--

Adams represented I was going to say commanded the Dashing Hero. Spinks opened beautifully with an account, statistically given, of where the Mary Jane was built, and the admiration that accompanied her on the morning she descended into what newspapers call 'her native element." He then grew warmer; he described the joy of Swansea, and the delight of her owners. She was a model craft"swanlike and graceful, and chartered by the house of Rigs and Rags with coal for the works at Millwall." Once at sea-" the blue, the open sea"-he became Fenimore Cooper, and told how she furrowed the white waves, cleaving her proud way through the crested water, her gallant crew, sons of that land "whose home," by some incongruity, "is on the deep," and at the main the flag that for a thousand years, &c., &c.

In the Pool, however, came disaster, and Captain Spinks had now to be professional. Poetry had done its work, and navigation must be called in. "We were, my lord, on our starboard tack; the wind was east-east and by south a fresh breeze, and threatening to be fresher. We were under a reefed topsail and trysail, with a storm jib and our mainsail doubly reeted. Your Lordship will perceive from this that we had taken every possible recaution, even to the battening down our fore hatch."

"What of the main ?" interrupted Adams. "Tell the court, I beg, how was the main hatchway."

"Brother Adams, I desire I may not be interrupted. I appeal to bis lordship, is the course now adopted by my learned friend usual, regular, or professional? I deny that it is either. I go farther, and declare it to be unseamanlike."

The rebuke was heavy, and Adams went below. But why should I go on?-the report is in the 'Times,' and under the head of "Admiralty Court-CollisionScuttles, owner, versus Scales and

Away with these flimsy subtleties, brother Spinks. No man ever walked a deck with more credit than yourself; but these cratty devices are not seamanship. When we saw, my lord, that the Mary Jane was determined to hold on ber course, reckless as it was-when by repeated signals

"What were your signals?"

"What were our signals! does my gallant brother require at this time of day to be told what is meant by loosening off the foresail of a schooner on the port tack, with her helm hard up?"

The scene grew warm-almost a battle; and when a grand peroration closed Adams's speech about the naval supremacy of Britain, and the rights of Englishmen to do at sea what nobody has ever dared to attempt on land, the genius of the place responded to the appeal, and three lusty cheers shook the courthouse.

Now, when one remembers that either of these intrepid mariners would have been sea-sick in a ferryboat, it must be owned that the exhibition was creditable. It was thoroughly histrionic too; they imparted to the whole discussion a certain bold and dashing character, an air of reckless attack and daring rejoinder, that savoured of a

They are finer still, however, in a patent case-a new treddle, the application of a lately-discovered salt as a dye for cotton prints, or new apparatus for condensing steam, or enamelling the skin, or strengthening the knee-timbers of iron-clads. The grandest achievement of all is a poisoning case something that is to be two-thirds emotional and one-third scientific -where the interest vacillates between the most powerful passions and the pangs of arsenic, and the listener is alternately carried from the domestic hearth to the laboratory and back again.

Now, when one is aware that the "learned Serjeant' knows as much about chemistry as a washerwoman does of the "wave theory," the display of impromptu learning he makes is positively astounding. Armed with an hour's reading of Beck and Orfila, the great man comes down to court to puzzle, bewilder, and very often confute men of real ability and acquirement; to hold them up to the world as hopelessly ignorant of all that they had devoted their lives to master; and in some cases to exhibit the very science they profess as a mass of crude disjointed facts, from which no inference could be drawn, or a safe conclusion derived.

เ

"Listen to these doctors, gentlemen of the jury; I hope you understand them. I vow to heaven that I do not; and which of them will you believe? Are you for the gentleman who relies on the garlic odour,' the beautiful paleblue colour, or that still more scientific performer who insists on a specific gravity of 999; and will any one tell me that the life of a fellow-creature is to hang on subtleties on which the creators them. selves are not agreed? In the

in

is this science by whose decision we are to send a man to the scaffold? Dr. Peebles tells you that the odour of a garlic is a decisive evidence of arsenic. Heaven help the whole Spanish Peninsula! Gentlemen, in this case the indictment must take in all from the Pyrenees to Gibraltar. Professor Mery weather says blueness, and the last witness declares lightness, to be the infallible witness; and I have no doubt I could put on that table two others just as learned, and who would pronounce that the tests should be a yellow colour, and a greater specific gravity. For, remember, these sciences are their infancy. The affinities that are to-day believed eternal, to-morrow discovers to be a mere accident. If there be a little salt of this, or muriate of that, or an oxide of the other, the colour blue would be red, and the garlic odour become like violets. How is the business of life to go on in the midst of such refined subtleties as these? Who would have the courage to ask his friend to dinner, when, should the common fate of mortality soon befall him, a question would arise as to what he had eaten on that day, what remarks he had passed on the fish, and what judgment on the sherry? the whole to be closed up with a medical opinion about a garlic odour and a blue tint. Give me three lines of a man's writing, and I'll draw an indictinent that will hang him,' was the terrible threat of an old criminal lawyer; but this is worse. Show me the crust or the biscuit your friend offered you, a fragment of the rusk or the cheese you had at luncheon, and I have an analytic professor who will vouch to discover in it either arsenic, corrosive sublimate, or sugar-of-lead."

