The Book-Hunter Part 13

Dire have been the disappointments incurred by The Diversions of Purley--one of the toughest books in existence. It has even cast a shade over one of our best story-books, The Diversions of Hollycot, by the late Mrs Johnston. The great scholar, Leo Allatius, who broke his heart when he lost the special pen with which he wrote during forty years, published a work called Apes Urbanae--Urban Bees. It is a biographical work, devoted to the great men who flourished during the Pontificate of Urban VIII., whose family carried bees on their coat-armorial. The History of New York, by Diedrich Knickerbocker, has sorely perplexed certain strong-minded women, who read nothing but genuine history. The book which, in the English translation, goes by the name of Marmontel's Moral Tales, has been found to give disappointment to parents in search of the absolutely correct and improving; and Edgeworth's Essay on Irish Bulls has been counted money absolutely thrown away by eminent breeders.

There is a sober-looking volume, generally bound in sheep, called MacEwen on the Types--a theological book, in fact, treating of the types of Christianity in the old law. Concerning it, a friend once told me that, at an auction, he had seen it vehemently competed for by an acute-looking citizen artisan and a burly farmer from the hills. The latter, the successful party, tossed the lot to the other, who might have it and be d----d to it, he "thought it was a buik upo' the tups," a word which, it may be necessary to inform the unlearned reader, means rams: but the other compet.i.tor also declined the lot; he was a compositor or journeyman printer, and expected to find the book honestly devoted to those tools of his trade of which it professed to treat. Mr Ruskin, having formed the pleasant little original design of abolis.h.i.+ng the difference between Popery and Protestantism, through the persuasive influence of his own special eloquence, set forth his views upon the matter in a book which he termed a treatise "on the construction of sheepfolds." I have been informed that this work had a considerable run among the muirland farmers, whose reception of it was not flattering. I think I could also point to a public library in England, the keeper of which justified his high character for cla.s.sification and arrangement by binding up this production between "suggestions as to eating off turnips with stock" and "an inquiry concerning the best materials for smeering."

Peignot discusses, by the way, with his usual scientific precision, as a department in Bibliography, "t.i.tres de livres qui ont induit en erreur des Bibliothecaires et des Libraires peu instruits." After mentioning a treatise De Missis Dominicis, which was not a religious book, as it might seem, but an inquiry into the functions of certain officers sent into the provinces by the emperors and the early kings of France, he comes nearer to our own door in telling how "un ignorant avait place le _Traite des Fluxions de Maclaurin_ avec les livres de pathologie, prenant pour une maladie les fluxions mathematiques."[41]

[Footnote 41: Dict. de Bibliologie, i. 391.]

Logic has not succeeded as yet in discovering the means of framing a t.i.tle-page which shall be exhaustive, as it is termed, and const.i.tute an infallible finger-post to the nature of a book. From the beginning of all literature it may be said that man has been continually struggling after this achievement, and struggling in vain; and it is a humiliating fact, that the greatest adepts, abandoning the effort in despair, have taken refuge in some fortuitous word, which has served their purpose better than the best results of their logical a.n.a.lysis. The book which has been the supreme ruler of the intellect in this kind of work, stands forth as an ill.u.s.trious example of failure. To those writings of Aristotle which dealt with mind, his editing pupils could give no name,--therefore they called them the things after the physics--the _metaphysics_; and that fortuitous t.i.tle the great arena of thought to which they refer still bears, despite of efforts to supply an apter designation in such words as Psychology, Pneumatology, and Transcendentalism.

Writhing under this nightmare kind of difficulty, men in later times tried to achieve completeness by lengthening the t.i.tle-page; but they found that the longer they made it, the more it wriggled itself into devious tracks, and the farther did it depart from a comprehensive name.

Some t.i.tle-pages in old folios make about half an hour's reading.[42]

One advantage, however, was found in these lengthy t.i.tles--they afforded to controversialists a means of condensing the pith of their malignity towards each other, and throwing it, as it were, right in the face of the adversary. It will thus often happen that the controversialist states his case first in the t.i.tle-page; he then gives it at greater length in the introduction; again, perhaps, in a preface; a third time in an a.n.a.lytical form, through means of a table of contents; after all this skirmis.h.i.+ng, he brings up his heavy columns in the body of the book; and if he be very skilful, he may let fly a few Parthian arrows from the index.

