THE LAW'S DELAY, CARES, COSTS.

395

or an over-strong sense of wrong, under which they would, by many degrees, prefer utter ruin to making the slightest concession to a neighbour. It is a very noteworthy trait in the costermongers of London, as alleged by the closest and most comprehensive student of their ways, that their dread of all courts of law, or of anything connected with the law, is second only to their hatred of the police.

Feltham likens a lawsuit to a building: we cast up the charge in gross and under-reckon it, he says, but being in for it, we are trained along through several items, till we can neither bear the account, nor leave off, though we have a mind to it. "The anxiety, the trouble, the attendance, the hazard, the checks, the vexatious delays, the surreptitious advantages against us, the defeats of hope, the falseness of pretending friends, the interest of parties, the negligence of agents, and the designs of ruin upon us, do put us upon a combat against all that can plague poor man; or else we must lie down, be trodden upon, be kicked and die." Judge Haliburton's oracle, for his part, never condescends to shake hands with a lawyer their grasp is adhesive, he says, you can never disengage your fingers, but are trapped, as an owl is, with bird-lime.* Matters are not so much mended since Ariosto painted his gentlemen of the long-robe, as our penny-a-liners call, or used to call them, whose

:

* Was he thinking of Crabbe's picture of that small office where the incautious guest goes blindfold in, where in his web the observant spider lies, and peers about for fat intruding flies?

"Doubtful at first he hears the distant hum,

And feels them fluttering as they nearer come;
They buzz and blink, and doubtfully they tread
On the strong birdlime of the utmost thread;
But when they're once entangled by the gin,
With what an eager clasp he draws them in!
Nor shall they 'scape, till after long delay,
And all that sweetens life is drawn away.'

BOROUGH, letter vi.

In courts of delegates and of requests,

To grieve the simple sort with great vexations."

But then if the simple sort love to have it so-que voulez-vous? And if a Peter Peebles is not very uncommon, very common indeed is an Andrew Fairservice, bent on having his pennyworth of cheap litigation, and making the most of it. As a sweet morsel under his tongue the pawky gardener rolls the syllables he has learnt from "a canny chiel" he kens at Loughmaben, "a bit writer lad"-jurisdictiones fandandy causey, such is Andrew's law Latin, and to him "thae are bonny writer words-amaist like the language o' huz gardeners and other learned men-it's a pity they're sae dear—thae three words were a' that Andrew got for a lang law-plea, and four ankers o' as gude brandy as e'er was coupit ower craig—Hech, sirs! but law's a dear thing." Wordsworth once led a distinguished guest, in their hillside rambles, to a ravishing view of a little pastoral recess, within the very heart of the highest mountains, where lay a hamlet of seven cottages clustering together as if for mutual support in that lovely but awful solitude-a solitude, indeed, so perfect the stranger had never seen, nor had he supposed it possible that in the midst of populous England any little brotherhood of households could pitch their tents so far aloof from human society, from its noisy bustle, and (he ventured to hope) its angry passions. Here, if anywhere, it seemed possible that a world-wearied man should find perfect rest. "Yes," said the philosophic guide, "Nature has done her part to create in this place an absolute and perpetual Sabbath. And doubtless you conceive that in those low-roofed dwellings her intentions are seconded. Be undeceived then lawsuits, and the passions of lawsuits, have carried fierce dissension into this hidden paradise of the hills : and it is a fact, that not one of those seven families will now speak to another." The listener turned away at these words with a pang of misanthropy, and for one moment assented. he confesses, to the king of Brobdignag—that men are the most pernicious race of little odious vermin that nature ever suffered to crawl upon the surface of the earth.

BENTLEY'S CAMBRIDGE FEUDS.

