, like priests and policemen and judges. Now no small boy with a healthy mind believes this. He knows that the schoolmaster and the policeman are merely evidences of an imperfect social system, that no progress is likely to be made until society is able to dispense with their services, and though he cannot put these ideas into words he can and does act upon that assumption, and continues to do so until his natural alertness is destroyed and he is dragooned into at all events an outward observance of the official belief in the sanctity of schoolmasters.

Personally I have always regarded it as a matter of congratulation that I escaped from school at a comparatively early age, nor can I honestly say that I remember to-day anything that I formerly learnt at school, or that if I did remember anything I learnt, there,—except perhaps a few irregular French verbs—that it would be of the slightest use to me in the everyday business of life.

If I were, for instance, to model my methods of trial in the County Court upon the proceedings of Euclid, who spent his life in endeavouring to prove by words, propositions that were self-evident even in his own very rudimentary pictures, I should be justly blamed by a commercial community for wasting their time. Yet how many of the most precious hours of the best of my youth have been wasted for me by schoolmasters, who were so dull as not to perceive that Euclid, like Edward Lear and Lewis Carroll, was the writer of a book of nonsense? Not nonsense that can possibly appeal to the child of to-day, but nonsense that will always have its place in the library of those to whom the Absurd is as precious in life as the Beautiful.

If you believe at all in evolution and progress, and the descent of man from more primitive types, with its wonderfully hopeful corollary, the ascent of man to higher things, you must acknowledge at once that education has necessarily been, and always must be, a great set back to onward movement. A schoolmaster can only teach what he knows, and if one generation only learns what the last generation can teach there is not much hope of onward movement.

Schoolmasters are apt to believe that the hope of the younger generation depends upon their assimilating the ideas of their pastors and masters, whereas the true hope is that they will not be so long overborne by authority, as to make their young brains incapable of rejecting at all events some of the false teaching that each generation complacently offers to the next.

We need not accept the new generation entirely at its own valuation, nor need we disturb ourselves about the exaggerated under-estimate with which one-and-twenty sets down for naught the wisdom of fifty. But unless we pursue education as a preparation for the betterment of the human race we are beating the air. And the responsibility is a great one. For the mind of a child, as Roger Ascham says, is “like the newest wax, most able to receive the best and fairest printing!” But, alas! it is equally able to receive printing of an inferior type. Every one of us, I should imagine, half believes something to-day that he knows to be untrue because it was impressed on the wax of his child-mind by some well-meaning but ignorant schoolmaster.

One of the gravest disadvantages about education is the way it thwarts progress by teaching young folk that which, to say the least of it, is uncertain. If education were to be strictly confined by the schoolmaster to the things he really knew, what a quantity of lumber could be trundled out of the schoolroom to-morrow. Teaching should be kept to arts, accomplishments and facts—opinions and theories should have no place whatever in the schoolroom.

Open any school book of a hundred years ago and read its theories and opinions, and remember that these were thrust down the throats of the little ones with the same complacent conceit that our opinions and theories of to-day are being taught in the schools. And yet we all know that theories and opinions in the main become very dead sea-fruit in fifty or a hundred years, whilst the multiplication table remains with us like the Ten Commandments, a monument of everlasting truth.

This chief disadvantage of education will probably continue with us for many generations, until it is recognised as immoral and wicked to warp a child’s mind by teaching things to it as facts which are at the best only conjectures, in the hope that in after life it may take some side in the affairs of the world, which the teacher, or the committee of the school, is interested in. The true rule should of course be to teach children, especially in State Schools, only ascertained facts, the truth of which all citizens, who are not in asylums, agree to be true.

My view of the ideal system of education is much the same as Mr. Weller senior’s. You will remember that he said to Mr. Pickwick about his son Sam, “I took a great deal of pains with his eddication, sir! I let him run in the streets when he were very young and shift for his self. It’s the only way to make a boy sharp, sir.” I could not ask any body of schoolmasters to adopt this principle, though it is one that seems to me thoroughly sound. Put into other and more scholastic words, it may be made a copy-book sentiment. Emerson says much the same thing as old Tony Weller, when he writes, “That which each can do best only his Maker can teach him,” and the spirit of the Maker of the Universe seems to me at least as likely to be met with in Market Street as in a committee room of the Manchester Town Hall, where the destinies of our national education are so ably managed by citizens of respectability and authority.

Some such preface as this is needed if I am to make it clear to you why I choose the disadvantages of education rather than the advantages, as the subject matter of my essay. One should always try to speak on something one really believes in heartily and thoroughly. The advantages of education have been spread before us during the last fifty years by every writer of importance—a writer of no importance may fairly give an idle hour to the other side of the picture.

In any commercial country it should not be necessary to apologise for the endeavour to make a rough balance-sheet describing the liabilities of education; even if we are all convinced that the assets of education are more than enough to meet the liabilities and that we are educationally solvent. Nor am I really stating anything very new or startling, for all thinkers and writers on education seem beginning at last to discover that education is only a means to an end, and that when you have no clear idea of what end you hope to arrive at it is not very probable that you will choose the right means.

If a man wanted to travel to Blackpool and was so ignorant as to imagine that Blackpool was in the neighbourhood of London, he would probably in the length of his journey lose many beautiful hours of the sea-side and spend them in the stuffy atmosphere of a railway train. This would be of little importance to the community if it was only the case of an individual man—a schoolmaster for instance. But what if the man had taken a party of children with him? thereby losing for them wonderful hours of digging on the sand, or seeing Punch or Judy, or listening to a Bishop preaching—that indeed would be a serious state of things for everyone.

One of the great disadvantages of modern education is that few of its professors and teachers, and fewer of its elected managers, have the least idea where they are going to. The authorities shoot out codes and prospectuses and minutes and rules and orders, and change their systems with the inspired regularity of a War Office.

Another of the disadvantages of education to-day is that there is too much of it, and that what there is is in the hands of well-meaning directors, who are either middle-aged and ignorant, or, what is worse, middle-aged and academic. If we cannot reach the ideal of Tony Weller and let the child shift for himself, let us at all events unshackle the schoolmaster and allow him to shift for himself. The head master of a great English school is a despot. He has at his back—and I use the phrase “at his back” with deliberate care, not meaning “upon his shoulders”—he has at his back a powerful board of citizens of position who are wise enough and strong enough to leave the question of education to the man at the wheel, and to remember that it is dangerous to speak to him whilst he is steering the ship. Any system of education that is to be of any avail at all must be a personal system in a great measure, and the elementary head master should be in the same position as the head master of our great public schools. The boards and committees should interfere as little as possible with the schoolmasters they employ. A schoolmaster, of all workmen, wants freedom and liberty to do his work his own way. And who can teach anything, worth teaching, who is being constantly worried and harassed by inspectors and committees? Education is not sewage, and you cannot judge of its results by a chemical analysis of the mental condition of the human effluent that pours out of the school gates into the rivers of life.

I have expressed my distrust of schoolmasters quite freely, but I must confess that my detestation of boards and committees amounts almost to a mania, though when I notice the pleasure and delight so many good citizens have in sitting on a committee and preventing business from being done, I fairly admit it is quite possible I am wrong about the matter. It may well be that there is some hidden virtue in these boards and committees, some divine purpose in them that I cannot see. I have sometimes thought that in the course of evolution they will arrive at a condition of permanent session without the transaction of any business whatever. Then possibly the golden age will have arrived, and then the individual servant, no longer hampered by their well meant interference, will have a chance to do his best work. But for my part, so oppressed am I by the futility of committees that I am tempted sometimes to doubt the personality of the Evil One, in the sure belief that the affairs of his territory would be governed more to his liking by a large committee elected on a universal suffrage of both sexes. Who are our ideal schoolmasters in the history of the profession? Roger Ascham, who, learned man that he was, impressed on youth the necessity of riding, running, wrestling, swimming, dancing, singing and the playing of instruments cunningly; Arnold, of Rugby, whose whole method was founded on the principle of awakening the intellect of every individual boy, and who was the personal guide and friend of those of the scholars who could appreciate the value of his friendship; Edward Thring, of Uppingham, who thought “the most pitiful sight in the world was the slow, good boy laboriously kneading himself into stupidity because he is good,” and who stood firm for the individual master’s “liberty to teach.” Are any of these schoolmasters men who could or would have tolerated any interference in their life’s work from an unsympathetic inspector or a prosy town councillor? The work of the committees should be devoted to choosing a good man or woman to be head master of a school and then to leaving him or her alone. The inspectors should be pensioned—and turned off on the golf-links.

Having dealt with these serious disadvantages to education, let me hasten to say a little more about that grave disadvantage to education, the schoolmaster himself. The schoolmaster is generally a man who, having learnt to teach, has long ago ceased to learn. It is the past education of the schoolmaster that generally stands in his way. He believes in education, and thinks it a good thing in itself; he believes in rules and orders and lessons as desirable, whereas they are only the necessary outcome of Adam’s misconduct in the Garden of Eden. I cannot quite agree with Tolstoi’s suggestion that all rules in a school are illegitimate, and that the child’s liberty is inviolable. I do not think anarchy in a school is more possible to-day than anarchy in a state. But I do think that the schoolmaster of to-day should rule as far as possible by the creation of a healthy public opinion among his scholars and make the largest use of that public opinion as a moral and educational force. Looking back on my own experience, it is not what I learnt from my schoolmasters but what I learnt from my companions that has been of any real value to me in after life.

