V

VDOCTORS AND DOCTORINGSydney Smith, who was fond of quacking his parishioners, and had a poor opinion of "professional and graduated homicides," observes that "the Sixth Commandment is suspended by one medical diploma from the North of England to the South." Personally, I have experienced the attentions of the Faculty north, south, east, and west, and I began in London. In my first appearance on this planet I was personally conducted by a smart gentleman, who came straight from a dinner-party, in a large white cravat and turquoise studs. Those studs still exist, and have descended, with the practice, to his grandson. May they beam on births more propitious than my own.My knowledge of the first act of life's drama is necessarily traditional. But, as I approach the second, memory begins to operate. I seem to remember a black silhouette of a gentleman in an elbow-chair, with a pigtail and knee-breeches; and this icon was revered as the likeness of "old Doctor P——." This "old Dr. P.'s" son, "Tom P——," was a sturdy stripling of seventy odd,who had never used a stethoscope, and dismissed a rival practitioner who talked about heart-sounds as "an alarmist." To these succeeded a third generation of the same drug-stained dynasty, represented to me by a gentleman in shiny black, who produced a large gold watch when he felt one's pulse, and said "Hah!" when he looked at one's tongue. These three generations, for something more than a century, monopolized all the best practice of Loamshire, were immensely respected, and accumulated a great deal of money. Echoes of the dialogue between doctor and patient still haunt the ear of memory:—Nervous and Dyspeptic Lady."Do you know, Dr. P., I felt so very uncomfortable after luncheon—quite a sensation of sinking through the floor. Of course I had some brandy and water—about half and half—at once, but I feel that I ought to have a little champagne at dinner. Nothing helps me so much."Dr. P."Your ladyship is no inconsiderable physician. I was about to make the same suggestion. But pray be careful that it is a dry wine."All this was very comfortable and friendly, and tended to promote the best relations between doctor and patient. I do not recollect that the doctor was supposed to effect cures; but his presence at a deathbed created the pleasant sense that all had been done which could be done, and that the patient was dying with the dignity properto his station. It may be remarked, in passing, that the two elder generations did all their rounds, early and late, summer and winter, on horseback; while the third subsided into a brougham drawn by a pair of horses afflicted with stringhalt, and presumably bought cheap on account of that infirmity.So much for the men. What was their method? To my infant palate the oils of castor and cod were as familiar as mother's milk. I dwelt in a land flowing with rhubarb and magnesia. The lively leech was a household pet. "Two nocturnes in blue and an arrangement in black," as the Æsthete said, were of frequent occurrence. But other parts of the system were more palatable. I seem to have drunk beer from my earliest infancy. A glass of port wine at eleven, with a teaspoonful of bark in it, was the recognized tonic, and brandy (which the doctor, who loved periphrasis, always called "the domestic stimulant") was administered whenever one looked squeamish, while mulled claret was "exhibited" as a soporific. The notion of pouring all this stuff down a child's throat sounds odd to a generation reared on Apollinaris and barley-water, but it had this one advantage—that when one grew up it was impossible to make one drunk.From childhood we pass on to schooldays. Wild horses should not drag from me the name of the seminary where I was educated, for itsmedical arrangements left a good deal to be desired. There were three doctors in this place, and they shared the care of some six hundred boys. Dr. A. was certainly very old, and was reputed to be very good, insomuch that his admirers said that, if they were dying, they should wish to have Dr. A. with them, as he was better than any clergyman. If, however, they were so carnally-minded as to wish to recover, they sent for Dr. B., a bluff gentleman, who told his patients that they were not half as ill as they thought, and must pull themselves together—a prescription which, if there was nothing the matter, answered admirably. The third was a grievous gentleman, who took a dark view of life, and, sitting by my sick-bed, would inform me of the precarious condition of a schoolfellow, who, to use his own phrase, was "slipping through his fingers," and "had no more constitution than a fly." Regarding this triumvirate in the light of my subsequent experience, I cannot affect surprise that there were fifteen deaths among the boys during the five years that I was in the school.From the anonymous school I proceeded to an anonymous university, where the medical world was dominated by the bland majesty of Sir Omicron Pie (the name is Trollope's, but it will serve). Who that ever saw them can forget that stately bearing, that Jove-like brow, that sublime air of omniscience and omnipotence? Who that ever heard it, that even flow of mellifluous eloquence and copiousnarrative? Who that ever experienced it, the underlying kindness of heart?A nervous undergraduate is ushered into the consulting-room, and the great man advances with a paternal smile."Mr. Bumpstead? Ah! I think I was at school with your good father. No? Then