will have no dealings. It is sheer nonsense; lives of great men all
remind us it is sheer nonsense. Some of our greatest men have been
infernal scoundrels--pre-eminently bad men--with nothing mad about
them, unless it be mad to get on in the world and knock people about
in it.

_Twelve Bad Women_ contains much interesting matter, but, on the
whole, it is depressing. It seems very dull to be bad. Perhaps the
editor desired to create this impression; if so, he has succeeded.
Hannah More had fifty times more fun in her life than all these
courtesans and criminals put together. The note of jollity is
entirely absent. It was no primrose path these unhappy women
traversed, though that it led to the everlasting bonfire it were
unchristian to doubt. The dissatisfaction I confessed to at the
beginning returns upon me as a cloud at the end; but, for all that, I
rejoice the book is in a second edition, and I hope soon to hear it is
in a third, for it has a moral tendency.




ITINERARIES


Anyone who is teased by the notion that it would be pleasant to be
remembered, in the sense of being read, after death, cannot do better
to secure that end than compose an Itinerary and leave it behind him
in manuscript, with his name legibly inscribed thereon. If an honest
bit of work, noting distances, detailing expenses, naming landmarks,
moors, mountains, harbours, docks, buildings--indeed, anything which,
as lawyers say, savours of realty--and but scantily interspersed with
reflections, and with no quotations, why, then, such a piece of work,
however long publication may be delayed--and a century or two will not
matter in the least--cannot fail, whenever it is printed, to attract
attention, to excite general interest and secure a permanent hold in
every decent library in the kingdom.

Time cannot stale an Itinerary. _Iter, Via, Actus_ are words of pith
and moment. Stage-coaches, express trains, motor-cars, have written,
or are now writing, their eventful histories over the face of these
islands; but, whatever changes they have made or are destined to make,
they have left untouched the mystery of the road, although for the
moment the latest comer may seem injuriously to have affected its
majesty.

The Itinerist alone among authors is always sure of an audience. No
matter where, no matter when, he has but to tell us how he footed it
and what he saw by the wayside, and we must listen. How can we help
it? Two hundred years ago, it may be, this Itinerist came through our
village, passed by the wall of our homestead, climbed our familiar
hill, and went on his way; it is perhaps but two lines and a half he
can afford to give us, but what lines they are! How different with
sermons, poems, and novels! On each of these is the stamp of the
author's age; sentiments, fashions, thoughts, faiths, phraseology, all
worn out--cold, dirty grate, where once there was a blazing fire.
Cheerlessness personified! Leland's anti-Papal treatise in forty-five
chapters remains in learned custody--a manuscript; a publisher it will
never find. We still have Papists and anti-Papists; in this case the
fire still blazes, but the grates are of an entirely different
construction. Leland's treatise is out of date. But his _Itinerary_ in
nine volumes, a favourite book throughout the eighteenth century,
which has graced many a bookseller's catalogue for the last hundred
years, and seldom without eliciting a purchaser--Leland's _Itinerary_
is to-day being reprinted under the most able editorship. The charm of
the road is irresistible. The _Vicar of Wakefield_ is a delightful
book, with a great tradition behind it and a future still before it;
but it has not escaped the ravages of time, and I would, now, at all
events, gladly exchange it for Oliver Goldsmith's _Itinerary through
Germany with a Flute_!

Vain authors, publisher's men, may write as they like about
_Shakespeare's_ country, or _Scott's_ country, or _Carlyle's_ country,
or _Crockett's_ country, but--

'Oh, good gigantic smile of the brown old earth!'

the land laughs at the delusions of the men who hurriedly cross its
surface.

'Rydal and Fairfield are there,--
In the shadow Wordsworth lies dead.
So it is, so it will be for aye,
Nature is fresh as of old,
Is lovely, a mortal is dead.'

These reflections, which by themselves would be enough to sink even an
Itinerary, seemed forced upon me by the publication of _A Journey to
Edenborough in Scotland by Joseph Taylor, Late of the Inner Temple,
Esquire_. This journey was made two hundred years ago in the Long
Vacation of 1705, but has just been printed from the original
manuscript, under the editorship of Mr. William Cowan, by the
well-known Edinburgh bookseller, Mr. Brown, of Princes Street, to whom
all lovers of things Scottish already owe much.