A child should go early to some good kindergarten presided over by some delightfully bright and pleasant lady, merely to learn the lesson that there are other children in the world besides itself. How important it is in life to learn to sit cheerfully next to someone you cordially detest without slapping him or her. And yet such a lesson, to be really mastered, should be learnt before five or seven at the latest. After that it can only be learned by much prayer and—dining out. At dinner parties, and particularly public dinners, one can get the necessary practice in this kind of self-control, but it is better to learn it whilst you are young, when alone it is possible to master the great lessons of life thoroughly and with comparatively little pain. Men have reached the position of King’s Counsel without attaining this simple moral grace.

If you come to think of it, all the really important things in life must of necessity be self-taught. I suppose schoolmasters, being experts in education, have never given serious thought to the fact that the child teaches itself, with the aid of a mother, all the best and necessary lessons of life in the first few years of its being. It learns to eat, for instance. I have watched a baby struggling to find the way to its mouth with a rusk, with intense interest and admiration. How it jabs itself in the eye with the soft end of the biscuit and bedaubs its cheeks and clothes with the debris, and kicks and fights in disgust and loses the biscuit in a temper and if not assisted by an over indulgent mother, finds the biscuit after infinite search and goes at it again with renewed energy on its way, and at length is rewarded by success. What a smile of victory, what a happy relapse into the dreamless sleep of the successful. The child has learned a lesson it will never forget. It has found its way to its mouth. One never learns anything as good as that from a schoolmaster. And indeed if you think of it the baby is learning useful things on its own every day of its life, and working hard at them. It learns to talk, and that in spite of its father and mother, who insist on cooing at it, and talking a wild baby language that must greatly irritate and impede a conscientious self-educating baby endeavouring to master the tongue of the land of its adoption. It learns to walk, too, not without tumbles, and tumbles which inspire it to further effort. I have very little doubt that some monkey schoolmaster of primeval days checked some bright monkey scholar who endeavoured to walk into the first primeval school on his hind legs, and threw back the progress of mankind some thousands of years in the sacred name of discipline. If you think of a child teaching itself those wonderful pursuits eating, walking, and talking, are there any bounds to what it might continue to learn if there were no schoolmaster?

If you were to abolish the schoolmaster what would happen? I think the answer is that the Burns, the Milton and the Sam Weller of a nation would profit by the stimulus to self-education. The child whose father was a musician or a carpenter or a ploughman who loved his art or craft, would be found striving to become as good an artist or craftsman as his father, and perhaps in the end bettering the paternal example. The school and the schoolmaster can do little but hinder the evolution of any worker in any art or craft. The real worker’s work must be the result of self-education, and he must live from early childhood among the workers. Read, for instance, the delightful account given by Miss Ellen Terry of her early days in “The Story of My Life.” “At the time of my marriage,” she writes, “I had never had the advantage—I assume it is an advantage—of a single day’s schooling in a real school. What I have learned outside my own profession I have learnt from environment. Perhaps it is this that makes me think environment more valuable than a set education and a stronger agent in forming character even than heredity.” Lives there even the schoolmaster who believes that there was any school or schoolmistress in Victorian days that could have done anything but hinder Miss Terry in the triumph of her artistic career? A born actress like Miss Terry could not be aided by Miss Melissa Wackles, with her “English grammar, composition and geography,” even though in that day of lady’s education it was tempered by the use of the dumb-bells.

In the same way, if we could assure to a boy or girl an apprenticeship from early days to a craftsman or farmer, it would probably be better for the children and the State than any other form of education they receive to-day. It is quite unlikely the world will ever see the minor arts and crafts ever restored to their former glory, unless it encourages parents who are themselves good craftsmen to keep their children away from the schoolmaster in the better atmosphere of a good workshop.

We talk largely about the melancholy increase of unemployment, but how much of this is caused by the education of masses of people in useless subjects. The bad boy who gets into trouble and has the good fortune to be put in a reformatory and there learns a trade has a much better chance of a useful and pleasurable life than the good boy who gains a County Council prize in geography.

I came across a servant in Cumberland whose education had resulted among other things in a knowledge of the catechism and a list of the rivers on the East coast of England, but who did not know the name of the river she could see from the window and who had not the least idea how to light a fire. What is the good of learning your duty to your neighbour when you cannot light a fire to warm him when he is wet through, without wasting two bundles of sticks and a pint of paraffin oil?

One must not however blame the girl, nor indeed her schoolmistress, for probably she too could not light a fire, and both regarded the lighting of a fire as a degrading thing to do. No doubt if you had pursued your educational researches in Cumberland to the source of things, you would have found that the committee could not light fires, and the inspector of schools could not light fires—it may be the Minister of Education himself cannot light a fire—and though there is plenty of material for fires in every board room there is nothing in the code about teaching children to make use of it. Yet I can conceive nothing a child would like better, in his or her early days in school, than being a fire monitor and having charge of the fire and learning to light and look after it. I have made much of this little incident because it is typical of the school education of to-day.

In the old days of family life boys and girls, and especially the latter, learnt in a good home a great deal of domestic work, and the boys could help in their father’s shop or farm or inn as the case might be, and learnt thereby many things that you cannot learn in schools. Mr. Squeers, though not a moral character, was possessed of a practical mode of teaching. “C-l-e-a-n clean, verb active to make bright, to scour. W-i-n win, d-e-r der, winder a casement. When the boy knows this out of a book he goes and does it.” And if you come to think of it, it is far more important that a boy should know how to keep a window clean than that he should know how to spell it.

The schoolmaster of an elementary school therefore should be a man of good domestic tastes, who wishes to see his home neat and clean and well kept and tidy, who insists on having his food well cooked, and prefers that his wife and daughter should be well dressed at the smallest possible cost to himself. These virtues he should be urged to put before scholars as being the first duties of life and the chiefest honour of a good citizen. The false notion that reading and writing are in themselves higher attainments than carpentering, cooking and sewing should be sternly discouraged, and only teachers should be chosen capable of some technical excellence in the practical work of crafts. For the same reasons teachers should never be chosen for any academic degree they possess, for every day it becomes more certain that the man who obtains these degrees is the man who has deliberately failed to make himself a master of any one subject. He is a man who has wasted precious hours in getting a smattering of many useless branches of learning, and has been forced by the sellers of degrees to abandon all hope of having sufficient leisure to study music or painting or the workmanship of a craft, or even to have read widely of English literature. In the education of the young the man who can play the piano, or better still, the fiddle, is more important to my purpose than the man who can make Latin verses; and the man who can model a toy boat with a pocket-knife whilst he is telling you a fairy tale is, from the standpoint of real education, a jewel of rare price. The schoolmaster of to-day is one of the disadvantages of education because he is interested mainly in subjects of smaller importance and is not really a sound man in any one real pursuit, such as music or drawing.

Another disadvantage of English elementary education is that it places the school course and literary things above the playing fields and physical things. All men who have thought about education at all, and who had any capacity for thinking wisely, have recognised that in training a child to make and keep his body a healthy body we are proceeding upon lines that experience tells us are right and sound lines. Here we can teach something we know. Plato tells us that the experience of the past in his day had discovered that right education consisted in gymnastics for the body and music for the mind. I do not know that we can say with certainty that we have ascertained to-day much more about education than Plato knew. In our day I should put the arts and crafts of home life and the practice—not preaching—of its virtues, first in the programme, and secondly, to use Plato’s word, gymnastics. These should include cricket, football, running, jumping, wrestling, dancing, fives, tennis, and all manly and womanly associated games which exercise and develop the body, and have by the public opinion of the players to be played with modesty and self-restraint, and with a reasonable technical skill that can only be arrived at by taking pains. All these things are far more useful than any subjects that can be taught in a schoolroom. One of the great advantages of middle-class public school life is that these things are taught, and that the boys work at them in a healthy spirit of emulation and a magnificent desire to succeed that would turn the whole nation into a Latin-speaking race, if by any misfortune its motive power were diverted into the schoolroom.

Elementary education and its schoolmasters have but small opportunities to foster this natural healthy training of the body in which all young people are willing and ready to co-operate with their teachers. Unfortunately, the men who obtain positions on educational committees are too often men who have amassed wealth at the expense of their livers, and who would look askance at the ideas of Plato, Roger Ascham, or Tolstoi. Still, I think a day is coming when playing-fields and playgrounds will be attached to every elementary school, and used not only by existing scholars, but by the old boys and girls, who will thereby keep in touch with the school and its good influences.

But, you will say, nothing has been said hitherto about any lessons. Are reading, writing, and arithmetic to be considered wholly as disadvantages? It would be easy to take up such a position and hold it in argument but it is not necessary. The advantages of educating the masses in the three R’s are obvious and on the surface, but the grave disadvantages are also there. It is no use teaching a person anything that he is likely to make a bad use of, and experience tells us that many people are ruined by learning to read. Since the Education Act of 1870, a mass of low-class literature and journalism has sprung up to cater for the tastes of a population that has undergone a compulsory training in reading. Betting and gambling have been greatly fostered by the power of reading and answering advertisements. In the same way quack remedies for imaginary ailments must have done a lot of harm to the health of the people, and the use of them is the direct result of teaching ignorant people to read and not teaching them to disbelieve most things they may happen to read. Writing in the same way by being made popular and common has become debased. One seldom sees a good handwriting nowadays and spelling is a lost art. Writing, however, must in a few years go out in favour of machine writing. Penmanship will hardly be taught some years hence when everyone will have a telephone and typewriter of his own. I cannot see that the universal habit of writing has done very much for the world. The great mass of written matter that circulates through the post, the vast columns of newspaper reports that are contradicted the next day—these things are the fruits of universal writing. There is no evidence that in the past anything worth writing ever remained unwritten. But there is strong evidence that since 1870 much has been written that had better have remained unwritten, and would have so remained but for State encouragement through its system of education. As to arithmetic—if you saw the books of the small shopkeepers in the County Court—you would recognise its small hold on the people. One chief use of it by the simpler folk seems to be the calculations of the odds on a horse race. In France and other more civilised countries this is done more honestly by a machine called a totaliser, and gambling is thereby kept within more reasonable limits. Elementary arithmetic has been profitable to the bookmaker—but to how many besides? If you teach a boy cooking or carpentering he is very unlikely to make an evil use of these accomplishments in after life because they naturally minister to the right enjoyment of life. Whereas if you teach a boy reading, writing, and arithmetic, the surroundings of youth being what they are, he is at least as likely to misuse these attainments as to use them to the benefit of himself and his fellow creatures. Once recognise this and you must admit not that the three R’s should be discontinued, but that much more should be done to teach the young persons to whom you have imparted these pleasant arts how to make use of them legitimately and honourably. It is no use teaching young people any subject unless you see that in after life they are to have opportunities of using their attainment for the benefit of the State. Our fathers and grandfathers were all for education as an end. We are face to face with the results of a national system of elementary education with no system whatever of helping the educated to make good use of their compulsory equipment. It is as though you gave a boy a rifle and taught him to shoot and turned him out into the world to shoot at anything he felt inclined. Such a boy would be a danger to the community, whereas if you placed him in a cadet corps when he left school he and his rifle might be a national asset.