[Footnote 42: A good modern specimen of a lengthy t.i.tle-page may be found in one of the books appropriate to the matter in hand, by the diligent French bibliographer Peignot:--

"DICTIONNAIRE RAISONNe DE BIBLIOLOGIE: contenant--1mo, L'explication des princ.i.p.aux termes relatifs a la bibliographie, a l'art typographique, a la diplomatique, aux langues, aux archives, aux ma.n.u.scrits, aux medailles, aux antiquites, &c.; 2do, Des notices historiques detaillees sur les princ.i.p.ales bibliotheques anciennes et modernes; sur les differentes sectes philosophiques; sur les plus celebres imprimeurs, avec une indication des meilleures editions sorties de leurs presses, et sur les bibliographes, avec la liste de leurs ouvrages; 3tio, enfin, L'exposition des differentes systemes bibliographiques, &c.,--ouvrage utile aux bibliothecaires, archivistes, imprimeurs, libraires, &c. Par G. Peignot, Bibliothecaire de la Haute-Saone, membre-correspondant de la Societe libre d'emulation du Haut-Rhin. _Indocti discant, et ament meminisse periti._ Paris, An x. 1802."

Here follows a rival specimen selected from the same department of literature:--

"BIBLIOGRAPHIE INSTRUCTIVE; OU, TRAITe DE LA CONNAISSANCE DES LIVRES RARES ET SINGULIERS; contenant un catalogue raisonne de la plus grande partie de ces livres precieux, qui ont paru successivement dans la republique des lettres, depuis l'invention de l'imprimerie jusqu'a nos jours; avec des notes sur la difference et la rarete de leurs editions, et des remarques sur l'origine de cette rarete actuelle, et son degre plus ou moins considerable; la maniere de distinguer les editions originales, d'avec les contrefaites; avec une description typographique particuliere, du compose de ces rares volumes, au moyen de laquelle il sera aise de reconnoitre facilement les exemplaires, ou mutiles en partie, ou absolument imparfaits, qui s'en rencontrent journellement dans le commerce, et de les distinguer srement de ceux qui seront exactement complets dans toutes leurs parties. Dispose par ordre de matieres et de facultes, suivant le systeme bibliographique generalement adopte; avec une table generale des auteurs, et un systeme complet de bibliographie choisie. Par Guillaume-Francois de Bre le jeune, Libraire de Paris."]

It is a remarkable thing that a man should have been imprisoned, and had his ears cut off, and become one of the chief causes of our great civil wars, all along of an unfortunate word or two in the last page of a book containing more than a thousand. It was as far down in his very index as W that the great offence in Prynne's Histrio-Mastix was found, under the head "Women actors." The words which follow are rather unquotable in this nineteenth century; but it was a very odd compliment to Queen Henrietta Maria to presume that these words must refer to her--something like Hugo's sarcasm that, when the Parisian police overhear any one use the terms "ruffian" and "scoundrel," they say, "You must be speaking of the Emperor." The Histrio-Mastix was, in fact, so big and so complex a thicket of confusion, that it had been licensed without examination by the licenser, who perhaps trusted that the world would have as little inclination to peruse it as he had. The calamitous discovery of the sting in the tail must surely have been made by a Hebrew or an Oriental student, who mechanically looked for the commencement of the Histrio-Mastix where he would have looked for that of a Hebrew Bible.

Successive licensers had given the work a sort of go-by, but, reversing the order of the sibylline books, it became always larger and larger, until it found a licenser who, with the notion that he "must put a stop to this," pa.s.sed it without examination. It got a good deal of reading immediately afterwards, especially from Attorney-General Noy, who asked the Star-Chamber what it had to do with the immorality of stage-plays to exclaim that church-music is not the noise of men, but rather "a bleating of brute beasts--choristers bellow the tenor as it were oxen, bark a counterpoint as a kennel of dogs, roar out a treble like a set of bulls, grunt out a ba.s.s as it were a number of hogs." But Mr Attorney took surely a more nice distinction when he made a charge against the author in these terms: "All stage-players he terms them rogues: in this he doth falsify the very Act of Parliament; for _unless they go abroad_, they are not rogues."