Nobody can hope to be less known than this our latest Itinerist, for
not only is he not in the _Dictionary of National Biography_, but it
is at present impossible to say which of two Joseph Taylors he was.
The House of the Winged Horse has ever had Taylors on its roll, the
sign of the Middle Temple, a very fleecy sheep, being perhaps
unattractive to the clan, and in 1705 it so happened that not only
were there two Taylors, but two Joseph Taylors, entitled to write
themselves 'of the Inner Temple, Esquire.' Which was the Itinerist?
Mr. Cowan, going by age, thinks that the Itinerist can hardly have
been the Joseph Taylor who was admitted to the Inn in 1663, as in that
case he must have been at least fifty-eight when he travelled to
Edinburgh. For my part, I see nothing in the _Itinerary_ to preclude
the possibility of its author having attained that age at the date of
its composition. I observe in the _Itinerary_ references which point
to the Itinerist being a Kentish man, and he mentions more than once
his 'Cousin D'aeth.' Research among the papers of the D'aeths of
Knowlton Court, near Dover, might result in the discovery which of
these two Taylors really was the Itinerist. As nothing else is at
present known about either, the investigation could probably be made
without passion or party or even religious bias. It might be
best begun by Mr. Cowan telling us in whose custody he found the
manuscript, and how it came there. These statements should always
be made when old manuscripts are first printed.

The journey began on August 2, 1705. The party consisted of Mr. Taylor
and his two friends, Mr. Harrison and Mr. Sloman. They travelled on
horseback, and often had difficulties with the poor beast that carried
their luggage. They reached Edinburgh in the evening of August 31, and
left it on their return journey on September 8, and got home on the
25th of the same month. The _Itinerary_ concludes as follows:

'Thus we spent almost 2 months in a Journy of many 100 miles,
sometimes thro' very charming Countryes, and at other times over
desolate and Barren Mountaines, and yet met with no particular
misfortune in all the Time.'

I may say at once of these three Itinerists--Mr. Taylor, Mr. Harrison,
and Mr. Sloman--that they appear to have been thoroughly
commonplace, well behaved, occasionally hilarious Englishmen, ready to
endure whatever befell them, if unavoidable; accustomed to take their
ease in their inn and to turn round and look at any pretty woman they
might chance to meet on their travels. Their first experience of what
the Itinerist calls 'the prodigies of Nature,' 'at once an occasion
both of Horrour and Admiration,' was in the Peak Country 'described in
poetry by the ingenious Mr. Cotton.' This part of the world they 'did'
with something of the earnestness of the modern tourist. But I hardly
think they enjoyed themselves. The 'prodigious' caverns and strange
petrifactions shocked them; 'nothing can be more terrible or shocking
to Nature.' Mam Tor, with its 1,710 feet, proved very impressive, 'a
vast high mountain reaching to the very clouds.' This gloom of the
Derbyshire hills and stony valleys was partially dispelled for our
travellers by a certain 'fair Gloriana' they met at Buxton, with whom
they had great fun, 'so much the greater, because we never expected
such heavenly enjoyments in so desolate a country.' If it be on
susceptibilities of this nature that Mr. Cowan rests his case for
thinking that the Itinerist can hardly have attained 'the blasted
antiquity' of fifty-eight, we must think Mr. Cowan a trifle hasty, or
a very young man, perhaps under forty, which is young for an editor.

After describing, somewhat too much like an auctioneer, the splendours
of Chatsworth, 'a Paradise in the deserts of Arabia,' the Itinerist
proceeds on his way north through Nottingham to Belvoir Castle, where
'my Lord Rosses Gentleman (to whom Mr. Harrison was recommended)
entertained us by his Lordship's command with good wine and the best
of malt liquors which the cellar abounds with'; the pictures in the
Long Gallery were shown them by 'my Lord himself.' At Doncaster, 'a
neat market-town which consists only in one long street,' they had
some superlative salmon just taken out of the river. By Knaresborough
Spaw, where they drank the waters and had icy cold baths, and dined at
the ordinary with a parson whose conversation startled the propriety
of the Templar, the travellers made their way to York, and for the
first and last time a few pages of _Guide Book_ are improperly
introduced. Then on to Scarborough.