That learning without a proper outlet for its use may be a grave danger to the individual and to the community is seen in the present state of India, and Lord Morley of Blackburn, one of the greatest supporters of education himself, called attention to the necessity of a community which provides an education to a certain class allowing the citizens so educated a proper opportunity of exercising the faculties it has developed. As he said in the House of Lords, “I agree that those who made education what it is in India are responsible for a great deal of what has happened since.” And what is true of India is equally true of England.

It is in providing healthy outlets and uses for the educational power that has been created that the Boards and Committees who govern these matters will have to turn immediate attention if they wish to justify their existence.

I know that these detached remarks of mine on education must necessarily appear heretical—and they are to some extent intentionally so. I do not agree with Mr. Chesterton that the heretic of old was proud of not being a heretic, and believed himself orthodox and all the rest of the world heretics. If he did he was indeed a madman. But there is a place in the world for the utterer of heresies if only to awaken the orthodox from slumber and to make him look around and see if there is any reform that can be made without destroying the whole edifice. Reforms come slowly and we, for our part, shall only see the dawn of a better era whose sunshine will gladden the lives of our grandchildren. I am not a pessimist about the English school though I have chosen to speak of its disadvantages. I think, to use an American phrase, it is a “live” thing.

If you go into an English village you find three great public institutions, the Church, the Inn, and the School. Each is licensed to some extent by the State and each is burdened by the connection. You find as a rule that the Church has voluntarily locked its doors and put up a notice that the key may be found at some old lady’s cottage half a mile away. You go into the Inn and find it struggling to make itself hospitable in spite of the mismanagement of brewers and the unsympathetic bigotry of magistrates. But from the door of the School troop out merry children, who some day will look back to that time of their life as the happiest of all, and who will recognise the debt of gratitude they are under to the schoolmaster, who in spite of the limitations of his system and himself encourages his pupils to effort and self-reliance and teaches them lessons of duty, reverence, and love.

I am not greatly interested in the Church or the Inn, both of which institutions seem well able to guard themselves from the disestablishment they are said to deserve. But I am interested in the School—and I wish to see it housed in fairer and more ample buildings with larger playing fields around them. And I want to see a race of schoolmasters not only better paid—but worth more. Men and women to whom the State can fairly give a free hand, knowing that their object in education would be to mould their pupils into self-reliant citizens rather than to teach them scholastic tricks. “The schoolmaster is abroad,” said Lord Brougham, “and I trust to him armed with his primer.” For my part, a schoolmaster armed with a primer is an abomination of desolation standing in a holy place. I differ from a Lord Chancellor with a very natural diffidence but his Lordship was wrong. The schoolmaster of 1828 was not abroad, he was in the same predicament as the schoolmaster of 1911—at sea.

If I were Minister of Education, I would write over the door of every school in the country the beautiful words, “Suffer little children and forbid them not to come unto Me: for of such is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Let us beware lest we forbid them by dogmas and creeds that lead only to hatred, malice, and all uncharitableness; let us take heed lest we forbid them by lessons and learning dull for to-day and dangerous for to-morrow. Let us at least teach them as our grandmothers taught children when there were no schools in the land, the simple duties of life that we all know the meaning of, and the Christian duty of unselfishness which we none of us practise. And in this, as in all things, let us strive to teach by example rather than by word. And if we are to teach by the Christian rule, then how great, how noble, how enduring is to be the work of the schoolmaster in continuing the greatness of our nation. And the man or woman we shall choose shall not be a pedant, whose long ears are decorated by degrees, but an honest, simple person of any creed whatsoever, who will humbly and reverently teach the children of his or her school the few simple facts of life, and add to that something of its arts and its crafts and so much or little of its learning as can be a service and not a hindrance to the child’s career.

COOKERY BOOK TALK.

Arviragus. How angel-like he sings!

Guiderius. But his neat cookery! he cut our roots in characters,

And sauc’d our broths as Juno had been sick

And he her dieter.

Cymbeline iv. 2.

In this passage Shakespeare exalts cookery above songs that are merely angel-like, and anyone who has dined at a modern restaurant with “music off” as part of the stage directions will agree with Guiderius that it is impertinent to consider the merit of song at moments that should be given to the praise of cookery. Incidentally, too, the passage has a value for the cuisinologist of an antiquarian turn of mind by pointing out that the decoration of dishes with alphabetical carrots and turnips, “roots cut in characters,” was a commonplace of the Shakespearean table.

And if in a detached passage from a dramatic writer we can find so much culinary thought, how much more remains to be sought after in those masterpieces of kitchen literature given to the world by the great artist cooks of bygone centuries.

It has always been a matter of considerable surprise to me that so few people really read their Cookery Book with any diligence and attention. There is no subject of conversation so popular as Cookery Book. It blends together all persons in a common chorus of talk irrespective of rank, age, sex, religion and education. The dullest eye lights up and a ripple crosses the most stagnant mind when the dying embers of formal conversation are called into brilliant flames by a few pages from the Cookery Book. Every one lays claim to take a hand at Cookery Book talk, no one is too bashful or ignorant in his own seeming, and yet how few really bring to the discussion a sound literary knowledge of even Mrs. Beeton and Francatelli, and how many prate of cookery to whom Mrs. Glasse and John Farley are unknown names. No one will talk of Shakespeare and the musical glasses without at least a slight knowledge of Charles Lamb’s delightful nursery tales and the study of an article on the theory of music in “Snippy Bits.” But if Cookery Book is mentioned—and in ordinary society the subject is generally reached in the first ten minutes after the introduction—the humblest and most ignorant is found laying down the law with the misplaced confidence of a county magistrate. And yet with Cookery Book as with lower forms of learning one can never tell whence illumination may spring. True indeed is it that out of the mouths of babes and sucklings strength is ordained.

I remember a beautiful and remarkable instance of this which occurred but recently. I was privileged to dine at the family table of a great artist and there were present besides myself several others of sound learning and religious education from whom might be expected stimulating and rational conversation. We began I remember with the Pre-Raphaelites and ox-tail soup. Albert Durer started with the fish but “failed to stay the course,” as a sporting friend of my host remarked. He it was who brought the conversation round to the haven and heaven of all conversation—Cookery Book. He told a story of a haggis which drew from my host—an ardent Scotsman—a learned and literary defence of the haggis, which in common with the thistle, the bagpipes and Burns poetry it is a matter of patriotism for a Scotsman to uphold in the company of aliens. There was no doubt that my friend broke down in cross-examination as to the actual contents of the haggis, but as to the necessity of drinking raw whisky at short intervals during its consumption he was eloquent and convincing. When he had finished—or maybe before—I began to describe the inward beauties of a well-grilled mutton chop, and to detail an interesting discussion I had had the week before with a Dean of the Church of England on the respective merits of Sam’s Chop House in Manchester and the South Kensington Museum Grill Room. Listening is I fear a lost art for my entertaining reminiscences were broken into by a babel of tongues. Every one named his or her particular and favourite dish which was discussed rejected, laughed at and dismissed by the rest of the company. So loud was the clash of tongues that you might have imagined you were taking part in a solemn council at Pandemonium, when suddenly the shower of Cookery Book talk dried up and there was a pause, a lull—a silence. At that moment the youngest son of the house whose little curly head—like one of those heads of Sir Joshua’s angels—rested on his hands as he listened to the earnest converse of his grave elders—this child threw down before us a pearl of simple wisdom—“Surely you have forgotten bread sauce and chicken!” And so we had. The artist also remembered that we had left out sucking pig. The conversation started with renewed force. The whole question of onions in bread sauce was exhaustively debated and a happy evening was spent in congenial and intellectual conversation.

But how seldom it is that you find yourself among persons capable of discussing with knowledge any of the nicer problems of the kitchen. At my own table the other day a graduate of Cambridge actually asked my wife whether she put maraschino or curaçoa in the Hock cup. Yet in educational affairs this man passes for a rational and highly cultivated man. Colossal ignorance of this type is but too common. I have stayed—but never for more than one week-end—with families of the highest respectability to whom tarragon vinegar is unknown, and I once entertained a Judge of the High Court who did not know the difference between Nepaul and Cayenne pepper,—yet in his daily life he must have been called upon to decide differences of graver importance.

I wish I had the pen and the inspiration of one of the early prophets to rouse my countrymen to urge upon Education Committees, schools and universities their duty in dealing with this national ignorance. But one may at least make a practical suggestion. Why should not “What to do with the Cold Mutton” be read as a first reader in our elementary schools? It touches on no points of doctrine and teaches truths that both Anglican and Nonconformist could discuss pleasantly at a common board.

