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 fire, when down coom Ichimley 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 really 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 flavor. 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 those 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. We have now an official interpreter attached to the 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. 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."

He

The old man told a sad story of illhealth, 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 fervor 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 gray 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."

When the future historian of the Victorian era draws to the end of his task, and begins to sum up the intellectual forces that marked its close, one wonders whether he will attach any significance, as an indication of a certain trend in popular thought and feeling during its last decade, to the gradual but steady emergence of the poetry of Matthew Arnold. It is bare truth to say that when Arnold died in 1888 his poetry, in any popular sense, was absolutely unknown. To-day, judging from the frequency with which it is drawn upon for quotation, the number and variety of editions of it in vogue, and the fact that it has been democratized and is retailed by the hundred thousand at a penny, Arnold would seem to have achieved the modern apotheosis and become popular. This belated recognition of a poet whose most characteristic work has been before the world for fifty years is curious as well as significant, and renders it worth while to look a little closely into his achievement under the new light thus thrown upon it, if only with the object of revising, modifying, or confirming prepossessions born of long acquaintance.

Fifteen years ago Arnold's most fervent admirers would have smiled incredulously, if they had not been shocked, at the bare suggestion of popularity for one who was before all things the poet of culture, and there

fore destined to appeal only to the audience "fit though few." Nevertheless, as the sequel showed, Arnold himself had a prevision of what has happened, and even went the length of assigning the prospective contributing cause. Still further, he foreshadowed with remarkable accuracy the place he was to occupy in the order of Victorian poets. As far back as 1869 we find him writing to his mother:

My poems represent on the whole the main movement of mind of the last quarter of a century, and thus they will probably have their day as people become conscious to themselves of what that movement of mind is, and interested in the literary productions which reflect it. It might fairly be urged that I have less poetical sentiment than Tennyson, and less intellectual vigor and abundance than Browning; yet because I have perhaps more of a fusion of the two than either of them, and have more regularly applied that fusion to the main line of modern development, I am likely enough to have my turn as they have had theirs.

nold the poet. The critic, blithe and gay and debonnair; the poet, "sober, steadfast and demure": the one basking in the sunshine of certitude, a pungent commentator on the mundane panorama; the other dwelling in the sober twilight of doubt, conscious of

-The heavy and the weary weight Of all this unintelligible world.

Even in his familiar letters, while the critic is much in evidence, the poet is unmistakably shy. The clue to this reserve, one conjectures, lies in a sensitive nature, conscious of intellectual isolation and unwilling to bring its deepest thoughts into the arena of familiar discussion. But, when all is said, the duality of his character remains something of a psychological puzzle.

Looking at Arnold's total achievement as a poet one is inclined to echo the words Charles Dickens applied to Gray, and say that no poet has "come down to posterity with so thin a volume under his arm." Some of his best and most characteristic work was written between 1849 and 1853: a silence of fourteen years followed upon the volume bearing the latter date; and by 1867 his poetical career was practically closed. This apparently premature exhaustion of fertility has been ascribed to poverty of soil. There is truth in the ascription, but it would be more correct to say that Arnold allowed his allotment to go out of cultivation. He found the field of criticism more alluring and, in an intellectual as well as a pecuniary sense, more profitable. It is to be remembered, too, that he was all his life a public official, and to cultivate the muse with success demanded unbroken leisure and continuous thought, or, in the alternative, a knocking of himself to pieces against the inexorable limits of time and opportunity. Pegasus between the shafts of a

hackney chariot would find his area somewhat circumscribed.

The most striking feature of Arnold's work, on a superficial survey, is the evidence it affords of his intellectual ancestry. His was a complex culture, but there were three main strands in it, each separately traceable in his poetry, the great Greek writers, Wordsworth, and Goethe,-this without impairment to his originality, for he worked by way of assimilation and reproduction, and every line he wrote has the impress of individuality. By intellectual affinity Arnold was Greek to the core. He had drunk deep at

the dragon-warder'd fountains Where the springs of Knowledge are.