'The next morning early we left Scarborough and travelled through a
dismall road, particularly near Robins Hood Bay; we were obliged to
lead our horses, and had much ado to get down a vast craggy
mountain which lyes within a quarter of a mile of it. The Bay is
about a mile broad, and inhabited by poor fishermen. We stopt to
taste some of their liquor and discourse with them. They told us
the French privateers came into the Very Bay and took 2 of their
Vessels but the day before, which were ransom'd for L25 a piece. We
saw a great many vessels lying upon the Shore, the masters not
daring to venture out to sea for fear of undergoing the same fate.'

We boast too readily of our inviolate shores.

A curious description is given of the Duke of Buckingham's alum works
near Whitby. The travellers then procured a guide, and traversed 'the
vast moors which lye between Whitby and Gisborough.' The civic
magnificence of Newcastle greatly struck our travellers, who, happier
than their modern successors, were able to see the town miles off. The
Itinerist quotes with gusto the civic proverb that the men of
Newcastle pay nothing for the Way, the Word, or the Water, 'for the
Ministers of Religion are maintained, the streets paved, and the
Conduits kept up at the publick charge.' A disagreeable account is
given of the brutishness of the people employed in the salt works at
Tynemouth. At Berwick the travellers got into trouble with the sentry,
but the mistake was rectified with the captain of the guard over '2
bowles of punch, there being no wine in the town.'

Scotland was now in sight, and the travellers became grave, as
befitted the occasion. They were told that the journey that lay before
them was extremely dangerous, that 'twould be difficult to escape with
their lives, much less (ominous words) without 'the distemper of the
country.' But Mr. Taylor, Mr. Harrison, and Mr. Sloman were as brave
as Mr. Pickwick, and they would on. 'Yet notwithstanding all these sad
representations, we resolv'd to proceed and stand by one another to
the last.'

What the Itinerists thought of Scotland when they got there is not for
me to say. I was once a Scottish member.

They arrived in Edinburgh at a great crisis in Scottish history. They
saw the Duke of Argyll, as Queen Anne's Lord High Commissioner, go to
the Parliament House in this manner:

'First a coach and six Horses for his Gentlemen, then a Trumpet,
then his own coach with six white horses, which were very fine,
being those presented by King William to the Duke of Queensbury,
and by him sold to the Duke of Argyle for L300; next goes a troop
of Horse Guards, cloathed like my Lord of Oxford's Regiment, but
the horses are of several colours; and the Lord Chancellor and the
Secretary of State, and the Lord Chief Justice Clerk, and other
officers of State close the cavalcade in coaches and six horses.
Thus the Commissioner goes and returns every day.'

The Itinerists followed the Duke and his procession into the
Parliament House, and heard debated the great question--the greatest
of all possible questions for Scotland--whether this magnificence
should cease, whether there should be an end of an auld sang--in
short, whether the proposed Act of Union should be proceeded with. By
special favour, our Itinerists had leave to stand upon the steps of
the throne, and witnessed a famous fiery and prolonged debate, the
Duke once turning to them and saying, _sotto voce_, 'It is now
deciding whether England and Scotland shall go together by the ears.'
How it was decided we all know, and that it was wisely decided no one
doubts; yet, when we read our Itinerist's account of the Duke's coach
and horses, and the cavalcade that followed him, and remember that
this was what happened every day during the sitting of the Parliament,
and must not be confounded with the greater glories of the first day
of a Parliament, when every member, be he peer, knight of the shire,
or burgh member, had to ride on horseback in the procession, it is
impossible not to feel the force of Miss Grisel Dalmahoy's appeal in
the _Heart of Midlothian_, she being an ancient sempstress, to Mr.
Saddletree, the harness-maker:

'And as for the Lords of States ye suld mind the riding o' the
Parliament in the gude auld time before the Union. A year's rent o'
mony a gude estate gaed for horse-graith and harnessing, forby
broidered robes and foot-mantles that wad hae stude by their lane
with gold and brocade, and that were muckle in my ain line.'