Once the young mind has tasted of the delight of the literary side of cookery a demand would spring up for the re-publication of many earnest, eloquent and scientific Cookery books of olden time. The eighteenth century was a golden age in the literature of cookery, and the works of Charlotte Mason, Sarah Harrison’s “Housekeeper’s Pocket Book,” and Elizabeth Marshall’s “Young Ladies’ Guide in the Art of Cookery,”—these are books that should be in every polite library. For myself I prefer what may be called the Archæology of Cookery and the study of “The Proper New Book of Cookery, 1546,” or Partridge’s “Treasury of Commodious Conceits and Hidden Secrets, 1580?” will have a charm for all who like to pierce the veil that hides the old world from us. We have moved on since then it is true, but for my part I like to learn how to “pot a Swan” or “make an Olio Pye,” though such learning is no longer practical.

To those who have not access to the original editions of the classics, let me commend that charming volume of the Book Lovers’ Library, Mr. W. Carew Hazlitt’s “Old Cookery Books.” Problems are there touched upon that when we have a serious business Government untrammelled by party ties will be solved by Royal Commissions dealing with the various aspects of cookery which, as an old writer says, is “The Key of Living.” It was Tobias Venner, as long ago as 1620, who endeavoured to dissuade the poor from eating partridges, because they were calculated to promote asthma. Many Poor Law Commissions have sat since then, but the truth of Venner’s theory has never yet been subjected to modern scientific criticism, and every year from September to February the poor continue to remain under the shadow of asthma. The Government give us volumes of historical records, but I search in vain among them for the way to make Mrs. Leed’s Cheesecakes and “The Lord Conway, His Lordship’s receipt for the making of Amber Pudding.” Thus are we trifled with by our rulers, few of whom I think could tell us without research why the porpoise and the peacock no longer grace the tables of Royal persons.

But see how Nature supplements the mistakes of mankind. True it is that Governments do nothing for our greatest art, sadly true it is that the great masterpieces of culinary writing remain on the shelves, and disgracefully true it is that among the idle rich of our universities there is not one Professor of Cookery—though there be many ignorant critics of the Art at high tables. And yet, round every board, simple or noble, with the steam that rises from the cooked meats comes the heartfelt praise of mankind rejoicing to lift up the voice in that Cookery Book talk, which is the oral tradition that carries on the religion of the “Key of Living.”

Indeed, there is only one human being who does not talk about Cookery, and that is the high Priestess herself—the Cook. This I have on the evidence of a policeman.

A DAY OF MY LIFE IN THE COUNTY COURT.

“We take no note of time

But from its loss.”

Young’s Night Thoughts.

It is a difficult task to describe to others the everyday affairs of one’s own life. The difficulty seems to me to arise in discovering what it is that is new and strange to a person who finds himself for the first time in a place where the writer has spent the best part of the last twenty years. The events in a County Court are to me so familiar that it is hard to appreciate the interest shown in our daily routine by some casual onlooker whom curiosity, or a subpœna, has brought within our walls. Still, in so far as the County Court is a poor man’s Court, it is a good thing that the outside world should take an interest in its proceedings, for much goes on there that has an immediate bearing on the social welfare of the working classes, and a morning in the Manchester County Court would throw a strong light on the ways and means of the poor and the fiscal problems by which they are surrounded.

An urban County Court is a wholly different thing from the same institution in a country town. Here in Manchester we have to deal with a large number of bankruptcy cases, proceedings under special Acts of Parliament, cases remitted from the High Court, and litigation similar in character to, but smaller in importance than the ordinary civil list of an Assize Court. Cases such as these are contested in much the same way as they are in the High Court, counsel and solicitors appear—the latter having a right of audience in the County Court—and all things are done in legal decency and order. The litigants very seldom desire a jury, having perhaps the idea that a common judge is as a good tribunal as a common jury, whereas a special judge wants a common jury to find out the everyday facts of his case for him. I could never see why juries are divided into two classes, special and common, and judges are not. It is a fruitful idea for the legal reformer to follow out.

The practice in Manchester is to have special days for the bigger class of cases, and to try to give clear days for the smaller matters where most of the parties appear in person. The former are printed in red on the Court Calendar, and the latter in black, and locally the days are known as red-letter days and black-letter days. On a black-letter day counsel and solicitors indeed often appear—for it is a practical impossibility to sort out the cases into two exact classes—but the professions know that on a black-letter day they have no precedence, and very cheerfully acquiesce in the arrangement, since it is obvious that to the community at large it is at least as important that a working woman should be home in time to give her children their dinner as that a solicitor should return to his office or a barrister lunch at his club.

Let me try, then, to bring home to your mind what happens on a black-letter day.

We are early risers in Manchester, and the Court sits at ten. I used to get down to my Court about twenty minutes earlier, as on a black-letter day there are sure to be several letters from debtors who are unable to be at Court, and these are always addressed to me personally. Having disposed of the correspondence there is generally an “application in chambers” consisting of one or more widows whose compensation under the Workman’s Compensation Act remains in Court to be dealt with for their benefit. I am rather proud of the interest and industry the chief clerks of my Court have shown in the affairs of these poor women and children, and the general “liberty to apply” is largely made use of that I may discuss with the widows or the guardians of orphans plans for the maintenance and education of the children, and the best way to make the most of their money.

You would expect to find the Court buildings geographically in the centre of Manchester, but they are placed almost on the boundary. Turning out of Deansgate down Quay Street, which, as its name implies, leads towards the river Irwell, you come across a street with an historic name, Byrom Street. The name recalls to us the worthy Manchester doctor and the days when even Manchester was on the fringe of a world of romance, and John Byrom made his clever epigram:

God bless the King, I mean the faith’s defender,

God bless—no harm in blessing—the Pretender.

But who Pretender is, and who the King,

God bless us all—that’s quite another thing.

It is a far cry from Jacobites to judgment debtors, but it is a pleasant thought to know that one lives in an historic neighbourhood, even if the building you work in is not exactly fitted for the modern purpose for which it is used.

At the corner of Byrom Street and Quay Street is the Manchester County Court. It is an old brick building with some new brick additions. Some architect, we may suppose, designed it, therefore let it pass for a house. It was built, as far as I can make out, in the early part of last century, when the brick box with holes in it was the standard form of the better class domestic dwelling house. Still it is an historic building. In 1836 it was No. 21 Quay Street, the residence of Richard Cobden, calico printer, whose next door neighbour was a Miss Eleanora Byrom. Cobden sold it to Mr. Faulkner for the purposes of the Owens College, so it was the first home of the present Victoria University. It is now a County Court. Facilis descensus. It still contains several very fine mahogany doors that give it the air of a house that has seen better days.

You will see groups of women making their way down to the Court, many with a baby in one arm and a door key slung on the finger. The wife is the solicitor and the advocate of the working class household, and very cleverly she does her work as a rule. The group of substantial-looking men chatting in the street are debt-collecting agents and travelling drapers discussing the state of trade. These are the Plaintiffs and their representatives, the women are the Defendants. Here and there you will see a well-dressed lady, probably summoned to the Court by a servant or a dressmaker. There will always be a few miscellaneous cases, but the trivial round and common task of the day is collecting the debts of small tradesmen from the working class.

I have no doubt that a County Court Judge gets an exaggerated view of the evils of the indiscriminate credit given to the poor. They seem to paddle all their lives ankle-deep in debt, and never get a chance of walking the clean parapet of solvency. But that is because one sees only the seamy side of the debt-collecting world, and knows nothing of the folk who pay without process. At the same time, that indiscriminate credit-giving as practised in Manchester is an evil, no one, I think, can doubt, and it seems strange that social reformers pay so little attention to the matter.

The whole thing turns, of course, upon imprisonment for debt. Without imprisonment for debt there would be little credit given, except to persons of good character, and good character would be an asset. As it is, however, our first business in the morning will be to hear a hundred judgment summonses in which creditors are seeking to imprison their debtors. There are some ten thousand judgment summonses in Manchester and Salford in a year, but they have to be personally served, and not nearly that number come for trial. We start with a hundred this morning, of which say sixty are served. It is well to sit punctually, and we will start on the stroke of ten.

A debt collector enters the Plaintiff’s box, and, refreshing his memory from a note book, tells you what the Defendant’s position is, where he works, and what he earns. The minute book before you tells you the amount of his debt, that he has been ordered to pay 2s. a month, and has not paid anything for six months. His wife now enters into all the troubles of her household, and makes the worst of them. One tries to sift the true from the false, the result being that one is generally convinced that the Defendant has had means to pay the 2s. a month, or whatever the amount may be, since the date when the order was made. The law demands that the debtor should be imprisoned for not having paid, but no one wants him to go to prison, so an order is made of seven or fourteen days, and it is suspended, and is not to issue if he pays the arrears and fees, say in three monthly instalments. The wife is satisfied that the evil day is put off and goes away home, and the creditor generally gets his money. He may have to issue a warrant, but the Defendant generally manages to pay by hook or by crook, rather than go to Knutsford Gaol, where the debtors are imprisoned, and as a matter of fact only a few actually go to gaol. Of course, the money is often borrowed or paid by friends, which is another evil of the system. The matter is more difficult when, as often happens, the Defendants do not appear. It is extraordinary how few people can read and understand a comparatively simple legal notice or summons. Mistakes are constantly made. A collier once brought me an official schedule of his creditors, in which in the column for “description,” where he should have entered “grocer,” “butcher,” etc., he had filled in the best literary description he could achieve of his different creditors, and one figured as “little lame man with sandy whiskers.” There are of course many illiterates, and they have to call in the assistance of a “scholard.” An amusing old gentleman came before me once, who was very much perturbed to know if, to use his own phrase, he was “entaitled to pay this ’ere debt.” The incident occurred at a time when the citizens of Manchester were being polled to vote on a “culvert scheme” of drainage, which excited much popular interest.