it must have been your uncle. You are very like him. We ran a neck-and-neck race at the University. I won the Gold Medal, and he wasproximè. In those days I little thought of settling down in Oxbridge. I had destined myself for a London practice; but Sir Thomas Watson—you have heard of 'Watson's style'? He was the Cicero of Medicine—well, Watson said, 'No, my dear Pie, it won't do. In ten years you will be at the head of the profession, and will have made £100,000. But, mark my words,the blade will wear out the scabbard. You are not justified in risking your life.' I was disappointed, of course. All young men like the idea of fame. But I saw that Watson was right, and I came here, and found my life's work. The Medical School was then in a very decayed condition, and I have made it what it is. Why am I telling you all this——?"(Enter the butler.) "Please, Sir Omicron, you've an appointment at Battle-axe Castle at four o'clock, and the carriage is at the door."Sir O. P."Ah! well. I must tell you the rest another day. Let me see, what was thematter? Palpitation? Let me listen for a moment. It is as I thought—only a little functional irritability. Lead a sensible life; avoid excess; cultivate the philosophic temper. Take this prescription, and come again next week. Thank you, thank you."Fortified by four years of Sir Omicron's care, I came up to London somewhere between 1870 and 1880. The practice of the West End was then divided between three men—Sir A. B., Sir C. D., and Sir E. F.Sir A. B. was bluff and brutal, fashioned himself on the traditions of Abernethy, and ruled his patients by sheer terrorism. He had an immense influence over hysterical women and weak-minded men, and people who might otherwise have resented his ursine manner were reconciled to it by the knowledge that he officially inspected the most illustrious Tongue in the kingdom.His principal rival was Sir C. D., who ruled by love. "Well, my dear sir, there is not much the matter. A day or two's hunting will set you right. You don't ride? Ah! well, it doesn't much matter. A fortnight at Monte Carlo will do just as well. All you want is change of scene and plenty of amusement.""As to your ladyship's diet, it should be light and nutritious. I should recommend you to avoid beefsteaks and boiled mutton. A little turtle soup, some devilled whitebait, and a slice of a turkeytruffewould be the sort of dinner to suit you. If the insomnia is at all urgent, I have found a light supper of pâté de foie gras work wonders."Sir E. F. operated on a theological system. His discourse on the Relations between Natural and Revealed Religion profoundly impressed those who heard it for the first time, and his tractate on Medical Missions in India ran into a third edition. In his waiting-room one found, instead of last month'sPunchor the Christmas number ofMadame, devotional works inscribed "From his grateful patient, the author." In his consulting-room a sacred picture of large dimensions crowned the mantelpiece, and signed portraits of bishops whom he had delivered from dyspepsia adorned the walls. Ritualistic clergy frequented him in great numbers, and—what was better still—recommended their congregations to the "beloved physician." Ecclesiastically-minded laymen delighted in him, and came away with a comfortable conviction, syllogistically arranged, that (1) one's first duty is to maintain one's health; (2) whatever one likes is healthy; therefore (3) one's first duty is to like exactly as one likes.A water-drinking adherent of Mr. Gladstone once saw that eminent man crowning a banquet of champagne with a glass of undeniable port. "Oh! Mr. Gladstone," he exclaimed in the bitterness of his soul, "what would Sir E. F. say if he could see you mixing your liquors?" The great man'sdefence was ready to his hand: "Sir E. F. assures me that, if I let fifteen minutes elapse between two kinds of wine, there is no mixture."Somehow these lively oracles of Sir E. F.'s, with which I was always coming in contact, left on my mind a dim impression that he must have been related to the doctor who attended Little Nell and prescribed the remedies which the landlady had already applied: "Everybody said he was a very shrewd doctor indeed, and knew perfectly well what people's constitutions were, which there appears some reason to suppose he did."VIMOURNINGMy infant mind was "suckled in a creed outworn," in the form of a book called, by a strange misnomer, a "Book of Useful Knowledge." It was there stated, if my memory serves me, that "the Chinese mourn in yellow, but Kings and Cardinals mourn in purple." In what do modern English people mourn? That is the subject of to-day's enquiry.Lord Acton, in one of his most impressive passages, speaks of England as living under "institutions which incorporate tradition and prolong the reign of the dead." But the very notion of "prolonging the reign of the dead" is an anachronism in an age which forgets its friends the moment it has buried them. "Out of sight, out of mind" is an adage which nowadays verifies itself with startling rapidity. Mourning is as much out of date as Suttee; and, as to the Widow's Cap, the admirable Signora Vesey Neroni in "Barchester Towers" was only a little in advance of her age when she exclaimed, "The death of twenty husbands should not make me undergo such a penance.It is as much a relic of paganism as the sacrifice of a Hindoo woman at the burning of her husband's body. If not so bloody, it is quite as