The graphic account of a famous debate given by, Taylor is worth
comparing with the _Lockhart Papers_ and Hill Burton. The date is a
little troublesome. According to our Itinerist, he heard the
discussion as to whether the Queen or the Scottish Parliament should
nominate the Commissioners. Now, according to the histories, this
all-important discussion began and ended on September 1, but our
Itinerist had only arrived in Edinburgh the night before the first,
and gives us to understand that he owed his invitation to be present
to the fact that whilst in Edinburgh he and his friends had had the
honour to have several lords and members of Parliament to dine, and
that these guests informed him 'of the grand day when the Act was to
be passed or rejected.' The Itinerist's account is too particular--for
he gives the result of the voting--to admit of any possibility of a
mistake, and he describes how several of the members came afterwards
to his lodgings, and, so he writes, 'embraced us with all the outward
marks of love and kindness, and seemed mightily pleased at what was
done, and told us we should now be no more English and Scotch, but
Brittons.' In the matter of nomenclature, at all events, the promises
of the Union have not been carried out.

After September 1 the Parliament did not meet till the 4th, when an
Address was passed to the Queen, but apparently without any repetition
of debate. So it really is a little difficult to reconcile the dates.
Perhaps Itinerists are best advised to keep off public events.

How our travellers escaped the 'national distemper' and journeyed
home by Ecclefechan, Carlisle, Shap Fell, Liverpool, Chester,
Coventry, and Warwick must be read in the _Journey_ itself, which,
though it only occupies 182 small pages, is full of matter and even
merriment; in fact, it is an excellent itinerary.




EPITAPHS


Epitaphs, if in rhyme, are the real literature of the masses. They
need no commendation and are beyond all criticism. A Cambridge don, a
London bus-driver, will own their charm in equal measure. Strange
indeed is the fascination of rhyme. A commonplace hitched into verse
instantly takes rank with Holy Scripture. This passion for poetry, as
it is sometimes called, is manifested on every side; even tradesmen
share it, and as the advertisements in our newspapers show, are
willing to pay small sums to poets who commend their wares in verse.
The widow bereft of her life's companion, the mother bending over an
empty cradle, find solace in thinking what doleful little scrag of
verse shall be graven on the tombstone of the dead. From the earliest
times men have sought to squeeze their loves and joys, their sorrows
and hatreds, into distichs and quatrains, and to inscribe them
somewhere, on walls or windows, on sepulchral urns and gravestones, as
memorials of their pleasure or their pain.

'Hark! how chimes the passing bell--
There's no music to a knell;
All the other sounds we hear
Flatter and but cheat our ear.'

So wrote Shirley the dramatist, and so does he truthfully explain the
popularity of the epitaph as distinguished from the epigram. Who ever
wearies of Martial's 'Erotion'?--

'Hic festinata requiescit Erotion umbra,
Crimine quam fati sexta peremit hiems.
Quisquis eris nostri post me regnator agelli
Manibus exiguis annua justa dato.
Sic lare perpetuo, sic turba sospite, solus
Flebilis in terra sit lapis iste tua'--

so prettily Englished by Leigh Hunt:

'Underneath this greedy stone
Lies little sweet Erotion,
Whom the Fates with hearts as cold
Nipped away at six years old.
Those, whoever thou may'st be,
That hast this small field after me,
Let the yearly rites be paid
To her little slender shade;
So shall no disease or jar
Hurt thy house or chill thy Lar,
But this tomb be here alone
The only melancholy stone.'

Our English epitaphs are to be found scattered up and down our country
churchyards--'uncouth rhymes,' as Gray calls them, yet full of the
sombre philosophy of life. They are fast becoming illegible, worn out
by the rain that raineth every day, and our prim, present-day parsons
do not look with favour upon them, besides which--to use a clumsy
phrase--besides which most of our churchyards are now closed against
burials, and without texts there can be no sermons:

'I'll stay and read my sermon here,
And skulls and bones shall be my text.