“I don’t deny owing the debt,” he said, “and I’ll pay reet enow, what your Honour thinks reet, if I’m entaitled to pay.”

I suggested that if he owed the money he was clearly “entitled” to pay.

“Well,” he continued, “I thowt as I should ’ave a summons first.”

“But you must have had a summons,” I said, “or how did you get here?”

“’E towd me case wor on,” he said, pointing to the Plaintiff, “so I coom.”

I looked up matters and discovered that service of the summons was duly reported, and informed the Defendant, who seemed much relieved.

“You see,” he said, “I’m no scholard, and we got a paaper left at our ’ouse, and I took it up to Bill Thomas in our street, a mon as con read, an’ ’e looks at it, an’ says as ’ow may be it’s a coolvert paaper. ‘I’m not certain,’ ’e says, ‘but I think it’s a coolvert paaper.’ So I asks him what to do wi’ it, and he says, ‘Put a cross on it, and put it in a pillar box,’ and that wor done. But if you say it wor a summons, Bill must a bin wrong.”

One can gather something from this poor fellow’s difficulties of the trouble that a summons of any kind must cause in a domestic household, and one can only hope for the day when England will follow the example of other civilised countries and at least do away with the judgment summons and imprisonment for debt.

The hundred judgment summonses will have taken us until about eleven o’clock, and meanwhile in an adjoining Court the Registrar has been dealing with a list of about four hundred cases. The bulk of these are undefended, and the Registrar enters up judgment and makes orders against the Defendant to pay the debt by instalments at so much a month. A small percentage—say from five to ten per cent. of the cases—are sent across to the Judge’s Court for trial, and small knots of folk come into Court to take the seats vacated by the judgment debtors and wait for the trials to come on.

The trial of a County Court action on a black-letter day, where Plaintiff and Defendant appear in person, where neither understands law, evidence, or procedure, and where the main object of each party is to overwhelm his opponent by a reckless fire of irrelevant statements, is not easy to conduct with suavity and dignity. The chief object of a County Court Judge, as it seems to me—I speak from many years’ experience—should be to suffer fools gladly without betraying any suspicion that he considers himself wise. Ninety-nine per cent. of the cases are like recurring decimals. They have happened, and will happen again and again. The same defence is raised under the same circumstances. To the shallow-witted Defendant it is an inspiration of mendacity, to the Judge it is a commonplace and expected deceit. All prisoners in a Police Court who are found with stolen goods upon them tell you that they have bought them from a man whose name they do not know. There is no copyright in such a defence, and it sounds satisfactory to each succeeding publisher of it. No doubt it is disappointing to find that the judge and jury have heard it before and are not disposed to believe it. In the same way in the County Court there are certain lines of defence that I feel sure students of folk-lore could tell us were put forward beneath the oak trees when the Druids sat in County Courts in prehistoric times. The serious difficulty lies in continuing to believe that a Defendant may arise who actually has a defence, and in discovering and rescuing a specimen of a properly defended action from a crowded museum of antique mendacities. Counter-claims, for instance, which of course are only filed in the bigger cases, are very largely imaginative. The betting against a valid counter-claim must be at least ten to one. It is, of course, in finding the one that there is scope for ingenuity. It is the necessity for constant alertness that makes the work interesting.

The women are the best advocates. Here, for instance, is a case in point.

A woman Plaintiff with a shawl over her head comes into the box, and an elderly collier, the Defendant, is opposite to her. The action is brought for nine shillings. I ask her to state her case.

“I lent yon mon’s missus my mon’s Sunday trousers to pay ’is rent, an’ I want ’em back.”

That seems to me, as a matter of pleading, as crisp and sound as can be. If the trousers had been worth five hundred pounds, a barrister would have printed several pages of statement of claim over them, but could not have stated his case better. My sympathies are with the lady. I know well the kindness of the poor to each other, and, won by the businesslike statement of the case, I turn round to the Defendant and ask him why the trousers are not returned and what his defence may be.

He smiles and shakes his head. He is a rough, stupid fellow, and something amuses him. I ask him to stop chuckling and tell me his defence.

“There’s nowt in it all,” is his answer.

I point out that this is vague and unsatisfactory, and that the words do not embody any defence to an action of detinue known to the law.

He is not disturbed. The lady gazes at him triumphantly. He is a slow man, and casually mentions “The ’ole street knows about them trousers.”

I point out to him that I have never lived in the street, and know nothing about it. He seems to disbelieve this and says with a chuckle, “Everyone knows about them trousers.”

I press him to tell me the story, but he can scarcely believe that I do not know all about it. At length he satisfies my curiosity.

“Why yon woman an’ my missus drank them trousers.”

The woman vociferates, desires to be struck dead and continues to live, but bit by bit the story is got at. Two ladies pawn the husband’s trousers, and quench an afternoon’s thirst with the proceeds. The owner of the Sunday trousers is told by his wife a story of destitution and want of rent, and the generous loan of garments. Every one in the street but the husband enjoys the joke. The indignant husband, believing in his wife, sues for the trousers and sends his wife to Court. The street comes down to see the fun, and when I decide for the Defendant there is an uprising of men, women, and babies, and the parties and their friends disappear while we call the next case. These are the little matters where it is easy to make a blunder, and where patience and attention and a knowledge of the ways and customs of the “’ole street” are worth much legal learning.

One must learn to sympathise with domestic frailties. I was rebuking a man, the other day, for backing up his wife in what was not only an absurd story, but one in which I could see he had no belief.

“You should really be more careful,” I said, “and I tell you candidly I don’t believe a word of your wife’s story.”

“You may do as yer like,” he said, mournfully, “but I’ve got to.”

The sigh of envy at the comparative freedom of my position as compared with his own was full of pathos.

A case of a workman who was being sued for lodging money gave me a new insight into the point of view of the clever but dissipated workman. His late landlady was suing for arrears run up when, as she said, he was “out of work.”

The phrase made him very angry.

“Look ’ere,” he said, “can that wumman kiss the book agen? She’s swearin’ false. I’ve never been out o’ wark i’ my life. Never.”

“Tummas,” says the old lady, in a soothingly irritating voice. “Think, Tummas.”

“Never been out o’ wark i’ my life,” he shouts.

“Oh, Tummas,” says the old lady, more in sorrow than in anger. “You remember Queen’s funeral. You were on the spree a whole fortneet.”

“Oh, ay!” says Thomas unabashed; “but you said out o’ wark. If you’re sayin’ on the spree I’m with yer, but I’ve never been out o’ wark i’ my life.”

It was a sad distinction for a clever working man to make, but a true one and to him an important one, and I rather fancy the nice old lady knew well what she was doing in her choice of phrase and hoped to score off Thomas by irritating him into an unseemly exhibition by the use of it.

A class of case that becomes very familiar arises out of the sale of a small business. A fried-fish shop is regarded by an enterprising widow who does not possess one as a mine of untold gold. She purchases one at a price above its value, fails from want of knowledge to conduct it successfully, and then brings an action for fraudulent misrepresentation against the seller. Of course, there are cases of fraud and misrepresentation; but, as a rule, there is nothing more than the natural optimistic statements of a seller followed by incompetence of the purchaser and the disgust of old customers. In a case of this sort, in which up to a point it was difficult to know where the truth lay, owing to the vague nature of the evidence, a graphic butcher gave a convincing account of the reason of the failure of the new management. He had come down to the Court in the interests of justice, leaving the abattoir—or as he called it “habbitoyre”—on his busiest morning.

“Yer see,” he said, “I knew the old shop well. I was in the ’abit of takin’ in a crowd of my pals on Saturday neet. So when the old Missus gave it up, I promised to give it a try wi’ the new Missus. Well, I went in twice, an’ there wor no sort o’ choice at all. There worn’t no penny fish, what there wor, wor ’a-penny fish, and bad at that, an’ the chips wor putty.”

It was obvious that the Plaintiff had started on a career for which Nature did not intend her, and that the cause of the failure of the business was not the fraud of the Defendant, but the culinary incompetence of the Plaintiff.

It is amazing how, apart altogether from perjury, two witnesses will give entirely different accounts of the same matter. No doubt there is a great deal of reckless evidence given and some perjury committed, but a great deal of the contradictory swearing arises from “natural causes,” as it were. A man is very ready to take sides, and discusses the facts of a case with his friend until he remembers more than he ever saw. In “running down” cases, where the witnesses are often independent folk and give their own evidence their own way, widely different testimony is given about the same event. One curious circumstance I have noticed in “running down” cases is that a large percentage of witnesses give evidence against the vehicle coming towards them. That is to say, if a man is walking along, and a brougham is in front of him and going the same way as he is, and a cab coming in the opposite direction collides with the brougham, I should expect that man to give evidence against the cab. I suppose the reason of that is that to a man so situated the brougham appears stationary and the cab aggressively dangerous, but whatever the reason may be the fact is very noticeable.

On the whole the uneducated man in the street is a better witness of outdoor facts than the clerk or warehouseman. The outdoor workers have, I fancy, a more retentive memory for things seen, and are more observant than the indoor workers. They do not want to refresh their memory with notes.

A story is told of a blacksmith who came to the farriery classes held by the Manchester Education authorities. The clerk in charge gave him a notebook and a pencil.

“Wot’s this ’ere for?” asks the blacksmith.

“To take notes,” replied the clerk.

“Notes? Wot sort o’ notes?”

“Why, anything that the lecturer says which you think important and want to remember, you make a note of it,” said the clerk.

