Various - The Mirror of Literature, Amusement, and Instruction. Volume 10, No. 269, August 18, 1827

my dun cow has just calv'd , exactly as they did above thirty years since!"—Did the reader never encounter a similar key-note, leading to a multitude of early and vivid recollections? Those well-remembered tones, in like manner, brought before my imagination numberless incidents and personages no longer important, or no longer in existence. My scattered and once-loved schoolmates, their characters and their various fortunes, passed in rapid review before me; my schoolmaster, his wife, and all the gentry, and heads of families, whose orderly attendance at divine service on Sundays, while those well-remembered bells were "chiming for church," (but now gone and mouldering in the adjoining graves,) were again presented to my perceptions! With what pomp and form they used to enter and depart from their house of God! I still saw with the mind's eye the widow Hogarth, and her maiden relative, Richardson, walking up the aisle dressed in their silken sacks, their raised head-dresses, their black hoods, their lace ruffles, and their high-crook'd canes, preceded by their aged servant, Samuel; who, after he had wheeled his mistress to church in her Bath-chair, carried the prayer-books up the aisle, and opened and shut the pew! There too was the portly Dr. Griffiths, of the Monthly Review , with his literary wife in her neat and elevated wire-winged cap! And oftimes the vivacious and angelic Duchess of Devonshire, whose bloom had not then suffered from the canker-worm of pecuniary distress, created by the luxury of charity! Nor could I forget the humble distinction of the aged sexton, Mortefee, whose skill in psalmody enabled him to lead that wretched group of singers, whom Hogarth so happily portrayed; whose performance with the pitch-fork excited so much wonder in little boys; and whose gesticulations and contortions of head, hand, and body, in beating time, were not outdone even by Joah Bates in the commemorations of Handel! Yes, simple and happy villagers! I remember scores of you;—how fortunately ye had, and still have, escaped the contagion of the metropolitan vices, though distant but five miles; and how many of you have I conversed with, who, at an adult age, had never beheld the degrading assemblage of its knaveries and miseries!

I revelled in the melancholy pleasure of these recollections, yielding my whole soul to that witchery of sensibility which magnifies the perception of being, till one of the bells was overset, when, the peal stopping, I had leisure to think on the rapid advance of the day, and on the consequent necessity of quickening my speed.

"A fly your honour."— Brighton Cliff

Talk of musquitoes!—a musquito is a gentleman who honourably runs you through with a small sword, and from whom (as from a mad dog) we may easily seek a defence in— muslin .

But your rory-tory, hurly-burly blue-bottle, is no better than a bully. His head is a humming-top , and his tight blue little body like a tomahawk, cased in glittering steel, which he takes a delight in whirling against your head. I really believe, that to confine a nervous man in a room with one of these winged tormentors, on a July day, would inevitably destroy him in less than an hour.

He rudely and unceremoniously bumps away all sober reflection,—(I wonder whether the phrenological Spurzheim ever felt the bumps of a blue-bottle!) then his whimsical vagaries effectually defy repose; now settling with his tickling bandy legs upon your nose, and industriously insinuating his sharp proboscis, and anon abruptly buzzing in your ear—no secret—off he shoots again to his own music.

Now, truly, his hum-drum puts me in mind of the whirring tone of the hurdy-gurdy, while his ad libitum bumping against the booming window-panes sounds, to my fancy, like the unskilful accompaniment of a double drum, beaten by some unmusical urchin.

The house spider who spreads with so much care his beautiful nets for gnats, and moths, and smaller flies, finds alike his labour and his toils in vain to secure this rampaging rogue; and, indeed, when the turbulent blue-bottle chances, in his bouncing random flight, to get entangled in the glutinous meshes, he shakes and roars, and blusters so loudly, until he breaks away, that the spider affrighted, invariably takes advantage of his long legs to scamper off to his sanctum in the cracked wainscot—like some imbecile watchman, who fearing to encounter a tall inebriated bruiser, sneaks away with admirable discretion to the security of his snug box, praying the drunkard may speedily reel into another beat .

Your noisy people generally grow taciturn in their cups—but Sir Blue-bottle, though he drinks deep draughts of your wine, particularly if it abound in sweetness, is never changed. He is naturally giddy, and according to entomologists, always sees more than double, while his head was never made to be turned. So may you hope for peace—only in his flight or death!— Absurdities: in Prose and Verse .

William the Conqueror entertained the difficult project of totally abolishing the English language, and for that purpose, he ordered that in all schools throughout the kingdom, the youth should be instructed in the French tongue. Until the reign of Edward III. the pleadings in the supreme courts of judicature were performed in French, when it was appointed that the pleas should be pleaded in English; but that they should be entered or recorded in Latin. The deeds were drawn in the same language; the laws were composed in that idiom, and no other tongue was used at court. It became, says Hume, the language of all fashionable company; and the English themselves ashamed of their own country, affected to excel in that foreign dialect. At Athens, and even in France and England, formal and prepared pleadings were prohibited, and it was unlawful to amuse the court with long, artful harangues; only it was the settled custom here, in important matters, to begin the pleadings with a text out of the holy scriptures. It is of late years that eloquence was admitted to the bar.

The account which the learned judge Hale gives of the lawyers, who pleaded in the 15th century, does them little honour. He condemns the reports during the reigns of Henry IV. and V. as inferior to those of the last twelve years of Edward III. and he speaks but coolly of those which the reign of Henry VI. produces. Yet this deficiency of progressive improvement in the common law arose not from a want of application to the science; since we learn from Fortescue that there were no fewer than two thousand students attending on the inns of chancery and of court, in the time of its writer. Gray's-inn, in the time of Henry VIII. was so incommodious, that "the ancients of this house were necessitated to lodge double." Indeed until the beginning of the last century the lawyers lived mostly in their inns of court, or about Westminster-hall. But a great change has been effected; they are all now removed to higher ground, squares and genteel neighbourhoods, no matter how far distant from their chambers.

The number of judges in the courts of Westminster was by no means certain. Under Henry VI. there were at one time eight judges in the court of common pleas. Each judge took a solemn oath that "he would take no fee, pension, gift, reward, or bribe, from any suitor, saving meat and drink, which should be of no great value." In 1402, the salary of the chief justice of the king's bench was forty pounds per annum. In 1408, the chief justice of the common pleas had fifty-five marks per annum. In 1549, the chief justice of the king's bench had an addition of thirty pounds to his salary, and each justice of the same bench and common pleas, twenty pounds. At this time, a felony under the value of twelve pence, was not a capital offence; and twelve pence then was equal to sixty shillings at the present day.

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