*       *       *       *

Here learn that glory and disgrace,
Wisdom and Folly, pass away,
That mirth hath its appointed space,
That sorrow is but for a day;
That all we love and all we hate,
That all we hope and all we fear,
Each mood of mind, each turn of fate,
Must end in dust and silence here.'

The best epitaphs are the grim ones. Designed, as epitaphs are, to
arrest and hold in their momentary grasp the wandering attention and
languid interest of the passer-by, they must hit him hard and at once,
and this they can only do by striking some very responsive chord, and
no chords are so immediately responsive as those which relate to death
and, it may be, judgment to come.

Mr. Aubrey Stewart, in his interesting _Selection of English Epigrams
and Epitaphs_, published by Chapman and Hall, quotes an epitaph from a
Norfolk churchyard which I have seen in other parts of the country.
The last time I saw it was in the Forest of Dean. It is admirably
suited for the gravestone of any child of very tender years, say four:

'When the Archangel's trump shall blow
And souls to bodies join,
Many will wish their lives below
Had been as short as mine.'

It is uncouth, but it is warranted to grip.

Frequently, too, have I noticed how constantly the attention is
arrested by Pope's well-known lines from his magnificent 'Verses to
the Memory of an Unfortunate Lady,' which are often to be found on
tombstones:

'So peaceful rests without a stone and name
What once had beauty, titles, wealth, and fame.
How loved, how honoured once avails thee not,
To whom related or by whom begot.
A heap of dust alone remains of thee;
'Tis all thou art and all the proud shall be.'

I wish our modern poetasters who deny Pope's claim to be a poet no
worse fate than to lie under stones which have engraved upon them the
lines just quoted, for they will then secure in death what in life was
denied them--the ear of the public.

Next to the grim epitaph, I should be disposed to rank those which
remind the passer-by of his transitory estate. In different parts of
the country--in Cumberland and Cornwall, in Croyland Abbey, in
Llangollen Churchyard, in Melton Mowbray--are to be found lines more
or less resembling the following:

'Man's life is like unto a winter's day,
Some break their fast and so depart away,
Others stay dinner then depart full fed,
The longest age but sups and goes to bed.
O reader, there behold and see
As we are now, so thou must be.'

The complimentary epitaph seldom pleases. To lie like a tombstone has
become a proverb. Pope's famous epitaph on Newton:

'Nature and Nature's laws lay hid in night,
God said, Let Newton be! and all was light.'

is hyperbolical and out of character with the great man it seeks to
honour. It was intended for Westminster Abbey. I rejoice at the
preference given to prose Latinity.

The tender and emotional epitaphs have a tendency to become either
insipid or silly. But Herrick has shown us how to rival Martial:

'UPON A CHILD THAT DIED.

Here she lies a pretty bud
Lately made of flesh and blood;
Who as soon fell fast asleep
As her little eyes did peep.
Give her strewings, but not stir
The earth that lightly covers her.'

Mr. Dodd, the editor of the admirable volume called _The
Epigrammatists_, published in Bohn's Standard Library, calls these
lines a model of simplicity and elegance. So they are, but they are
very vague. But then the child was very young. Erotion, one must
remember, was six years old. Ben Jonson's beautiful epitaph on S.P., a
child of Queen Elizabeth's Chapel, beginning,

'Weep with me all you that read
This little story;
And know for whom the tear you shed
Death's self is sorry,'

is fine poetry, but it is not life or death as plain people know those
sober realities. The flippant epitaph is always abominable. Gay's, for
example:

'Life is a jest, and all things show it.
I thought so once, but now I know it.'

But _does_ he know it? Ay, there's the rub! The note of Christianity
is seldom struck in epitaphs. There is a deep-rooted paganism in the
English people which is for ever bubbling up and asserting itself in
the oddest of ways. Coleridge's epitaph for himself is a striking
exception:

'Stop, Christian passer-by! stop, child of God,
And read with gentle breast, Beneath this sod
A poet lies, or that which once seemed he.
O lift one thought in prayer for S.T.C,
That he who many a year with toil of breath
Found death in life, may here find life in death!
Mercy for praise--to be forgiven for fame,
He ask'd and hoped through Christ. Do thou the same.'