A pitiable spectacle indeed is that poor man of science, pilloried up in the witness-box and pelted by the flippant ignorance of his examiner! What a contrast between the diffident caution of true knowledge

and the bold assurance, the chuckling confidence, the vainglorious self-satisfaction, and mock triumphant delight of his questioner! Mark the practised leer, the OldBailey grin, with which he. comments on something that science still regards as uncertain or obscure, and hear him declare to the jury, that in the present state of medical knowledge, there is not a man in court might not be indicted for having banded the salt or the mustard to his neighbour!

Occasionally very rarely, it must be owned-the witness is, besides being a man of science, a man of the world-one who joins to the requirements of the "savant" all the quick and ready-witted tact of society. I remember such a case. The barrister was no common man; he was highly and variously gifted; had a keen wit and a commanding eloquence. It was his task, on the occasion I refer to, to obtain from the medical witness the admission that the substance to which the poisoning was attributed was one freely used in practice, often prescribed by the best physicians, and occasionally in doses that verged on being excessive.

"Now, Doctor A.," said he, "you have told us that strychnine is to be found in the Pharmacopoeia, an admission that goes to show that the Faculty are not afraid, to use the vulgar illustration, to play with edge-tools. You have also said that you have administered it in your own practice. Will you be kind enough to inform us in what doses?"

"The dose would be determined by the nature of the illness, the object sought to be obtained, and the peculiar circumstances of the individual patient."

"Come, come, doctor, I am not trying to poach on you for an unfee'd opinion. I want generalities. Would you give a grain of this medicine?"

"I might. I would rather give an eighth, or a sixth, or a fourth of & grain."

"Would grains?"

you give me three

At this the doctor seemed slightly confused, and unwilling to reply, and the lawyer, accepting the hesitation as confusion from being puzzled, followed up his supposed advantage by repeating his question.

"I am doubtful on the point. It is possible that I might," was the reply, after a long pause.

"Good heavens, sir! what do you mean? You have told us that under no circumstances would you administer as much as three grains to one of the gentlemen of the jury, nor to his lordship on the bench, and yet you now avow that you are actually uncertain whether you would not give this dose to me? Explain this, sir, if you can."

"It

"The action of strychnine is but imperfectly known," said the doctor, with great composure. would be a valuable contribution to medical science to determine it; and we have a maxim in chemistry that says, 'Fiat experimentum in corpore vili.' That's my meaning." In this case it was not the lawyer who triumphed.

The most offensive of all, however, is the display of legal drollery-the wit that sets the jury in a roar, and shakes the g llery with laughter. Excepting House of Commons drollery, there is nothing on earth so pitiably contemptible as legal fun. In bad taste, too, it totally eclipses the "House," for the senator is usually satisfied with

a dreary bit of Joe Miller in some supposed "apropos" to what he is saying; while counsel is sure to cut his joke on something personal to the witness-his dress, his accent, his whiskers, or his boots, well knowing the while that all reply is denied to the man he assails, and that in his coward immunity he may pelt him in perfect security.

And yet there is an offence worse than this the practice of abashing a witness, especially a female witness, by something which, in shocking her delicacy, may seem to impugn her truthfulness. A late and flagrant instance of this occurred where a young lady, suffering under a most ruffianly assault on a roadside, was subjected by the prisoner's counsel to the most shameless and

insulting cross-examination, to lead to the conclusion that she was, at one period at least, not totally averse to the advances of her ag gressor. When rebuked by the court for his line of defence, counsel flippantly replied, "My lord, I must do my best for my client." What sort of professional training can it be that will make a gentleman descend to such a depth as this!

Of a truth, it requires all the gifts and graces of these accomplished men to counterbalance such little blemishes; nor am I quite sure that in extending to any class in the community the privilege of protection, while scattering insinuations broadcast, and pushing insults home, we may not be buying too dearly even our Admirable Crichton.