In the very difficulties in the way of framing a conclusive and exhaustive t.i.tle, there is a principle of compensation. It clears literature of walls and hedgerows, and makes it a sort of free forest.

To the desultory reader, not following up any special inquiry, there are delights in store in a devious rummage through miscellaneous volumes, as there are to the lovers of adventure and the picturesque in any district of country not desecrated by the tourist's guide-books. Many readers will remember the pleasant little narrative appended to Croker's edition of Boswell, of Johnson's talk at Cambridge with that extensive book-hunter, Dr Richard Farmer, who boasted of the possession of "plenty of all such reading as was never read," and scandalised his visitor by quoting from Markham's Book of Armorie a pa.s.sage applying the technicalities of heraldry and genealogy to the most sacred mystery of Christianity. One who has not tried it may form an estimate of this kind of pursuit from Charles Lamb's Specimens of the Writings of Fuller. No doubt, as thus transplanted, these have not the same fresh relish which they have for the wanderer who finds them in their own native wilderness, yet, like the specimens in a conservatory or a museum, they are examples of what may be found in the place they have come from.

But there are pa.s.sages worth finding in books less promising. Those who potter in libraries, especially if they have courage to meddle with big volumes, sometimes find curious things--for all gems are not collected in caskets. In searching through the solid pages of Hatsell's Precedents in Parliament for something one doesn't find, it is some consolation to alight on such a precedent as the following, set forth as likely to throw light on the mysterious process called "naming a member." "A story used to be told of Mr Onslow, which those who ridiculed his strict observance of forms were fond of repeating, that as he often, upon a member's not attending to him, but persisting in any disorder, threatened to name him--'Sir, sir, I must name you'--on being asked what would be the consequence of putting that threat in execution and naming a member, he answered, 'The Lord in heaven knows.'"

In the perusal of a very solid book on the progress of the ecclesiastical differences of Ireland, written by a native of that country, after a good deal of tedious and vexatious matter, the reader's complacency is restored by an artless statement how an eminent person "abandoned the errors of the Church of Rome, and adopted those of the Church of England."

So also a note I have preserved of a brief pa.s.sage descriptive of the happy conclusion of a duel runs thus:--

"The one party received a slight wound in the breast; the other fired in the air--and so the matter terminated."[43]

[Footnote 43: This pa.s.sage has been quoted and read by many people quite unconscious of the arrant bull it contains. Indeed, an eminent London newspaper, to which the word Bull cannot be unfamiliar, tells me, in reviewing my first edition, that it is no bull at all, but a plain statement of fact, and boldly quotes it in confirmation of this opinion.

There could be no better testimony to its being endowed with the subtle spirit of the genuine article. Irish bulls, as it has been said of const.i.tutions, "are not made--they grow," and that only in their own native soil. Those manufactured for the stage and the anecdote-books betray their artificial origin in their breadth and obviousness. The real bull carries one with it at first by an imperceptible confusion and misplacement of ideas in the mind where it has arisen, and it is not until you reason back that you see it. Horace Walpole used to say that the best of all bulls, from its thorough and grotesque confusion of ident.i.ty, was that of the man who complained of having been "changed at nurse;" and perhaps he is right. An Irishman, and he only, can handle this confusion of ideas so as to make it a more powerful instrument of repartee than the logic of another man: take, for instance, the beggar who, when imploring a dignified clergyman for charity, was charged not to take the sacred name in vain, and answered, "Is it in vain, then? and whose fault is that?" I have doubts whether the saying attributed to Sir Boyle Roche about being in two places at once "like a bird," is the genuine article. I happened to discover that it is of earlier date than Sir Boyle's day, having found, when rummaging in an old house among some Jacobite ma.n.u.scripts, one from Robertson of Strowan, the warrior poet, in which he says about two contradictory military instructions, "It seems a difficult point for me to put both orders in execution, unless, as the man said, I can be in two places at once, like a bird." A few copies of these letters were printed for the use of the Abbotsford Club.