'HANSARD'


'Men are we, and must mourn when e'en the shade of that which once was
great has passed away.' This quotation--which, in obedience to the
prevailing taste, I print as prose--was forced upon me by reading in
the papers an account of some proceedings in a sale-room in Chancery
Lane last Tuesday,[A] when the entire stock and copyright of
_Hansard's Parliamentary History and Debates_ were exposed for sale,
and, it must be added, to ridicule. Yet 'Hansard' was once a name to
conjure with. To be in it was an ambition--costly, troublesome, but
animating; to know it was, if not a liberal education, at all events
almost certain promotion; whilst to possess it for your very own was
the outward and visible sign of serious statesmanship. No wonder that
unimaginative men still believed that _Hansard_ was a property with
money in it. Is it not the counterpart of Parliament, its dark and
majestic shadow thrown across the page of history? As the pious
Catholic studies his _Acta Sanctorum_, so should the constitutionalist
love to pore over the _ipsissima verba_ of Parliamentary gladiators,
and read their resolutions and their motions. Where else save in the
pages of _Hansard_ can we make ourselves fully acquainted with the
history of the Mother of Free Institutions? It is, no doubt, dull, but
with the soberminded a large and spacious dulness like that of
_Hansard's Debates_ is better than the incongruous chirpings of the
new 'humourists.' Besides, its dulness is exaggerated. If a reader
cannot extract amusement from it the fault is his, not _Hansard's_.
But, indeed, this perpetual talk of dulness and amusement ought not to
pass unchallenged. Since when has it become a crime to be dull? Our
fathers were not ashamed to be dull in a good cause. We are ashamed,
but without ceasing to be dull.

[Footnote A: March 8, 1902.]

But it is idle to argue with the higgle of the market. 'Things are
what they are,' said Bishop Butler in a passage which has lost its
freshness; that is to say, they are worth what they will fetch. 'Why,
then, should we desire to be deceived?' The test of truth remains
undiscovered, but the test of present value is the auction mart. Tried
by this test, it is plain that _Hansard_ has fallen upon evil days.
The bottled dreariness of Parliament is falling, falling, falling. An
Elizabethan song-book, the original edition of Gray's _Elegy_, or
_Peregrine Pickle_, is worth more than, or nearly as much as, the 458
volumes of _Hansard's Parliamentary Debates_. Three complete sets were
sold last Tuesday; one brought L110, the other two but L70 each. And
yet it is not long ago since a _Hansard_ was worth three times as
much. Where were our young politicians? There are serious men on both
sides of the House. Men of their stamp twenty years ago would not have
been happy without a _Hansard_ to clothe their shelves with dignity
and their minds with quotations. But these young men were not bidders.

As the sale proceeded, the discredit of _Hansard_ became plainer and
plainer. For the copyright, including, of course, the goodwill of the
name--the right to call yourself 'Hansard' for years to come--not a
penny was offered, and yet, as the auctioneer feelingly observed, only
eighteen months ago it was valued at L60,000. The cold douche of the
auction mart may brace the mind, but is apt to lower the price of
commodities of this kind. Then came incomplete and unbound sets, with
doleful results. For forty copies of the 'Indian Debates' for 1889
only a penny a copy was offered. It was rumoured that the bidder
intended, had he been successful, to circulate the copies amongst the
supporters of a National Council for India; but his purpose was
frustrated by the auctioneer, who, mindful of the honour of the
Empire, sorrowfully but firmly withdrew the lot, and proceeded to the
next, amidst the jeers of a thoroughly demoralized audience. But this
subject why pursue? It is, for the reason already cited at the
beginning, a painful one. The glory of _Hansard_ has departed for
ever. Like a new-fangled and sham religion, it began in pride and
ended in a police-court, instead of beginning in a police-court and
ending in pride, which is the now well-defined course of true
religion.

