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whose "babble" but distracts the listener. With uttermost scorn the same philosopher descants on Universal Suffrage as "the admirablest method ever imagined of counting heads and gathering indubitable votes: you will thus gather the vote, vox or voice, of all the two-legged animals without feathers in your dominion; what they think is what the gods thinkis it not?—and this you shall go and do." Mr. Carlyle would prefer the voice of a single human being, that could and would speak with power; whether backed or not by the vox populi as Cato is made to be in Ben Jonson's tragedy:

People. The voice of Cato is the voice of Rome.

Cato. The voice of Rome is the consent of heaven."

Perhaps the most memorable passage in which the author of "Hero Worship" has put on record his contempt for a shouting mob, merely as such, is that in stern reminder of a certain People, once upon a time, who clamorously voted by overwhelming majority, "Not He; Barabbas, not He! . Barabbas is our man; Barabbas, we are for Barabbas !" Well, they got Barabbas, he goes on to say; and they got of course such guidance as Barabbas and the like of him could give them; "and, of course, they stumbled ever downwards and devilwards, in their truculent stiffnecked way; andand, at this hour, after eighteen centuries of sad fortune, they prophetically sing 'Ou' clo!' in all the cities of the world." Mr. Carlyle adds a sort of monitory, minatory aspiration, Might the world, at this late hour, but take note of them, and understand their song a little!

Not that he, any more than any other large-hearted and open-minded thinker, is apt to ignore what is of weight, at times, in the voice of the people. But it is rather to their instincts than their thoughts-to their native impulses than their acquired opinions-that he challenges attention and respect. Witness what he says of the shrieks of indignation, the howl of contumely, with which the Bastille was assailed in '89. "Great is the combined voice of men; the utterance of their instincts, which are truer than their thoughts: it is the greatest

a man encounters among the sounds and shadows which make up this World of Time. He who can resist that, has his footing somewhere beyond Time." *

Philip de Commines incidentally recognizes the vox populi as vox Dei, when relating the ruin and the deaths of three kings of Arragon within a little more than one year: "I conclude, therefore, with several pious and religious men, and the general voice of the people (which is the voice of God), that God intended to make an example of these princes," etc. And yet probably Maître Philippe would not have said nay to the blunt speech of Lord Lytton's Man of the Middle Class, that "Heaven made the people, and the devil makes three-fourths of what is popular." Shelley quotes the adage vox populi vox Dei only to apply to it what his father-in-law said of a more famous proverb, “Of some merit as a popular maxim, but totally destitute of philosophical accuracy." The voice of the people, writes a Quarterly Reviewer, may be the voice of God when they rise as one man on some grand occasion for the just and necessary vindication of their rights; but it is difficult to recognize the Divine origin when we hear nothing but the Babel-like hubbub of corruption, selfishness, and intrigue. Coleridge speaks, in one of his earlier political essays, of the public will expressing itself at first in low and distant tones, "but if corruption deafen power [on the part of the government], gradually increasing till they swell into a deep and awful thunder, the vOICE OF GOD, [the capitals are S. T. C's very own,] which his vicegerents must hear, and hearing dare not disobey." It must have been in remembrance of such a passage, and by way of eager disclaimer of the construction put upon it, by those who called him renegade from the liberalism of his youth, that the old man eloquent,

* Hast thou considered how each man's heart is so tremulously responsive to the hearts of all men; hast thou noted how omnipotent is the very sound of many men? Gluck confessed that the ground-tone of the noblest passage, in one of his noblest operas, was the voice of the populace he had heard at Vienna, crying to their Kaiser: Bread! Bread!"-Carlyle: History of the French Revolution, Book v. chap. vi.

CORINTHIAN LAW-SUITS.

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the noticeable man with large gray eyes, uttered this deprecatory protest in after days: "I never said that the vox populi was of course vox Dei. It may be; but it may be, and with equal probability, vox Diaboli. That the voice of 10,000,000 of men calling for the same thing is a spirit, I believe; but whether that be a spirit of Heaven or Hell, I can only know by trying the thing called for by the prescript of reason and God's will."

ST.

LITIGIOUS.

I CORINTHIANS vi. 7.

