honourable Undecimus Scott, and that typical exemplar of ruffian rascaldom, Bill Sykes. Burglar Bill, he argues, could not boast the merit of selecting the course which he had run; he had served the Devil, having had, as it were, no choice in the matter; he was born and bred and educated an evil-doer, and could hardly have deserted from the colours of his great Captain without some spiritual interposition to enable him to do so. To Undy Scott, therefore, a warmer reward must surely be due: for he had been placed fairly on the world's surface, with power to chose between good and bad, and had deliberately taken the latter. "Bread and water would have come to him naturally without any villany on his part; ay, and meat and milk, and wine and oil, the fat things of the world; but he elected to be a villain; he liked to do the Devil's bidding. Surely he was the better servant; surely he shall have the richer reward." Poor Bill Sykes! is Mr. Trollope's pitying exclamation, as he owns to a sort of comparative regard for that unlettered rough, walking about wretched with that dog of his; a sort of regard, notwithstanding the manifest necessity of hanging such a desperado. "Yes, Bill; I, your friend, cannot gainsay that, must acknowledge that. Hard as the case may be, you must be hung; hung out of the way of further mischief; my spoons, my wife's throat, my children's brains, demand that. You, Bill, and polecats, and such-like, must be squelched when we can come across you, seeing that you make yourself so universally disagreeable. It is your ordained nature to be disagreeable, you plead silently. I know it; I admit the hardship of your case; but still, my Bill, self-preservation is the first law of nature. You must be hung. But, while hanging you, I admit that you are more sinned against than sinning. There is another, Bill, another, * who will surely take account of this in some way, though it is not for me to tell you how." So the novelist would hang Bill Sykes with soft regret ; but with what a savage joy, with what exultation of heart, with what alacrity of eager soul, would he hang his fashionable friend, Undy Scott, the member of Parliament for the Tillietudlem burghs, if he could but get at his throat for such a purpose! † When the highly respectable Mr. Sondes visits Richard Savage in gaol, and remonstrates against the familiarity of that scapegrace with his fellow-prisoners, Mr. Richard protests against their being called base company; and asks, 'What will you lay, there is not better material in any one of these rogues, out of which a good man might have been made, than exists in you or me?" A sublimely safe bet to offer, and a quite impossible one ever to take. 66 Another prison bit, from another popular story-teller. Mr. Charles Reade gives us Justice and Thief face to face within prison walls; and for a wonder, the Justice (a visiting one) * Not over felicitous, maybe, is the mixture of sacred with familiar, in this prolonged personal apostrophe. Especially the clashing of Bill and another (bis). Query, however, whether another would read better with a capital A? A.K. H.B. would have used the capital A as a matter of course. (Another, Bill, Another.) For he, the good Country Parson, whose Recreations became those of a large public, produces a rather ludicrous effect by not only using such a periphrasis for the sacred name as "certain quarter "-a periphrasis that highestpolite or high-politest penny-a-liner might envy-but (minding his P's and Q's) is scrupulous to write Quarter with a capital Q. Ex. gr., "You will very earnestly apply for strength and wisdom beyond your own, in a certain Quarter where they will never be sought in vain." (Recreations of a Country Parson, Second Series, p. 14.) And again: "You must have a very sweet nature, and (let me say it) much help from a certain high Quarter, if,” etc. (Ibid., p. 347.) Irresistibly one is reminded of Parliamentary "allusions" (let me say it) to Another Place. + "Hang him? ay, as high as Haman! In this there would be no regret, no vacillation of purpose, no doubt as to the propriety of the sacrifice."-The Three Clerks, ch. xliv. : is humorously tolerant in favour of the Thief. There are two visiting Justices in the case; and the easy-going satirical one, Mr. Wright, serves to relieve by contrast a morosely pompous one, in the person of Mr. Williams. They are inquiring into the antecedents of a young prisoner, a quietlooking boy, now for the third time convicted once for throwing stones, once for orchard-robbing, and this time for stealing a piece of beef out of a butcher's shop. "Robbing an orchard!" cries Mr. Wright: "oh, what sweet reminiscences those words recall. I say, Williams, do you remember us two robbing Farmer Harris's orchard?" "I remember your robbing it, and my character suffering for it." "I don't remember that; but I remember my climbing the pear-tree, and flinging the pears down, and finding them all grabbed on my descent. What is the young villain's next?—Oh, snapping a piece off a counter. Ah! we never did that--because we could always get it without stealing it." Else, by implication it had been, in the joint biography of Messrs. Wright and Williams, a clear foregone case of Handy-dandy, justice and thief. Nor, indeed, is it without example that the Justice should, despite his office, commit misdeeds to match, even in legal culpability, those for which he sentences the Thief. Sir James Stephen remarks of M. Marion, who was advocate-general to Henri IV., and maternal grandfather of Jaqueline Marie Angelique, and of Agnes Arnauld, that, in the ardour of his parental affections, this learned functionary was hurried into acts for which he would have consigned a criminal of lower degree to the gallows. Very many are they of like standing who with baser motives have incurred the like guilt. As to assorting, or distributing, the several degrees of guilt, in any complex misdoing-and what misdoing but is com plex?-that is immeasurably beyond the power of human intelligence. Suggestive enough is Mr. Carlyle's mode of criticising the ejaculation of the Fils Adoptif, on the elopement of Mirabeau with Sophie de Monnier,—“ Crime for ever lamentable, of which the world has so spoken, and must for ever speak!" So ejaculates the Adopted Son. Him Mr. Carlyle apostrophises with a query, Why (thou virtuous Fils Adoptif) was that of the Canteen-keeper's wife at If such a peccadillo, and this of the legal President's (Monnier) wife such a crime? Were they not the same crime? Again, might not the first grand criminal and sinner in the business be legal President Monnier,-the distracted, spleen-stricken, moon-stricken old man; liable to trial, with non-acquittal or difficult acquittal, at the great Bar of Nature herself? And then the second sinner in it? and the third and the fourth? In essaying to determine the casuistry of such cases of precedency one finds no end, in wandering mazes lost. And many of the last are first, and the first last, IX. Ahout Square Men in Round Holes; and Round in Square. UST as Talleyrand-upon whom, probably, so many other J peoples is popularly credited with the cynical witticism about language being given us to conceal our thoughts,—a mot of considerably older standing than the prince-bishop; so to Sydney Smith appears to be popularly ascribed the favourite illustration of the square man getting "located," dislocated rather, in the round hole,—a saying that was greatly in vogue a few years back, when the pet cry of the day was, the Right Man in the Right Place. The illustration has been a well-worked one, however, in various hands; and to whose brain is due the first conception of this sort of squaring the circle may be still, possibly, a question for Notes and Queries. Bayle has something a good deal like it; Jeremy Taylor the thing itself. Mr. Fonblanque, in those political essays of his which made a stir when George the Fourth was king, introduced the illustration once and again. Thus, in opposing the assumption that the qualifications requisite for the Advocate and the Judge are the same, |