The fact that nobody wants _Hansard_ is not necessarily a rebuff to
Parliamentary eloquence, yet these low prices jump with the times and
undoubtedly indicate an impatience of oratory. We talk more than our
ancestors, but we prove our good faith by doing it very badly. We have
no Erskines at the Bar, but trials last longer than ever. There are
not half a dozen men in the House of Commons who can make a speech,
properly so called, but the session is none the shorter on that
account. _Hansard's Debates_ are said to be dull to read, but there is
a sterner fate than reading a dull debate: you may be called upon to
listen to one. The statesmen of the time must be impervious to
dulness; they must crush the artist within them to a powder. The new
people who have come bounding into politics and are now claiming their
share of the national inheritance are not orators by nature, and will
never become so by culture; but they mean business, and that is well.
Caleb Garth and not George Canning should be the model of the virtuous
politician of the future.




CONTEMPT OF COURT


The late Mr. Carlyle has somewhere in his voluminous but well-indexed
writings a highly humorous and characteristic passage in which he,
with all his delightful gusto, dilates upon the oddity of the scene
where a withered old sinner perched on a bench, quaintly attired in
red turned up with ermine, addresses another sinner in a wooden pew,
and bids him be taken away and hung by the neck until he is dead; and
how the sinner in the pew, instead of indignantly remonstrating with
the sinner on the bench, 'Why, you cantankerous old absurdity, what
are you about taking my life like that?' usually exhibits signs of
great depression, and meekly allows himself to be conducted to his
cell, from whence in due course he is taken and throttled according to
law.

This situation described by Carlyle is doubtless mighty full of
humour; but, none the less, were any prisoner at the bar to adopt
Craigenputtock's suggestion, he would only add to the peccadillo of
murder the grave offence of contempt of court, which has been defined
'as a disobedience to the court, an opposing or despising the
authority, justice, and dignity thereof.'

The whole subject of Contempt is an interesting and picturesque one,
and has been treated after an interesting and picturesque yet accurate
and learned fashion by a well-known lawyer, in a treatise[A] which
well deserves to be read not merely by the legal practitioner, but by
the student of constitutional law and the nice observer of our manners
and customs.

[Footnote A: _Contempt of Court, etc._ By J.F. Oswald, Q.C. London:
William Clowes and Sons, Limited.]

An ill-disposed person may exhibit contempt of court in divers
ways--for example, he may scandalize the the court itself, which may
be done not merely by the extreme measure of hurling missiles at the
presiding judge, or loudly contemning his learning or authority, but
by ostentatiously reading a newspaper in his presence, or laughing
uproariously at a joke made by somebody else. Such contempts,
committed as they are _in facie curiae_, are criminal offences, and
may be punished summarily by immediate imprisonment without the right
of appeal. It speaks well both for the great good sense of the judges
and for the deep-rooted legal instincts of our people that such
offences are seldom heard of. It would be impossible nicely to define
what measure of freedom of manners should be allowed in a court of
justice, which, as we know, is neither a church nor a theatre, but, as
a matter of practice, the happy mean between an awe-struck and unmanly
silence and free-and-easy conversation is well preserved. The
practising advocate, to avoid contempt and obtain, if instructed so to
do, a hearing, must obey certain sumptuary laws, for not only must he
don the horsehair wig, the gown, and bands of his profession, but his
upper clothing must be black, nor should his nether garment be
otherwise than of sober hue. Mr. Oswald reports Mr. Justice Byles as
having once observed to the late Lord Coleridge whilst at the Bar: 'I
always listen with little pleasure to the arguments of counsel whose
legs are encased in light gray trousers.' The junior Bar is growing
somewhat lax in these matters. Dark gray coats are not unknown, and it
was only the other day I observed a barrister duly robed sitting in
court in a white waistcoat, apparently oblivious of the fact that
whilst thus attired no judge could possibly have heard a word he said.
However, as he had nothing to say, the question did not arise. It is
doubtless the increasing Chamber practice of the judges which has
occasioned this regrettable laxity. In Chambers a judge cannot
summarily commit for contempt, nor is it necessary or customary for
counsel to appear before him in robes. Some judges object to fancy
waistcoats in Chambers, but others do not. The late Sir James Bacon,
who was a great stickler for forensic propriety, and who, sitting in
court, would not have allowed a counsel in a white waistcoat to say a
word, habitually wore one himself when sitting as vacation judge in
the summer.