When the history of our time shall be written, it would not be easy to find a more significant title to it than "The Age of the Cheap Article." It is certainly the great characteristic of our day. Something that is to look like something else, seen as good, last as long, and only cost one tenth of the price, is the grand desideratum on every hand; and consequently our newspapers are filled and our walls covered with advertisements of nickel that looks like silver, "Gladstone" that drinks like claret, cheap tea, cheap furniture, Sydenham trousers, and the two-guinea "portmanteau, which contains everything necessary to a gentleman's full wardrobe for a three weeks' tour on the Continent."

It seems at first strange that this intense rage for cheapness should be essentially English. You do, of course, meet some of it in Paris, but in no other city of the Continent are the papers filled and the walls placarded with announcements of this or that substitute for something whose cost excludes it from conmon use. The reason, however, is

this, that there is not, from one end of Europe to the other, so unreal a people as the English! I know with what an outcry of disbelief this assertion will be met. I know well how we regard the wretched foreigner, sneering at his frivolity, his capricious ways, his poor, weak, purposeless existence, and the rest of it. I know all our national contempt for the man of eau sucré and dominoes, and I am not going to gainsay one word of it. I only reassert that for unreality, for a pretension to seem something that he is not-for, in fact, an outrageous affectation-John Bull has not his equal in Europe. The reason is simple enough. Every man in England knows and feels that his acceptance in society depends on the class in which he is supposed to move, and as class distinctions with us are meted out by money, it behoves every one to appear better off than he is. To do this requires no small share of skill or address, because it has to be done in the midst of thousands all trying the same game. To live in a fashionable quarter, or sufficiently near one to

steal the name of a neighbouring square, to indicate your whereabouts, is a first necessity. To live with a certain outward semblance of fortune is the second; to give dinners and entertainments comes next; to figure in subscription-lists, stand forward in works of benevolence, all follow. Now, as it is essential that you should do all these things on the scale of a man of ten times your means, you only can accomplish the feat by employing substitutes; that is to say, all around and about you mu-t be a mockery-your house a four-storeyed delusion, your butler a ruined greengrocer, your bordeaux a full-flavoured Chancellor of the Exchequer, and your clothes the cheap product of the last Manchester discovery in devil's dust and glue.

Will you tell me that the man who lives in this charmed circle of everlasting lies, in a mock house with a mock household, a mock dinner, and an enamelled wife with a mock diamond necklace, can come out real and true? Will you ask me to believe that he who breathes an atmosphere of falsehood all his days, can preserve throughout it his own pure unsullied nature?

And now, what foreigner does this? In what city of continental Europe is there any qua ter to inhabit which would be a brevet of social distinction? Is there any one, no matter how great, who could not live anywhere, no matter how humble, who asks or cares to know the amount of any man's fortune, how he spends, or why he saves it? This frivolous foreigner, with his eau sucré and kid-glove tastes, may be all that you say of him; he may follow no serious career, nor care for any occupation beyond amusement; but, take my word for it, he has fewer affectations, less of unreal pretensions-is, in a word, far less of a snob-than John Buil, and all because his social system makes no demand upon him to seem richer than he really is; nor is it any one's business to inquire whether he keeps

a chef in his kitchen, or dines at a cheap chop-house.

One of the greatest evils of all this unreality is, that no man is ever able to talk with any sense of security on the most ordinary things around him. He is, as it were, taking everything on trust, and on the recommendation of some one about him. He dares not question the capacity of the butler whom he got from "my lord" any more than he can cavil at the bordeaux he got from my lord's wine-merchant. Now all this might be borne if it only invaded the material circumstances of our lives; but it has gone down far deeper; it has penetrated to our morals, and threatens seriously to poison the very best elements of our national character. Not satisfied, it would seem, with sham silver, slam damask, shain diamonds, and sham lafitte, we are now coming to a pass, in which we shall probably be content with sham honour in our men, and sham virtue in our wo

men.

Dumas-père ou fils, I forget which -explains by a little apologue the meaning of the phrase demi-monde. He says-" You find in a fruit-stall a basket of beautiful peaches whose price will be two francs each, and close beside them another basket, to all semblance exactly alike, the same in colour and perfume and downy softness, for twenty-five cents; and, struck by this immeuse disparity in cost, you ask the reason. The fruiterer at once calls your attention to a minute, almost imperceptible speck on the cheaper article, and this très petite tache it is which damages all the excellence, and reduces to a mere fraction what seemed the equal of the best. "Such," says he, "is la femme demimonde." Now, if some real or supposed attraction in this article find favour with the forei ners, in England the success will be entirely owing to its semblance to something that costs more money, and the acceptance she will gain will be exactly proportioned to the credit she will be