does he would never have left me else. He does.' And the wrangling and love-making dialogue that follows is worthy either of Marston or of Jonson. But on the whole this play might not unjustly be described as Marston and water. Antonio, though he has some very pretty and fanciful verses to say, is a very thin 'moonshine shadow' of Andrugio. But in lighter things the lighter touch of Day is graceful and pleasant enough; the scene of blind man's buff in which the prisoner escapes by the help of his princess and her page, and leaves his gaoler in gaol, is as pretty an interlude of farce as even Molière could have devised by way of relief to the graver interest of romantic comedy.2

In the moral and satirical allegory of the scholar's pilgrimage, for the survival or revival of which Day and we owe sincere thanks to Mr. Bullen, the opening attack on the tricks of tradesmen is noticeable for a realistic force of humour not unworthy of Dekker. The wealth of curious terms and phrases would amply repay the research of a social historian or an intelligent lexicographer.3 There are such vivid and picturesque touches in the description of 'Poneria, or Sin,' as would be famous if they had but had the luck to be laid on by the hand of no better a poet than Bunyan. For example: 'Her hair, that hung in loose trammels about her shoulders, like fine threads of gold, seemed like a curled flame that burns downwards.' The entire allegory is alive with ingenious and imaginative invention of incident and symbol. There are touches of genuine if not very subtle or recondite humour in the seventeenth 'tractate:' the description of a kind of justice in law' and his household is hardly unworthy of Fielding or of Dickens; and 'the new vicar, made out of an old friar that had been twice turned at a religion-dresser's,' is a clergyman fit to stand beside the reverend and immortal figure of Parson Trulliber. In the nineteenth tractate it is curious to come once more upon the old mediæval fable or allegory of human life as a tree growing in the side of a gulf or pit, with God as a raging lion and the devil as a fiery serpent above it and beneath, and the white mouse Day and the black mouse Night ever nibbling at the root of it.4

The best known or rather the least unknown of Day's works belongs to the same category of allegorical satire. Leigh Hunt, who spoke of it with his usual and unfailing charm of sympathetic and

6

2 In the third line of the second speech of this play there is an obviously ridiculous misprint: the steeds still armed' could only have been 'banded with steel,' not 'branded '-or fired.

3 In his description of Envy, Day uses the word 'hag' as a masculine substantive, and Anger he defines as 'a right low country boot-haler.' The rare word 'swelted' which occurs in the sixth tractate the beauteous flowers were nothing else but swelted weeds '-is apparently another form of 'wilted.'

In the seventh tractate there is a curious phrase which is new to me: he is his own as sure as a club.'

sensitive appreciation in that delightful book which will always be especially cherished by all to whom his genius and Richard Doyle's are dear, was as right as might have been expected in his objection that the characters who play their parts in The Parliament of Bees were too unlike the makers of honey to represent them fairly in sight of the laziest and most indulgent fancy. He knew this quaint and queer and beautiful poem only by the extracts given in Lamb's priceless Specimens, and consequently could not guess that it was mainly intended as a direct and obvious presentation, satirical or panegyrical, of contemporary and characteristic types of men and women under the merely nominal and transparent form of bees. It is a real pity that the happy and happy-making author of A Jar of Honey from Mount Hybla should never have read even the title of the original version unearthed by the deservedly fortunate and thankworthy research of Mr. Bullen: An old Manuscript containing the Parliament of Bees, found in a hollow tree in a garden at Hybla, in a strange language, and now faithfully translated into easy English verse by John Day, Cantabrig.'-who ventures to append the motto chosen by Shakespeare for the first book which ever bore on its title-page the most illustrious of all mortal or immortal names. Balzac, if not Hugo, might have been interested to learn from the dedication 'how Lewis the eleventh (of that name) King of France took notice, and bountifully rewarded a decayed gardener, who presented him with a bunch of carrots.'

6

The partnership of Dekker in this work, detected and verified by Mr. Bullen, is confirmed beyond all question by comparison of the good metre in the charming sixth scene with the scandalously slipshod verse which here and there disfigures those which precede and follow it a perverse and villanous defect peculiar to Dekker alone among all his fellows; a sin out of which even the merciless lash of Ben Jonson failed to whip him into repentance and reformation. The changes from the manuscript in the printed text are sometimes at least such improvements as transfigure rather poor verse into really good poetry; and sometimes of a much more dubious kind. A passage which does not reappear in the printed Parliament of Bees, but recurs in Dekker's Wonder of a Kingdom, seems to me better expressed in its original manuscript form.

He that will read my acts of charity

Shall find them writ in ashes, which the wind
Shall scatter ere he spells them.

In the text of Dekker's play we find this surely inferior version:

He that will read the wasting of my gold

Shall find it writ in ashes, which the wind
Will scatter ere he spends it.

But if Wordsworth, Landor, and even Tennyson, did not always

change for the better, we can hardly expect a more infallible felicity in revision from Dekker or from Day.

That the third Character' belongs to Dekker seems to me evident from the cancelled couplet which announces without introducing an important figure in The Wonder of a Kingdom, the disowned and impoverished brother of the profligate and ruffianly braggart. As that gallant and ill-requited soldier is the next 'Character,' this scene must also, I presume, be Dekker's. But it is Day, I think, who touches the loathsome lips of the typical and eternal poetastersycophant and slanderer, coward and liar-with indirect and involuntary praise of Persius. I doubt whether Dekker could have construed a dozen consecutive lines of the noble young Roman stoic.

How Day could have had the heart to cancel some of the sweetest lines he ever wrote I cannot conjecture; but the strange fact is that these pretty verses were struck away from the sixth and gracefullest scene of the most delightful little poem he has left us.