It must not be supposed that there can be no contempt out of court.
There can. To use bad language on being served with legal process is
to treat the court from whence such process issued with contempt. None
the less, considerable latitude of language on such occasions is
allowed. How necessary it is to protect the humble officers of the law
who serve writs and subpoenas is proved by the case of one Johns, who
was very rightly committed to the Fleet in 1772, it appearing by
affidavit that he had compelled the poor wretch who sought to serve
him with a subpoena to devour both the parchment and the wax seal of
the court, and had then, after kicking him so savagely as to make him
insensible, ordered his body to be cast into the river. No amount of
irritation could justify such conduct. It is no contempt to tear up
the writ or subpoena in the presence of the officer of the court,
because, the service once lawfully effected, the court is indifferent
to the treatment of its stationery; but such behaviour, though lawful,
is childish. To obstruct a witness on his way to give evidence, or to
threaten him if he does give evidence, or to tamper with the jury, are
all serious contempts. In short, there is a divinity which hedges a
court of justice, and anybody who, by action or inaction, renders the
course of justice more difficult or dilatory than it otherwise would
be, incurs the penalty of contempt. Consider, for example, the case of
documents and letters. Prior to the issue of a writ, the owner of
documents and letters may destroy them, if he pleases--the fact of his
having done so, if litigation should ensue on the subject to which the
destroyed documents related, being only matter for comment--but the
moment a writ is issued the destruction by a defendant of any document
in his possession relating to the action is a grave contempt, for
which a duchess was lately sent to prison. There is something majestic
about this. No sooner is the aid of a court of law invoked than it
assumes a seizin of every scrap of writing which will assist it in its
investigation of the matter at issue between the parties, and to
destroy any such paper is to obstruct the court in its holy task, and
therefore a contempt.

To disobey a specific order of the court is, of course, contempt. The
old Court of Chancery had a great experience in this aspect of the
question. It was accustomed to issue many peremptory commands; it
forbade manufacturers to foul rivers, builders so to build as to
obstruct ancient lights, suitors to seek the hand in matrimony of its
female wards, Dissenting ministers from attempting to occupy the
pulpits from which their congregations had by vote ejected them, and
so on through almost all the business of this mortal life. It was more
ready to forbid than to command; but it would do either if justice
required it. And if you persisted in doing what the Court of Chancery
told you not to do, you were committed; whilst if you refused to do
what it had ordered you to do, you were attached; and the difference
between committal and attachment need not concern the lay mind.

To pursue the subject further would be to plunge into the morasses of
the law where there is no footing for the plain man; but just a word
or two may be added on the subject of punishment for contempt. In old
days persons who were guilty of contempt _in facie curiae_ had their
right hands cut off, and Mr. Oswald prints as an appendix to his book
certain clauses of an Act of Parliament of Henry VIII. which provide
for the execution of this barbarous sentence, and also (it must be
admitted) for the kindly after-treatment of the victim, who was to
have a surgeon at hand to sear the stump, a sergeant of the poultry
with a cock ready for the surgeon to wrap about the stump, a sergeant
of the pantry with bread to eat, and a sergeant of the cellar with a
pot of red wine to drink.

Nowadays the penalty for most contempts is costs. The guilty party in
order to purge his contempt has to pay all the costs of a motion to
commit and attach. The amount is not always inconsiderable, and when
it is paid it would be idle to apply to the other side for a pot of
red wine. They would only laugh at you. Our ancestors had a way of
mitigating their atrocities which robs the latter of more than half
their barbarity. Costs are an unmitigable atrocity.




5 EDWARD VII., CHAPTER 12


The appearance of this undebated Act of Parliament in the attenuated
volume of the Statutes of 1905 almost forces upon sensitive minds an
unwelcome inquiry as to what is the attitude proper to be assumed by
an emancipated but trained intelligence towards a decision of the