This letter of Strowan's occurs in p. 92.]

Professional law-books and reports are not generally esteemed as light reading, yet something may be made even of them at a pinch. Menage wrote a book upon the amenities of the civil law, which does anything but fulfil its promise. There are many much better to be got in the most unlikely corners; as, where a great authority on copyright begins a narrative of a case in point by saying, "One Moore had written a book which he called Irish Melodies;" and again, in an action of trespa.s.s on the case, "The plaintiff stated in his declaration that he was the true and only proprietor of the copyright of a book of poems ent.i.tled The Seasons, by James Thomson." I cannot lay hands at this moment on the index which refers to Mr Justice Best--he was the man, as far as memory serves, but never mind. A searcher after something or other, running his eye down the index through letter B, arrived at the reference "Best--Mr Justice--his great mind." Desiring to be better acquainted with the particulars of this a.s.sertion, he turned up the page referred to, and there found, to his entire satisfaction, "Mr Justice Best said he had a great mind to commit the witness for prevarication."

The following case is curiously suggestive of the state of the country round London in the days when much business was done on the road:--A bill in the Exchequer was brought by Everett against a certain Williams, setting forth that the complainant was skilled in dealing in certain commodities, "such as plate, rings, watches, &c.," and that the defendant desired to enter into partners.h.i.+p with him. They entered into partners.h.i.+p accordingly, and it was agreed that they should provide the necessary plant for the business of the firm--such as horses, saddles, bridles, &c. (pistols not mentioned)--and should partic.i.p.ate in the expenses of the road. The declaration then proceeds, "And your orator and the said Joseph Williams proceeded jointly with good success in the said business on Hounslow Heath, where they dealt with a gentleman for a gold watch; and afterwards the said Joseph Williams told your orator that Finchley, in the county of Middles.e.x, was a good and convenient place to deal in, and that commodities were very plenty at Finchley aforesaid, and it would be almost all clear gain to them; that they went accordingly, and dealt with several gentlemen for divers watches, rings, swords, canes, hats, cloaks, horses, bridles, saddles, and other things; that about a month afterwards the said Joseph Williams informed your orator that there was a gentleman at Blackheath who had a good horse, saddle, bridle, watch, sword, cane, and other things to dispose of, which, he believed, might be had for little or no money; that they accordingly went, and met with the said gentleman, and, after some small discourse, they dealt for the said horse, &c. That your orator and the said Joseph Williams continued their joint dealings together in several places--viz., at Bagshot, in Surrey; Salisbury, in Wilts.h.i.+re; Hampstead, in Middles.e.x; and elsewhere, to the amount of 2000 and upwards."[44]

[Footnote 44: This case has been often referred to in law-books, but I have never met with so full a statement of the contents of the declaration as in the Retrospective Review (vol. v. p. 81).]

Here follows a brief extract from a law-paper, for the full understanding of which it has to be kept in view that the pleader, being an officer of the law who has been prevented from executing his warrant by threats, requires, as a matter of form, to swear that he was really afraid that the threats would be carried into execution.

"Farther depones, that the said A.B. said that if deponent did not immediately take himself off he would pitch him (the deponent) down stairs--which the deponent verily believes he would have done.

"Farther depones, that, time and place aforesaid, the said A.B. said to deponent, 'If you come another step nearer I'll kick you to h.e.l.l'--which the deponent verily believes he would have done."[45]

[Footnote 45: It is curious to observe how bitter a prejudice Themis has against her own humbler ministers. Most of the bitterest legal jokes are at the expense of the cla.s.s who have to carry the law into effect. Take, for instance, the case of the bailiff who had been compelled to swallow a writ, and, rus.h.i.+ng into Lord Norbury's court to proclaim the indignity done to justice in his person, was met by the expression of a hope that the writ was "_not returnable_ in this court."]