T. PAUL accounts it utterly a fault among the Corinthian Christians that they have a habit of going to law one with another. A habit so bad, as he regards the matter, that he even puts the question, why do they not rather take wrong? why not rather suffer themselves to be defrauded? He was conversant with the letter and spirit of the Sermon on the Mount; and in the spirit of it, and to the letter of it, he denounced the practice of going to law between brethren. "It is an honour for a man," saith the Wise Man, "to cease from strife; but every fool will be meddling." The beginning of strife, as another proverb has it, "is as when one letteth out water; therefore leave off contention before it be meddled with." The apostle would have argued out the injunction on higher ground than these worldly-wise reasons may suggest, and would have made a particular appeal to Christian principle where the Wise King makes a general one to arguments of expediency; but into the speciality of his stand-point there is no present occasion to enter; enough that he is stringent against the litigious spirit, and would manifestly be as stern as Racine is satirical against les plaideurs.

It has been truly said of the litigious quibbling nature of the Greeks, that it was the soil on which an art like that of the Sophists was made to flourish. "This excessive love of lawsuits is familiar to all versed in Grecian history. The almost

:

farcical representation of a lawsuit, given by Æschylus in his otherwise awful drama, The Eumenides, shows with what keen and lively interest the audience witnessed even the very details of litigation." The English, rightly or wrongly, have the repute abroad of being equally fond of going to law. The Marchese Scampa in one of Landor's Imaginary Conversations-and that author has furnished ample corroborative evidence in his own practice-declares law to be to an Englishman like his native. air: he flies to it as he flies to his ship; he loses his appetite if he misses it and he never thinks he has enough of it until it has fairly stripped him and begins to lie heavy on his stomach. "It is his tea, his plum-pudding, his punch, his nightcap." Happy! if he can throw it off so easily as the last, when he wakens. For, as Plautus words the warning, Nescis tu quam meticulosa res sit ire ad judicem, You can little tell what a ticklish thing it is to go to law. Swift supports his Scheme to make an Hospital for Incurables, by alleging the vast supplies it would receive "from contentious people of all conditions, who are content to waste the greatest part of their own fortunes at law, to be the instrument of impoverishing others." There is a familiar process of quarrelling without anger, of pursuing claims which it is not intended to enforce, (the last war in China was described as analogous with this style of litigation,) of finding that every fresh step renders it more difficult to abandon the suit, and of accumulating costs which bear a constantly increasing proportion to the value of the subject-matter; in many instances there being not even the miserable satisfaction of throwing the blame on the attorney, for it seems as if every stage in the proceedings had been justified by prudence or necessity. "The perplexed client can only attribute his troubles to an overruling destiny, or, in other words, to the imperfection of human foresight, and to the mutual inability of different persons to understand one another's motives and intentions." The robes of lawyers are lined with the obstinacy of suitors, is an Italian adage which, laid to heart, is proposed by Archbishop Trench as a means of keeping men out of lawsuits, or, being in them, from refusing to accept tolerable terms of accom

A SAGE ORDINANCE.

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modation. Diedrich Knickerbocker may well be enthusiastic in praise of the exalted wisdom of Charondas, the Locrian legislator, whose was the "sage ordinance," that whoever proposed a new law, should do it with a halter round his neck; so that, in case his proposition was rejected, they just hung him up, and there the matter ended; the alleged effect of which salutary institution was, that for more than two hundred years there was only one trifling alteration in the criminal code, and the whole race of lawyers starved to death for want of employment.

"Depuis qu'il est des lois, l'homme, pour ses péchés,

Se condamne à plaider la moitié de sa vie :

La moitié! les trois quarts, et bien souvent le tout."

The Locrians enjoy the credit of having, in consequence of the Charondan canon, lived very lovingly together, and of being such a happy people, that they scarce make any figure throughout the whole Grecian history. They found no sustenance for the pettifoggers, who crowd the law-courts they infest, as the mythical historian of New York puts it, by tampering with the passions of the lower and more ignorant classes ; who, as if poverty were not a sufficient misery in itself, are always ready to heighten it by the bitterness of litigation. The pettifoggers are charged with being in law what quacks are in medicine-exciting the malady for the purpose of profiting by the

and retarding the cure for the purpose of augmenting the fees. "Where one destroys the constitution, the other impoverishes the purse;" and it is also observable, that as a patient, who has once been under the hands of a quack, is ever after dabbling in drugs, and poisoning himself with infallible remedies, so an ignorant man, who has once meddled with the law, under the auspices of one of these empirics, is for ever after embroiling himself with his neighbours, and impoverishing himself with successful lawsuits. An unsuccessful one is reward enough for some litigants, for in the dear delight of litigation itself they have their reward. When the Abbé Fragueir lost a suit that had been going on for twenty years, he was reminded of all the costs and troubles it must have inflicted on him first and last. "Oh!" buoyantly replied the