“Oh,” was the scornful reply, “anything I want to remember I must make a note of in this ’ere book, must I? Then wot do you think my blooming yed’s for?”

It is the use and exercise of the “blooming yed” that makes the Lancashire workman the strong character he is. May it be long before the mother wit inside it is dulled by the undue use of the scholastic notebook.

Witnesses are often discursive, and the greatest ingenuity is devoted to keeping them to the point without breaking the thread of their discourse. Only long practice and a certain instinct which comes from having undergone many weary hours of listening can give you the knack of getting the pith and marrow of a witness’s story without the domestic and genealogical details with which he—and especially she—desires to garnish it.

I remember soon after I took my seat on the bench having an amusing dialogue with a collier. He had been sued for twelve shillings for three weeks’ rent. One week he admitted, and the week in lieu of notice, which leads to more friction between landlord and tenant than any other incident in their contract, was duly wrangled over and decided upon. Then came the third week, and the collier proudly handed in four years’ rent books to show nothing else was owing. The landlord’s agent pointed out that two years back a week’s rent was missing, and sure enough in the rent book was the usual cross instead of a four, showing that no rent had been paid for that week.

“How did that week come to be missed?” I asked the collier.

“I’ll never pay that week,” he said, shaking his head stubbornly. “Not laikely.”

“But,” I said, “I’m afraid you’ll have to. You see you admit it’s owing.”

“Well, I’ll just tell yer ’ow it was. You see we wor ’aving rabbit for supper, an’ my wife——”

He looked as if he was settling down for a long yarn, so I interposed: “Never mind about the rabbit, tell me about the rent.”

“I’m telling yer. Yer see we wor ’aving rabbit for supper, an’ my wife ’ad got a noo kettle, an’ we don’t ’ave rabbit every——”

“Oh, come, come,” I said impatiently, “just tell me about the rent.”

He looked at me rather contemptuously, and began again at the very beginning.

“I’m telling yer, if yer’ll only listen. We wor ’aving rabbit for supper, an’ my wife ’ad got a noo kettle, an’ we don’t ’ave rabbit every neet for supper, an’ my wife ’ad just put the kettle, the noo kettle——”

“Oh, never mind about the kettle, do please get to the rent,” I said, and was immediately sorry I had spoken.

“I’m getting to it, ain’t I?” he asked, rather angrily. “We wor ’aving rabbit for supper”—I groaned inwardly and resolved to sit it out without another word—“an’ my wife ’ad got a noo kettle, an’ we don’t ’ave rabbit every neet for supper, an’ my wife ’ad just put the kettle—the noo kettle with the rabbit—on to th’ fire, when down coom chimley an’ aw into middle o’ room. Was I going to pay rent for that week? Not laikely!”

It turned out that I was wholly in the wrong, and that the destruction of the rabbit was a kind of equitable plea in defence to the action for rent. When I am tempted now to burst in too soon upon an irrelevant story, I think of the rabbit and am patient. Of course all rabbit stories are not even equitable defences, but the diagnosis of what is purely domestic and dilatory and of what is apparently anecdotal but in reality relevant gives a distinct charm to one’s daily work.

One day of my life every month is given up to the trial of Yiddish cases. The Yiddisher is a litigious person, and his best friend would not describe him as a very accurate witness. One ought to remember, however, that he has not had generations of justice administered to him, that he is a child and beginner in a court of law, and that the idea of a judge listening to his story and deciding for him upon the evidence is, in some cases from personal experience and in all cases from hereditary instinct, an utterly unfamiliar thing. The fact, too, that he speaks Yiddish, or very broken English, and never answers a question except by asking another, always gives his evidence an indirect flavour. One strong point about a Yiddisher is his family affection, and he swears in tribes, so to speak. A Christian in a family dispute will too often swear anything against his brother, and is often wickedly reckless in his sworn aspersions. A Yiddisher, on the other hand, will swear anything for his brother, and most Yiddish evidence could be discounted by an accurate percentage according to the exact relationship by blood or marriage of the witness to the Plaintiff or Defendant.

It is needless to say a foreign-speaking race such as this gives one some anxiety and trouble in a small-debt court. One of my earliest Yiddish experiences was a case in which two Yiddishers each brought his own interpreter. A small scrap of paper cropped up in the case with some Hebrew writing on it. One interpreter swore it was a receipt, the other that it was an order for a new pair of boots. Without knowing anything of Hebrew, it occurred to me that these divergent readings were improbable. The case was adjourned. I applied to some of my friends on that excellent body, the Jewish Board of Guardians, a respectable interpreter was obtained, and the Hebrew document properly translated. There is now an official interpreter attached to the Manchester Court, and I think I can safely congratulate the Yiddish community on a distinct improvement in their education in the proper use of English law courts.

That some of them have the very vaguest notions of the principles on which we administer justice may be seen from the following story which happened some years ago. A little flashy Yiddish jeweller who spoke very bad English, had taken out a judgment summons against an old man who appeared broken down in health and pocket. I asked the little man for evidence of means which would justify me in committing the debtor to prison.

“Vell,” he says, “I vill tell you. He ish in a very larsh vay of pizness indeed. He has zree daughters vorking for him and several hands as vell, and zare is a great deal of monish coming into ze house.”

The old man told a sad story of ill-health, loss of business, and said that his daughters had to keep him. It turned out that there was a Yiddish gentleman in Court, Mr. X., who knew him, and Mr. X. corroborated the defendant’s story in every particular. He had had a good business, but was now being kept by his daughters, having broken down in health.

I turned to the little jeweller and said: “You have made a mistake here.”

“It ish no mishtake at all,” he cried excitedly. “Mr. X. ish a very bad man. He and the Defendant are both cap makers, and are vot you call in English a long firm.”

This was too much for Mr. X.—a most respectable tradesman—and he called out: “My Lorts, may I speak?” Without waiting for leave, he continued very solemnly: “My Lorts, I have sworn by Jehovah that every vord I say ish true, but I vill go furder than that. I vill put down ten pounds in cash, and it may be taken avay from me if vot I say ish not true.”

The offer was made with such fervour and sincerity that I thought it best to enter into the spirit of the thing.

Turning to the little man, I asked: “Are you ready to put down ten pounds that what you say is true?”

He looked blank and lost, and, shaking his head, murmured sadly, “No, it ish too motch.”

I pointed out to him how his attitude about the ten pounds went to confirm the evidence for the Defendant, and seeing his case slipping away from under his feet, he cried out, as if catching at the last straw, “My Lorts thish ish not mine own case, thish ish mine farder’s case, and I vill put down ten pounds of mine farder’s monish that vot I say ish true.”

The offer was not accepted, and the Defendant was not committed. But the story throws light on the rudimentary ideas that some Yiddishers have of the administration of justice.

And now we have finished the list of cases, but there are a few stragglers left in Court. Some of them have been in the wrong Court, or come on the wrong day; some have applications to make, or advice to ask. I always make a point now of finding out what these folk want before leaving the bench. I remember in my early days a man coming before me the first thing one morning, and saying he had sat in my Court until the end of yesterday’s proceedings.

“Why didn’t you come up at the end of the day,” I asked, “and make your application then?”

“I was coming,” he replied, “but at the end of last case you was off your chair an’ bolted through yon door like a rabbit.” I think his description was exaggerated, but I rise in a more leisurely way nowadays, though I am still glad when the day’s work is over.

I do not know that what I have written will convey any clear idea of the day of my life that I have been asked to portray. I know it is in many respects a very dull grey life, but it has its brighter moments in the possibilities of usefulness to others. I am not at all sure that the black-letter jurisdiction of a big urban County Court ought not to be worked by a parish priest rather than by a lawyer. I know that it wants a patience, a sympathy, and a belief in the goodness of human nature that we find in those rare characters who give up the good things in this world for the sake of working for others. I am very conscious of my own imperfections; but I was once greatly encouraged by a criticism passed upon me which I accidentally overheard, and which I am conceited enough to repeat. I was going away from the Court, and passed two men walking slowly away. I had decided against them, and they were discussing why I had done so.

“Well, ’ow on earth ’e could do it I don’t see, do you, Bill?”

“’E’s a fool.”

“Yes, ’e’s a fool, a —— fool, but ’e did ’is best.”

“Ay. I think ’e did ’is best.”

After all, coming from such source or indeed from any source, the suggestion contained in the conversation was very gratifying. I have often thought that one might rest beneath an unkinder epitaph than this:

HE WAS
A —— FOOL,
BUT
HE DID HIS BEST.

DOROTHY OSBORNE.

Iachimo. Here are letters for you.

Posthumus. Their tenor good, I trust.

Iachimo. ’Tis very like.

Cymbeline ii. 4.

They had set (it is years ago now) the Period of the Restoration as subject for the Historical Essay Prize at Oxbridge. I had been advised to read Courtenay’s Life of Sir William Temple. It would give me an insight into the times, and a thorough knowledge of the Triple Alliance.

It was in my uncle’s library that I found the book—two octavo volumes of memoirs bound in plain green cloth, with mouldy yellow backs. I remember it well, and the circumstances surrounding it.

I threw open the windows, piled all the red cushions into one window seat, placed a chair for my feet, and took up the volumes. I cast my eyes over the contents of Vol. I.: a portrait of Temple—a handsome fellow—engraved by one Dean, after Sir Peter; a genealogical table. Ugh! And twenty chapters of negotiations to follow. My uncle was right, it was undoubtedly a dull book.