I know not whether "lay gents," as the English bar used to term that portion of mankind who had not been called to itself, can feel any pleasure in wandering over the case-books, and picking up the funny technicalities scattered over them; but I can attest from experience that, to a person trained in one set of technicalities, the pottering about among those of a different parish is exceedingly exhilarating.

When one has been at work among interlocutors, suspensions, tacks, wadsets, multiplepoindings, adjudications in implement, a.s.signations, infeftments, h.o.m.ologations, charges of horning, quadriennium utiles, vicious intromissions, decrees of putting to silence, conjoint actions of declarator and reduction-improbation,--the brain, being saturated with these and their kindred, becomes refreshed by crossing the border of legal nomenclature, and getting among common recoveries, demurrers, Quare impedits, tails-male, tails-female, docked tails, lat.i.tats, avowrys, nihil dicits, cestui que trusts, estopels, essoigns, darrein presentments, emparlances, mandamuses, qui tams, capias ad faciendums or ad withernam, and so forth. After vexatious interlocutors in which the Lord Ordinary has refused interim interdict, but pa.s.sed the bill to try the question, reserving expenses; or has repelled the dilatory defences, and ordered the case to the roll for debate on the peremptory defences; or has taken to avizandum; or has ordered re-revised condescendence and answers on the conjoint probation; or has sisted diligence till caution be found judicio sisti; or has done nearly all these things together in one breath,--it is like the consolation derived from meeting a companion in adversity, to find that at Westminster Hall, "In fermedon the tenant having demanded a view after a general imparlance, the demandant issued a writ of pet.i.t cape--held irregular."

Also, "If, after nulla bona returned, a testatum be entered upon the roll, quod devastavit, a writ of inquiry shall be directed to the sheriff, and if by inquisition the devastavit be found and returned, there shall be a scire facias quare executio non de propriis bonis, and if upon that the sheriff returns scire feci, the executor or administrator may appear and traverse the inquisition."

Again, "If the record of Nisi prius be a die Sancti Trinitatis in tres Septimanas nisi a 27 June, prius venerit, which is the day after the day in Bank, which was mistaken for a die Sancti Michaelis, it shall not be amended."

It is interesting to observe that at one end of the island a panel means twelve perplexed agriculturists, who, after having taken an oath to act according to their consciences, are starved till they are of one mind on some complicated question; while, at the other end, the same term applies to the criminal on whose conduct they are going to give their verdict. It would be difficult to decide which is the more happy application; but it must be admitted that we are a great way behind the South in our power of selecting a nomenclature immeasurably distant in meaning from the thing signified. We speak of a bond instead of a mortgage, and we adjudge where we ought to foreclose. We have no such thing as chattels, either personal or real.[46] If you want to know the English law of book-debts, you will have to look for it under the head of a.s.sumpsit in a treatise on Nisi Prius, while a lawyer of Scotland would unblus.h.i.+ngly use the word itself, and put it in his index. So, too, our bailments are merely spoken of as bills, notes, or whatever a merchant might call them. Our garneshee is merely a common debtor. Baron and feme we call husband and wife, and coverture we term marriage.

[Footnote 46: A late venerable pract.i.tioner in a humble department of the law, who wanted to write a book, and was recommended to try his hand at a translation of Latin law-maxims as a thing much wanted, was considerably puzzled by the maxim, "Catella realis non potest legari;"

nor was he quite relieved when he turned up his Ainsworth and found that catella means a "little puppy." There was nothing for it, however, but obedience, so that he had to give currency to the remarkable principle of law, that "a genuine little whelp cannot be left in legacy." He also translated "messis sequitur s.e.m.e.ntem," with a fine simplicity, into "the harvest follows the seed-time;" and "actor sequitur forum rei," he made "the agent must be in court when the case is going on." Copies of the book containing these gems are exceedingly rare, some malicious person having put the author up to their absurdity.]