There are poems of his where the spirits of the great masters of antiquity, -of Homer and Sophocles in particular -seem to move across the page. In Balder Dead the influence of Homer is obvious. Consider, for example, the

simile,

And as a spray of honeysuckle flowers Brushes across a tired traveller's face Who shuffles through the deep dewmoisten'd dust,

On a May evening, in the darken'd lanes,

And starts him, that he thinks a ghost

went by

So Hoder brushed by Hermod's side.

Or this passage, in Homer's larger

manner:

Bethink ye Gods, is there no other way? Speak, were not this a way, the way

for Gods?

If I, if Odin, clad in radiant arms, Mounted on Sleipner, with the warrior

Thor

Drawn in his car beside me, and my sons,

All the strong brood of Heaven, to swell my train,

Should make irruption into Hela's realm,

And set the fields of gloom ablaze with light,

And bring in triumph Balder back to Heaven?

Again, in matters of technique Arnold is all for Greek tradition. Flexibility, clearness, precision, along with simplicity of utterance, dignity of presentation, and perfection of form, wrought into harmonious poise in obedience to the fundamental maxim of all Greek craftsmanship, Nothing in excess,-this was what he strove to achieve, and by example and precept to instil. But it is in the spirit of his poetry, more than in its outward form, that the ascenddency of the Greeks as a formative influence will be found to be paramount.

Reticence and self-restraint, with their respective correlatives, elimination of the unessential and avoidance of rapture, were with Arnold matters of temperament rather than of discipline. It is his sense of the irony of life, his brooding sadness over man's inscrutable destiny, the serene continence of soul with which his characters confront the decrees of Fate, and go down to death with no thought of aftercompensation, that reveal the source of his inspiration. Empedocles on Etna portrays the nemesis that dogs the footsteps of human self-exaltation, personified in a regal and dominating nature, conscious of intellectual supremacy, and paying in charlatanry the price of personal primacy, doomed to realize that it has lost the future, and to suffer all the pangs of self-accusation.

Sohrab and

Rustum is the story of the involuntary death of a son at the hands of his father, and is tremulous with the pathos of inexpiable sorrow; Mycerinus, of a proud, austerely-upright, strenuouslyjust soul, setting itself in scorn against the unjust decree of the gods; The Sick King of Bokhara, of the impotence of power and futility of pity confronted with the problem of human misery, of mercy frustrated by the wrong-doer's

own instinct for justice; Balder Dead, of a blameless and valiant warrior done to death by craft, and of the impotence of even super-human power and prowess against Fate, blind, malignant, implacable.

Again, in his celebrated preface to the poems of 1851, Arnold reduces the primal law of poetical composition to the formula: "All depends upon the subject, choose a fitting action, penetrate yourself with the feeling of its situation; this done, everything else will follow." This, it is obvious must be taken rather as an attempt to body forth the shaping spirit of Greek tragedy than as a nostrum for practical application. As a test, it is entirely inapplicable to at least three-fourths of English poetry, not excluding Arnold's own, though Sohrab and Rustum (which, it is to be noted, immediately followed the preface of 1851) is a shining proof of its efficacy.

Further, Arnold's Greek proclivities can be seen in the strictures he felt called upon to make on certain innate characteristics or tendencies of English poetry. The sense of proportion (the nice correlation of the parts to the whole and elimination of any preponderating element) which with the Greeks was instinctive, was a sense almost entirely wanting in English poetry. There, everything was subordinated to expression. Whole poems seemed to be written for the sake of a single word, or to work in purple patches, or to express "distilled distilled words." Two thoughts in great offenders in respect of expression were Shakespeare and Keats. The wanton exuberance of the one and the witchery of phrase of the other Arnold held to be of evil influThe nascent poet who came under their spell seized by the spirit of emulation, to the neglect of the less attractive but not less essential details of his craft, and be

ence.

was