The second volume looked more interesting; there was something in it about Swift. Memory asserting herself, I remembered Temple to be Swift’s first patron, and Stella, I fancy, was Lady Temple’s maid. Happy Stella! At that moment a piece of paper fluttered out of the volume in my hand on to the floor, driving the Dean and his affairs out of my head. I picked it up. An old paper, brown at its edges and foldings, singed by time. On it were some verses—a sonnet. It ran thus:—

“TO DOROTHY OSBORNE,

“Why has no laureate, in golden song,

Wreathed rhythmic honours for her name alone,

Who worships now anear a purer throne?

And chosen, from that lovely, loyal throng

Of wantons ambling devilward along

At beck of God’s Anointed, one to praise,

Of brightest wit, yet pure through works and days,

Constant in love, in every virtue strong.

Dorothy, gift of God, it was not meant,

That thy bright light should shine upon the few,

Within the straitened circle of thy life;

Failing to reach mankind and represent

His own ideal, manifest in you,

Of holy woman and the perfect wife.”

I was a sonneteer myself, and therefore critical. This effort (was it my uncle’s?) did not seem to me of portentous genius. I hate your sonneteer who has more than two rhymes in his octett. It proves him a coward at the measure, one who is burdened by those shackles in which he should move as skilfully and lightly as a clever dancer bound to the knees on stilts. Those two subdominant rhymes were misplaced; so was the sudden stop in the sixth line, the violent cæsura in the sense, sending a cold shiver through the cultured mind. I did not admire the sestett either in its arrangement, but much liberty has always been allowed in the management of the sestett. For an amateur sonnet, I had read, nay, I will be just, I had written worse.

But whom does this sonnet describe? Dorothy Osborne, who is she? Lady Temple, answers Courtenay, and says little more. But she has written her own life, and painted her own character, as none else could have done it for her, in letters written to her husband before marriage. When I had read these, I pitied the unknown, and forbore to criticise his sonnet. I, too, could have written sonnets, roundels, ballads by the score to celebrate her praise. But I remembered Pope’s chill warning about those who “rush in where angels fear to tread,” and, full of humility I did not apply it to my friend the sonneteer, but—to myself.

These letters of Dorothy Osborne were, at one time, lying at Coddenham Vicarage, Suffolk. Forty-two of them has Courtenay transferred to an appendix, without arrangement or any form of editing, as he candidly confesses, but not without misgivings as to how they will be received by a people thirsting to read the details of the negotiations which took place in connection with the Triple Alliance. Poor Courtenay! Did he live to learn that the world had other things to do than pore over dull excerpts from inhuman state papers? For the lighting of fires, for the rag-bag, or, if of stout paper or parchment, for the due covering of preserves and pickles, much of these Temple correspondences and treaties would be eminently fitted, but for the making of books they are all but useless; book-making of such material is not to be achieved by Courtenay, nay, nor by the cunningest publisher’s devil in Grub Street. Here, beneath poor blind Courtenay’s eye, were papers and negotiations, not about a triple alliance between states, but concerning a dual alliance between souls. Here, even for the dull historian, were chat, gossip, the witty portrayal of neighbours, the customs, manners, thoughts, the very life itself, of English human beings of that time, set out by the living pen of Dorothy Osborne. Surely it was within his power at least to edit carefully for us those letters? Alas, no! All that he can do is to produce a book in two unreadable octavo volumes, and to set down in an appendix, not without misgivings but forty-two of these charming letters.

But I will dare to put it to the touch to gain or lose it all. I cannot, I know, make her glorious by my pen, but I can let her own pen have free play, and try to draw from her letters, and what other data there are at hand, some living presentment of a beautiful woman, pure in dissolute days, passing a quiet domestic existence among her own family; a loyalist, leading, in Cromwell’s days, a home-life of which those who draw their history from the pleasant pages of Sir Walter’s historical novels can have little idea. To confirmed novel readers it will be, I think, an awakening to learn that there was ever cessation of the “clashing of rapiers” and “heavy tramp of cavalry” in the middle of the seventeenth century.

Dorothy Osborne, born in 1627, was the daughter of Sir Peter Osborne, Lord Treasurer’s Remembrancer (an inherited office) and Governor of Guernsey in the days of James I. and Charles his son. She was the only daughter now (1650) unmarried, and had been named after her mother, Dorothy, without further addition. Much more could be collected of this sort from the lumber in Baronetages and Herald’s manuals; but to what purpose? William Temple was born in 1628.

It was in 1648, when the King was imprisoned at Carisbrook, in Colonel Hammond’s charge, that Dorothy first met her constant lover. They met in the Isle of Wight. She and her brother were on their way to St. Malo. Temple was starting on his travels. A little incident, almost a Waverley incident, took place here, worth reciting, perhaps. The Osbornes and Temple were loyalists. Young Osborne, more loyal than intelligent, remained behind at an inn where they had halted, that he might write on a window pane with a diamond “And Haman was hanged upon the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai.” This attack on Colonel Hammond, and the audacity of a cavalier daring to apply the Scriptures after the Puritanical method, caused the whole party to be arrested by the Roundheads, and a very pretty adventure was spoilt by the ready wit of our Dorothy taking the offence upon herself, when, through the gallantry of the Roundhead officer, the whole party was suffered to depart. “This incident,” says Courtenay, on good authority, “was not lost upon Temple.” Indeed, I think with Courtenay; but would add that much else besides was not lost upon him. Travelling with her and her brother, staying with her at St. Malo, is it to be wondered that Temple was attracted by the bright wit, clear faith and honesty of Dorothy; or that the brilliant parts and seriousness of Temple—a great contrast to many of the bibulous, rowdy cavaliers whom she must have met with—made her find in him one worthy of her friendship and her love? That Temple at this time openly declared his love I doubt. Love grew between them unknown to either. Years afterwards Dorothy writes:—

“For God’s sake, when we meet let us design one day to remember old stories in, to ask one another by what degrees our friendship grew to this height ’tis at. In earnest I am at a loss sometimes in thinking on’t; and though I can never repent of the share you have in my heart, I know not whether I gave it you willingly or not at first. No; to speak ingenuously, I think you got an interest there a good while before I thought you had any, and it grew so insensibly, and yet so fast, that all the traverses it has met with since, have served rather to discover it to me than at all to hinder it.”

The further circumstances necessary to the understanding of Dorothy’s letters, are shortly, these: Dorothy lived at Chicksands Priory, where her father was in ill-health, and there she received suitors at her parent’s commands. The Osbornes, it seemed, disliked Temple, and objected to him on the score of want of means; whilst Temple’s father had planned for his son an advantageous match in another quarter. Alas! for the frowardness of young couples! They held their course, and waited successfully.

Hardly can we do better that you may picture Dorothy and her mode of life clearly to yourself, than copy this important letter for you at length:

“You ask me how I pass my time here. I can give you a perfect account, not only of what I do for the present, but of what I am likely to do this seven years if I stay here so long. I rise in the morning reasonably early, and before I am ready I go round the house till I am weary of that, and then in the garden till it grows too hot for me. About ten o’clock I think of making me ready; and when that’s done I go into my father’s chamber; from thence to dinner, where my cousin Molle and I sit in great state in a room and at a table that would hold a great many more. After dinner we sit and talk till Mr. B. comes in question, and then I am gone. The heat of the day is spent in reading or working, and about six or seven o’clock I walk out into a common that lies hard by the house, where a great many young wenches keep sheep and cows, and sit in the shade singing of ballads; I go to them, and compare their voices and beauty to some ancient shepherdesses that I have read of, and find a vast difference there; but, trust me, I think these are as innocent as those could be. I talk to them, and find they want nothing to make them the happiest people in the world but the knowledge that they are so. Most commonly, while we are in the middle of our discourse, one looks about her, and spies her cows going into the corn, and then away they all run as if they had wings at their heels. I, that am not so nimble, stay behind, and when I see them driving home their cattle I think ’tis time for me to retire too. When I have supped I go into the garden, and so to the side of a small river that runs by it, where I sit down and wish you with me (you had best say this is not kind, neither). In earnest, ’tis a pleasant place, and would be more so to me if I had your company. I sit there sometimes till I am lost with thinking; and were it not for some cruel thought of the crossness of our fortune, that will not let me sleep there, I should forget there were such a thing to be done as going to bed.”

Truly a quiet country life, in a quiet country house; poor lonely Dorothy!

Chicksands Priory, Bedfordshire, is a low-built sacro-secular edifice, well fitted for its former service Its priestly denizens were turned out in Henry VIII’s monk-hunting reign (1538). To the joy or sorrow of the neighbourhood: who knows now? Granted then to one, Richard Snow, of whom the records are silent; by him sold, in Elizabeth’s reign, to Sir John Osborne, Knt. (Dorothy’s brother was first baronet); thus it becomes the ancestral home of our Dorothy. There is a crisp etching of the house in Fisher’s Collections of Bedfordshire. The very exterior of it is Catholic, unpuritanical, no methodism about the square windows set here and there, at undecided intervals, wheresoever they may be wanted. Six attic windows jut out from the low-tiled roof. At the corner of the house a high pinnacled buttress rising the full height of the wall; five buttresses flank the side wall, built so that they shade the lower windows from the morning sun, in one place reaching to the sill of an upper window. Perhaps Mrs. Dorothy’s window; how tempting to scale and see. What a spot for the happier realisation of Romeo and Juliet, or of Sigismonde and Guichard, if this were romance. In one end of the wall are two Gothic windows, claustral remnants, lighting now, perhaps, the dining-hall, where cousin Molle and Dorothy sat in state; or the saloon, where the latter received her servants. There are old cloisters attached to the house; at the other side of it may be. Yes! a sleepy country house, the warm earth and her shrubs creeping close up to the very sills of the lower windows, sending in morning fragrance, I doubt not, when Dorothy thrust back the lattice after breakfast. A quiet place, “slow” is the accurate modern epithet for it, “awfully slow.” But to Dorothy, a quite suitable home at which she never repines.