Still, for the honour of our country, it is possible to find a few technicalities which would do no discredit to our neighbours. Where one of them would bring a habeas corpus--a name felicitously expressive, according to the English method, of civil liberty--an inhabitant of the North, in the same unfortunate position, would take to running his letters. We have no turbary, or any other eas.e.m.e.nt; but, to compensate us, we have thirlage, outsucken multures, insucken multures, and dry multures; as also we have a soumin and roumin, as any one who has been so fortunate as to hear Mr Outram's pathetic lyric on that interesting right of pasturage will remember, in conjunction with pleasing a.s.sociations. To do the duty of a duces tec.u.m we have a diligence against havers. We have no capias ad faciendum (abbreviated cap ad fac), nor have we the fieri facias, familiarly termed fi fa, but we have perhaps as good in the in meditatione fugae warrant, familiarly abbreviated into fugie, as poor Peter Peebles termed it, when he burst in upon the party a.s.sembled at Justice Foxley's, exclaiming, "Is't here they sell the fugie warrants?"[47]

[Footnote 47: There are two old methods of paying rent in Scotland--Kane and Carriages; the one being rent in kind from the farmyard, the other being an obligation to furnish the landlord with a certain amount of carriage, or rather cartage. In one of the vexed cases of domicile, which had found its way into the House of Lords, a Scotch lawyer argued that a landed gentleman had shown his determination to abandon his residence in Scotland by having given up his "kane and carriages." It is said that the argument went further than he expected--the English lawyers admitting that it was indeed very strong evidence of an intended change of domicile when the laird not only ceased to keep a carriage, but actually divested himself of his walking-cane.]

I am not sure but, in the very mighty heart of all legal formality and technicality--the Statutes at large--some amusing as well as instructive things might be found. Let me offer a guiding hint to the investigator ambitious of entering on this arduous field. The princely collector will, of course, put himself in possession of the magnificent edition of the Statutes issued by the Record Commission, but let not the unprofessional person who must look short of this imagine that he will find satisfaction in the prim pages of a professional lawyer's modern edition. These, indeed, are not truly the Statutes at large, but rather their pedantic and conventional descendants, who have taken out letters of administration to their wild ancestors. They omit all the repealed Statutes in which these ancestors might be found really at large sowing their wild oats, and consequently all that would give them interest and zest for those in search of such qualities.

It is not, for instance, in the decorous quartos of Roughhead, but in the h.o.a.ry blackletter folios, looking older than they are--for blackletter adhered to the Statutes after it had been cast off by other literature--that one will find such specimens of ancestral legislation as the following:--

ATTORNEYS.--(33 Henry VI. c. 7.)

"Item: Whereas of time not long past, within the city of Norwich, and the counties of Norfolk and Suffolk, there were no more but six or eight atturneys at the most coming to the King's Courts, in which time great tranquillity reigned in the said city and counties, little trouble or vexation was made by untrue or foreign suits, and now so it is, that in the said city and counties there be four score atturneys or more, the more part of them having no other thing to live upon, but only his gain by the practise of atturneys.h.i.+p: and also the more part of them not being of sufficient knowledge to be an atturney, which come to every fair, market, and other places, where is any a.s.sembly of people, exhorting, procuring, moving, and inciting the people to attempt untrue and foreign suits for small trespa.s.ses, little offences, and small sums of debt, whose actions be triable and determinable in Court Barons, whereby proceed many suits, more of evil will and malice than of truth of the thing, to the manifold vexations and no little damage of the inhabitants of the said city and counties, and all to the perpetual diminution of all the Court Barons in the said counties, unless convenient remedy be provided in this behalf. The foresaid Lord the King, considering the premises, by the advice, a.s.sent, and authority aforesaid, hath ordained and stablished that at all times, from hencefort, there shall be but six common atturneys in the said county of Norfolk, and six common atturneys in the said county of Suffolk, and two common atturneys in the said city of Norwich, to be atturneys in the Courts of Record."

FUSTIAN.--(11 Henry VII. c. 27.)