397

Something of the same sentiment impressed Mr. de Quincey at intervals in his study of the great Bentley and his contemporaries, and their Cambridge feuds of all but implacable intensity and interminable length. Where upon this earth, he thought, should peace be found, if not within the cloistered solitudes of Oxford and Cambridge ?-places combining the resources of capital cities, with the deep tranquillity of sylvan hamletsplaces so favoured by time, accident, and law, as to come nearer to the creatures of Romance than any other known realities of Christendom; yet in these privileged haunts of meditation did the leading society of Cambridge, headed by the world's foremost scholar of the day, through a period of forty years engage in litigation of the fiercest,-sacrifice their time, energy, fortune, personal liberty, and conscience, to the prosecution, "with so deadly an acharnement," of their immortal hatreds; vexing the very altars with their ferocious discussions, and going to their graves so perfectly unreconciled, that, “had the classical usage of funeral cremation been restored, we might have looked for the old miracle of the Theban Brothers, and expected the very flames which consumed the hostile bodies to revolt asunder, and violently refuse to mingle." Some of the combatants, De Quincey points out, were young men at the beginning of the quarrel, but greyheaded, palsied, withered, doting, before it ended ;—some had outlived all distinct memory except of their imperishable hatreds ;—many died during its progress; and sometimes their deaths, by disturbing the equilibrium of the factions, had the effect of "kindling into fiercer activity those rabid passions which, in a Christian community, they should naturally have disarmed or soothed." Inter finitimos immortale odium.

CHILDISHNESS PRESENT, CHILDHOOD PAST.
I CORINTHIANS xiii. II.

· A

GOOD thing in season, how good is it! But even a good thing, out of season, may be bad. Unseasonable is often unreasonable; out of all season is out of all reason. "When I was a child," says the apostle, "I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child ; but when I became a man, I put away childish things.” "Brethren,” he exhorts the Church at Corinth, in another paragraph of his letter, "be not children in understanding; howbeit in malice be ye children, but in understanding be men." He understood as a child once. But the time past sufficed for that. Once upon a time was enough. Let bygones be bygones. In simplicity of heart he would have his converts be children ever. Might each man of them never outgrow his childhood, in that sense! For of such is the kingdom of heaven; and indeed only such as become little children have the promise of that kingdom. But in understanding, in wit (as that word was accepted of old), let each man of them strive to be manly: "in wit, a man; simplicity a child." It is a sorry thing to see childishness present when childhood is long past.

So long past, that, as extremes meet, second childhood has perhaps set in. An old divine tells us of a yet older, "Mr. Leigh, the synodical commentator," that he used, after he was seventy years of age, to begin his account again; so that if he was asked how old he was he would say five; five on the new account, seventy-five in all. But between first and second childhood there is a great gulf fixed. Sometimes memory itself has failed as a connecting link, and then the picture is that very sombre one of the seventh of the seven ages:

"Last scene of all,

That ends this strange, eventful history,

Is second childishness, and mere oblivion.”

Too often, as the essayist on Mechanism in Thoughts and

FIRST AND SECOND CHILDHOOD.

399

Morals has said, we see memory perish before the organ of it-the mighty satirist tamed into oblivious imbecility, as Swift; the great scholar wandering without sense of time or place among his alcoves, like Southey taking his books one by one from the shelves and fondly patting them; a child once more among his toys, but a child whose to-morrows come hungry, and not full-handed-come as birds of prey in the place of the sweet singers of morning.* Goneril is speaking quite in character when she says, "Old fools are babes again, and must be used with checks as [well as] flatteries." "That great baby, you see there," says Hamlet of Polonius, "is not yet out of his swaddling clouts." "Happily, he's the second time come to them," answers Rosencrantz; "for, they say, an old man is twice a child." Hawthorne's posthumous fragment, Pansie, contains a graphic sketch of old Dr. Dolliver and his great granddaughter and a kitten,—all three companions on intimate terms, as was natural enough, since a great many childish impulses were softly creeping back on the simple-minded old man; insomuch that, if no worldly necessities nor painful infirmity had disturbed him, his remnant of life "might have been as cheaply and cheerily enjoyed as the early playtime of the kitten and the child." Says Merryman in the Prologue to Goethe's Faust,

"That age doth make us childish, some maintain—

No, it but finds us children once again."

But what a different finding from the first! Oh that old age were truly second childhood! exclaims one who declares it to be seldom more like it than the berry is to the rosebud. And there is apt to recur to the mind Macaulay's only too salient contrast between those unsuccessful attempts to articulate which are so delightful and interesting in a child, but which disgust and shock us in an aged paralytic. Or, again,

"We must all become as little children if we live long enough; but how blank an existence the wrinkled infant must carry into the kingdom of heaven, if the Power that gave him memory does not repeat the miracle by restoring it."-Mechanism in Thoughts and Morals, p. 95.