This etching of Thomas Fisher, of December 26th, 1816, is a godsend to me, hearing as I do that Chicksands Priory no longer remains to us, having suffered martyrdom at the bloody hands of the restorer. For through this, partly, we have attained to a knowledge of Dorothy’s surroundings, and may now safely let Dorothy herself tell us of the servants visiting her at Chicksands during those long seven years through which she remains constant to Temple. See what she expects in a lover! Have we not here some local squires hit off to the life? Could George Eliot have done more for us in like space?

“There are a great many ingredients must go to the making me happy in a husband. First, as my Cousin Franklin says our humours must agree, and to do that he must have that kind of breeding that I have had, and used that kind of company. That is, he must not be so much a country gentleman as to understand nothing but hawks and dogs, and be fonder of either than of his wife; nor of the next sort of them, whose aim reaches no farther than to be Justice of Peace, and once in his life High Sheriff, who reads no books but statutes, and studies nothing but how to make a speech interlarded with Latin, that may amaze his disagreeing poor neighbours, and fright them rather than persuade them into quietness. He must not be a thing that began the world in a free school, was sent from thence to the university, and is at his furthest when he reaches the Inns of Court, has no acquaintance but those of his form in those places, speaks the French he has picked out of old laws, and admires nothing but the stories he has heard of the revels that were kept there before his time. He must not be a town gallant neither, that lives in a tavern and an ordinary, that cannot imagine how an hour should be spent without company unless it be in sleeping, that makes court to all the women he sees, thinks they believe him, and laughs and is laughed at equally. Nor a travelled Monsieur, whose head is feather inside and outside, that can talk of nothing but of dances and duels, and has courage enough to wear slashes, when everybody else dies with cold to see him. He must not be a fool of no sort, nor peevish, nor ill-natured, nor proud, nor courteous; and to all this must be added, that he must love me, and I him, as much as we are capable of loving. Without all this his fortune, though never so great, would not satisfy me; and with it a very moderate one would keep me from ever repenting my disposal.”

These negative needs doubtless excluded many of the neighbours who were ready to throw themselves at her feet. But, from far and near, came many suitors, Cromwell’s son, Henry, among others; who will be “as acceptable to her,” she thinks, “as anybody else.” He seems almost worthy of her, if we believe most accounts of him, and allow for the Presbyterian animosity of good Mrs. Hutchinson. However, Henry Cromwell disappears from the scene, marrying elsewhere; whereby English history is possibly considerably modified. Temple is ordered to get her a dog, an Irish greyhound. “Henry Cromwell undertook to write to his brother Fleetwood, for another for me; but I have lost my hopes there; whomsoever it is that you employ, he will need no other instruction, but to get the biggest he can meet with. ’Tis all the beauty of those dogs, or of any, indeed, I think. A mastiff is handsomer to me than the most exact little dog that ever lady played withal.” Temple, no doubt, procured the biggest dog in Ireland, not the less joyfully that “she has lost her hopes of Henry Cromwell.”

There is another lover worthy of special mention—a widower—Sir Justinian Isham, of Lamport, Northamptonshire, pragmatical enough in his love suit, causing Mrs. Dorothy much amusement. She writes of him to Temple under the nickname “The Emperor.” This is the character she gives him: “He was the vainest, impertinent, self-conceited, learned coxcomb that ever yet I saw.” Hard words these!

The Emperor, it appears, caused further disagreement between Dorothy and her brother. Like the kettle in the Cricket on the Hearth, the Emperor began it. “The Emperor and his proposals began it; I talked merrily on’t till I saw my brother put on his sober face, and could hardly then believe he was in earnest. It seems he was; for when I had spoke freely my meaning, it wrought so with him, as to fetch up all that lay upon his stomach. All the people that I had ever in my life refused were brought again upon the stage, like Richard the III’s ghosts to reproach me withal, and all the kindness his discoveries could make I had for you was laid to my charge. My best qualities, if I have any that are good, served but for aggravations of my fault, and I was allowed to have wit, and understanding, and discretions, in all other things, that it might appear I had none in this. Well, ’twas a pretty lecture, and I grew warm with it after a while. In short, we came so near to an absolute falling out that ’twas time to give over, and we said so much then that we have hardly spoken a word together since. But ’tis wonderful to see what curtseys and legs pass between us, and as before we were thought the kindest brother and sister, we are certainly now the most complimental couple in England. ’Tis a strange change, and I am very sorry for it, but I’ll swear I know not how to help it.”

It is doubtless unpleasant to be pestered by an unwelcome suitor; however Dorothy has this compensation, that the Emperor’s proposals and letters give her mighty amusement.

“In my opinion, these great scholars are not the best writers (of letters I mean, of books perhaps they are); I never had, I think, but one letter from Sir Jus, but ’twas worth twenty of anybody’s else to make me sport. It was the most sublime nonsense that in my life I ever read, and yet I believe he descended as low as he could to come near my weak understanding. ’Twill be no compliment after this to say I like your letters in themselves, not as they come from one that is not indifferent to me, but seriously I do. All letters, methinks, should be free and easy as one’s discourse; not studied as an oration, nor made up of hard words like a charm. ’Tis an admirable thing to see how some people will labour to find out terms that may obscure a plain sense, like a gentleman I know, who would never say ‘the weather grew cold,’ but that ‘winter began to salute us.’ I have no patience at such coxcombs, and cannot blame an old uncle of mine that threw the standish at his man’s head, because he writ a letter for him, where, instead of saying (as his master bid him) ‘that he would have writ himself but that he had gout in his hand,’ he said, ‘that the gout in his hand would not permit him to put pen to paper.’”

The Emperor, it seems, this much to his credit, is much enamoured of Mrs. Dorothy; and does not take a refusal quietly. Or is she playing the coquette with him?

“Would you think it, that I have an ambassador from the Emperor Justinian, that comes to renew the treaty? In earnest ’tis true, and I want your counsel extremely what to do in it. You told me once that of all my servants you liked him the best. If I could so too, there were no dispute in’t. Well, I’ll think on’t, and if it succeed I will be as good as my word: you shall take your choice of my four daughters. Am not I beholding to him, think you? He says he has made addresses, ’tis true, in several places since we parted, but could not fix anywhere, and in his opinion he sees nobody that would make so fit a wife for himself as I. He has often inquired after me to know if I were not marrying: and somebody told him I had an ague, and he presently fell sick of one too, so natural a sympathy there is between us, and yet for all this, on my conscience we shall never marry. He desires to know whether I am at liberty or not. What shall I tell him, or shall I send him to you to know? I think that will be best. I’ll say that you are much my friend, and that I am resolved not to dispose of myself but with your consent and approbation; and therefore he must make all his court to you, and when he can bring me a certificate under your hand that you think him a fit husband for me, ’tis very likely I may have him; till then I am his humble servant, and your faithful friend.”

But, at length Sir Justinian marries some other fair neighbour, and vanishes from these pages; leaving, however, other lovers in the field seeking Dorothy’s hand. “I have a squire now,” she writes, “that is as good as a knight. He was coming as fast as a coach and six horses could bring him, but I desired him to stay till my ague was gone, and give me a little time to recover my good looks, for I protest if he saw me now he would never desire to see me again. Oh, me! I cannot think how I shall sit like the lady of the lobster, and give audience at Babram; you have been there, I am sure, nobody at Cambridge ’scapes it, but you were never so welcome thither as you shall be when I am mistress of it.” Also there comes to woo her “a modest, melancholy, reserved man, whose head is so taken up with little philosophical studies, that I admire how I found a room there.” A new servant is offered to her: “who had £2000 a year in present, with £2000 more to come. I had not the curiosity to ask who he was, which they took so ill that I think I shall hear no more of it.” Thus in one way or another, she gets rid of them all. But they are very importunate, these “servants,” as they style themselves, requiring wit and determination to send them about their business. Dorothy is determined to marry where she loves. “Surely,” she says, “the whole world could never persuade me (unless a parent commanded it) to marry one that I had no esteem for.” It is doubtful if a parent’s command would suffice, did Dorothy come face to face with such.

Here is a sharp refusal dramatically given to one importunate servant, Mr. James Fish by name (fancy Dorothy Osborne as Mrs. Fish), who would fain have become master. “I cannot forbear telling you the other day he made me a visit; and I, to prevent his making discourses to me, made Mrs. Goldsmith and Jane sit by all the while. But he came better provided than I could have imagined. He brought a letter with him, and gave it me as one that he had met with, directed to me; he thought it came out of Northamptonshire. I was upon my guard, and suspecting all he said, examined him so strictly where he had it, before I would open it, that he was hugely confounded, and I confirmed that ’twas his. I laid it by, and wished then that they would have left us, that I might have taken notice on’t to him. But I had forbid it them so strictly before, that they offered not to stir further than to look out of window, as not thinking there was any necessity of giving us their eyes as well as their ears; but he, that thought himself discovered, took that time to confess to me (in a whispering voice that I could hardly hear myself), that the letter (as my Lord Broghill says) was of great concern to him, and begged I would read it, and give him my answer. I took it up presently, as if I had meant it, but threw it sealed as it was into the fire, and told him (as softly as he had spoke to me) I thought that the quickest and best way of answering it. He sat awhile in great disorder without speaking a word, and so rose and took his leave. Now what think you; shall I ever hear of him more?” We think not, decidedly. He, like the others, recovers, doubtless to marry elsewhere.

But Temple’s father, Dorothy’s brother, and her solicitous servants, are not the only obstacles these lovers meet with. There are long separations at great distances when the lovers can hear but little of each other. Few meetings, and these at long intervals, break the monotony of Dorothy’s life of love.