"Now so it is, that divers persons, by subtilty and undue sleights and means, have deceivably imagined and contrived instruments of iron, with the which irons, in the most highest and secret places of their houses, they strike and draw the said irons over the said fustians unshorn; by means whereof they pluck off both the nap and cotton of the same fustians, and break commonly both the ground and threeds in sunder, and after by crafty sleeking, they make the same fustians to appear to the common people fine, whole, and sound: and also they raise up the cotton of such fustians, and then take a light candle and set it in the fustian burning, which sindgeth and burneth away the cotton of the same fustian from the one end to the other down to the hard threeds, in stead of shering, and after that put them in colour, and so subtilly dress them that their false work cannot be espied without it be by workmen sherers of such fustians, or by the wearers of the same, and so by such subtilties, whereas fustians made in doublets or put to any other use, were wont and might endure the s.p.a.ce of two years and more, will not endure now whole by the s.p.a.ce of four months scarcely, to the great hurt of the poor commons and serving men of this realm, to the great damage, loss, and deceit of the King's true subjects, buyers and wearers of such fustians," &c.

The history of statute-making is not absolutely divested of pleasantry.

The best tradition connected with it at present arising in the memory is not to be brought to book, and must be given as a tradition of the time when George III. was king. Its tenor is, that a bill which proposed, as the punishment of an offence, to levy a certain pecuniary penalty, one half thereof to go to his Majesty and the other half to the informer, was altered in committee, in so far that, when it appeared in the form of an act, _the punishment_ was changed to whipping and imprisonment, _the destination_ being left unaltered.

It is wonderful that such mistakes are not of frequent occurrence when one remembers the hot hasty work often done by committees, and the complex entanglements of sentences on which they have to work.[48]

Bentham was at the trouble of counting the words in one sentence of an Act of Parliament, and found that, beginning with "Whereas" and ending with the word "repealed," it was precisely the length of an ordinary three-volume novel. To offer the reader that sentence on the present occasion would be rather a heavy jest, and as little reasonable as the revenge offered to a village schoolmaster who, having complained that the whole of his little treatise on the Differential Calculus was printed bodily in one of the earlier editions of the Encyclopaedia Britannica (not so profitable as the later), was told that he was welcome, in his turn, to incorporate the Encyclopaedia Britannica in the next edition of his little treatise.

[Footnote 48: A polite correspondent reminds me of the Registration Act, 52 G. III. c. 156, in which the fruit of penalties is divided between the informer, who gets one half, and certain charitable purposes, to which the other is devoted, while the only penalty set forth in the Act is transportation for fourteen years.]

In the supposition, however, that there are few readers who, like Lord King, can boast of having read the Statutes at large through, I venture to give a t.i.tle of an Act--a t.i.tle only, remember, of one of the bundle of acts pa.s.sed in one session--as an instance of the comprehensiveness of English statute law, and the lively way in which it skips from one subject to another. It is called--

"An Act to continue several laws for the better regulating of pilots, for the conducting of s.h.i.+ps and vessels from Dover, Deal, and the Isle of Thanet, up the River Thames and Medway; and for the permitting rum or spirits of the British sugar plantations to be landed before the duties of excise are paid thereon; and to continue and amend an Act for preventing fraud in the admeasurement of coals within the city and liberties of Westminster, and several parishes near thereunto; and to continue several laws for preventing exactions of occupiers of locks and wears upon the River Thames westward; and for ascertaining the rates of water-carriage upon the said river; and for the better regulation and government of seamen in the merchant service; and also to amend so much of an Act made during the reign of King George I. as relates to the better preservation of salmon in the River Ribble; and to regulate fees in trials and a.s.sizes at nisi prius," &c.

But this gets tiresome, and we are only half way through the t.i.tle after all. If the reader wants the rest of it, as also the substantial Act itself, whereof it is the t.i.tle, let him turn to the 23d of Geo. II., chap. 26.

No wonder, if he antic.i.p.ated this sort of thing, that Bacon should have commended "the excellent brevity of the old Scots acts." Here, for instance, is a specimen, an actual statute at large, such as they were in those pigmy days:--

"Item, it is statute that gif onie of the King's lieges pa.s.ses in England, and resides and remains there against the King's will, he shall be halden as Traiter to the King."