A pair of suns move in his spherelike eyes;
Were I love's pirate, he should be my prize.
Only his person lightens all the room,

For where his beauty shines night dares not come.

His frown would school a tyrant to be meek;

Love's chronicle is painted on his cheek,

Where lilies and fresh roses spread so high

As death himself to see them fade would die.

This passage can hardly have been cancelled because the characteristics of fascinating youth described in it were rather human than apiarian: the whole poem, on that score, would at once deserve the castigation of fire.

The seventh interlude, brightly and lightly written after the ready fashion of Dekker, has just the straightforward simplicity of his satire in its caricatures of parsimony and prodigality, with something of his roughness and laxity in metre. In the ninth and tenth we find him again, and recognise in each the first shape or sketch of yet another scene in the tragicomedy to which so much was transferred from this as yet unpublished poem. The eighth, a sequel or counterpart to the sixth, is no less evidently the work of Day: as smooth and musical in metre, as extravagant and fantastic in conceit. The two sweet and graceful scenes which wind up the pretty and fanciful weft of this lyric and satiric poem are perhaps the best evidence left us of Day's especial and delightful gift; fresh, bright, and delicate as the spirit and the genius of the poet and critic who discovered him, and gave his modest and gentle name the imperishable and most enviable honour of association with the name of Lamb.

ALGERNON CHARLES SWINBURNE.

FIFTY YEARS OF

THE ENGLISH COUNTY COURTS

FIFTY years ago an Act of Parliament came into force in England and Wales dealing with a branch of the subject of legal reform. It had passed through all its stages at the end of the stormy session of the free-trade year, receiving the royal assent on the 28th of August 1846, and it became law under the modest title of An Act for the more easy Recovery of Small Debts and Demands in England.' The debates which attended its passage through both Houses are recorded within less than a dozen columns of Hansard; yet its proposals were the outcome of nearly twenty years of resolute parliamentary effort, met by opposition no less persistent. Such struggles are wont to end, as this did, in a compromise. It was the old story of all sound English reform: hasty change was successfully withstood, and gradual evolution was happily accomplished. Now that the County Court system so inaugurated has been in operation in England for half a century, I may perhaps be permitted, as one who during the last fifteen years has worked in the mill,' to trace briefly the origin and progress and endeavour to realise the result of a measure whose full importance is hardly recognised as yet, but which will one day be reckoned among the great legislative achievements of Her Majesty's reign.

In the year 1828 Brougham had directed the attention of the House of Commons to the then existing state of the courts of common law, examining their constitution and the mode in which the business was distributed and conducted. In one of those flights of rhetoric so characteristic of the man he declared, 'If we view the whole establishments of the country,' whether executive, administrative, civil, military, naval, diplomatic, domestic, or fiscal, 'all shrink into nothing when compared with the pure, prompt, and cheap administration of justice throughout the Empire.' It was an easy task at that time to expose mischiefs which stayed the administration of civil jurisprudence, often causing a virtual denial of justice to large classes of the people. Those evils resulted mainly from rigid adherence to a system which arose out of conditions of life prevalent for a certain period in England. But those conditions were temporary; they had long passed away; the system had become obsolete.

As will presently be seen, however, the modern endeavour to provide for the administration of civil justice speedily, and on the spot, is but a return to the sounder principles and practice of an earlier age; and follows the enlightened maxim of Bacon: 'Antiquity deserveth that reverence, that men should make a stand thereupon, and discover what is the best way; but when the Discovery is well taken, then to make Progression.'

1

In feudal times the civil tribunals in England were threefold. There was the Supreme Court-baron, in which the sovereign, as superior lord, summoned his great tenants, those who held per baroniam, to administer justice for the whole realm; while the tenants of the Crown who held otherwise than per baroniam also performed judicial duties as one of the conditions of their tenure, exercising jurisdiction in respect of matters arising within their respective counties; their court was called the Curia Comitatus -the County Court--being held by and before the Comitatus, or body of Freeholders of the County; and, lastly, the inferior lords of manors were entitled to summon their own freehold tenants in Courts-baron, and so to exercise jurisdiction in matters arising within the district of the seignory. In the two latter tribunals the ordinary jurisdiction was limited to forty shillings, an amount probably sufficient in feudal times to reach most of the ordinary disputes of daily life; and it was their chief virtue that they were local, and therefore easy of access as well for the suitors as the sued.3 Thus, to use the words of Blackstone, Justice was brought home to every man's door, by constituting as many Courts of Judicature as there were manors or townships in the kingdom, wherein injuries were redressed in an easy and expeditious manner by the suffrages of neighbours and friends.' It may be assumed that the procedure in the local tribunals was simple and speedy; perhaps, too, it was cheap; but with the decay of the feudal system and the gradual decline in the value of money, the forty-shilling courts fell more and more into disuse. Instead of the local system being adapted to the changed conditions of life, the business of litigation was gradually drawn away from the districts in which the suitors resided, with increased gain to the London lawyers, who became in the course of time a brilliant and powerful craft, but with an increase of cost,

1 In the Appellate Jurisdiction of the House of Lords part of that duty exists to this day, its function as a Court of First Instance being now delegated to other hands, and Barons by Tenure superseded by Barons by Writ of Summons.

2 In Wales, and in the Counties Palatine of Lancaster, Chester, and Durham, a local jurisdiction survived large enough for dealing with cases of greater magnitude, but throughout the rest of the country the work of local courts was practically limited to the task of enforcing payment of petty debts by means of a dilatory, costly, and inefficient procedure.

The local courts were controlled by appeal to the central and superior judiciary, whose delegates-justiciarii in itinere, or Justices in Eyre, now superseded by the Judges of Assize-went round the country from time to time.