barbarous and quite as useless."In days gone by, a death in a family extinguished all festivity. Engagements were cancelled, social plans were laid aside, and the mourners went into retreat for a twelvemonth. Men wore black trousers; women swathed themselves in black crape. "Mourning Jewellery"—hideous combinations of jet and bogwood—twinkled and jingled round the necks of the bereaved, and widows wrote on letter-paper which was virtually black, with a small white space in the middle of the sheet. Harry Foker, we know, honoured his father's memory by having his brougham painted black; and I have known a lady who, when she lost her husband, had her boudoir lined with black velvet, after the fashion of Lord Glenallan in "The Antiquary."But nowadays people shrink (with amiable considerateness) from thus inflicting their griefs on their friends; and if (as we must in charity assume) they feel emotion, they studiously conceal it in their own bosoms. The ball follows the funeral with a celerity and a frank joyousness which suggest a Wake; and the keen pursuers of pleasure protest, with quite a religious air, that for their own part they would think it absolutely wicked to sorrow as those without hope. Weedless widows, becomingly "gowned," as Ladies' Papers say, inpale grey or black and white, sacrifice to propriety by forswearing the Opera or the Racecourse for twelve months or so, but find a little fresh air on the River or at Hurlingham absolutely necessary for health; and, if they dine out quietly or even give a little dance at home, are careful to protest that they have lost all pleasure in life, but must struggle to keep up for the sake of the dear children. Surely, as Master Shallow says, "good phrases are, and ever were, very commendable." The old-fashioned manifestations of mourning were no doubt overdone, but the modern disregard of the dead seems to me both heartless and indecent.The supreme exemplar of Mourning was, of course, Queen Victoria. During her reign, and in her personal practice, the custom of Mourning reached its highest point of persistence and solemnity. In 1844 Lady Lyttelton, who was governess to the present King and his sister the Princess Royal, wrote from Court, "We are such a 'boundless contiguity of shade' just now." The immediate cause of that shade was the death of Prince Albert's father; and although in Queen Victoria's life there was a fair allowance of sunshine, still, as Ecclesiastes said, "the clouds return after the rain"; and, in a family where cousinship is recognized to the third and fourth generation, the "shade" of mourning must constantly recur. The late Duke of Beaufort, head of the most numerous family in the Peerage, always wore a black bandround his white hat, because, as he said, one of his cousins was always dead and he would not be wanting in respect for the deceased; and, similarly, a Maid of Honour once said to me, "I never see the Queen's jewels, because she is almost always in mourning for some German prince or princess, and then she only wears black ornaments." Of course, in a case where there was this natural predisposition to mournful observance, the supreme loss of a husband meant a final renunciation of the world and its gaieties. I suppose it is no exaggeration to say that from her bereavement in 1861 to her death in 1901 Queen Victoria lived in unbroken communion with the unseen but unforgotten. The necessary business of the State was not, even for a week, laid aside; but pomps and ceremonies and public appearances are profoundly distasteful to shattered nerves and broken hearts. Yielding to the urgent advice of her Ministers, Queen Victoria emerged from four years' seclusion to open the new Parliament in 1866; and her reward was reaped in the following December, when a peculiarly rancorous politician rebuked her at a great meeting of reformers in St. James's Hall for a lack of popular sympathies. It was then that, on the spur of the moment, John Bright, who himself had known so well what bereavement meant, uttered his chivalrous defence of the absent and lonely Sovereign:—"I am not accustomed to stand up in defenceof those who are possessors of crowns. But I could not sit and hear that observation without a sensation of wonder and of pain. I think there has been, by many persons, a great injustice done to the Queen in reference to her desolate and widowed position. And I venture to say this—that a woman, be she the Queen of a great realm or be she the wife of one of your labouring men, who can keep alive in her heart a great sorrow for the lost object of her life and affection, is not at all likely to be wanting in a great and generous sympathy with you."Admirable and reverend as was this abiding sorrow, contemporary observers felt that its outward manifestations were not always harmonious. The Mausoleum at Frogmore is not a "poem in stone," and the Monument of Gilt opposite the Albert Hall has supplied the frivolous with an appropriate pun. Landseer, who, when once he forsook his stags and deerhounds, was surely the most debased painter of a hideous age, attained his worst in a picture of the Slopes at Windsorcirca1862. Under an inky sky, in the forefront of a sunless landscape, stands a black pony, and on its back is a lady dressed in the deepest weeds, with a black riding-skirt and a black bonnet. A retainer in subfusc kilt holds the pony's head, a dingy terrier looks on with melancholy eyes, and, in the distant background, two darkly-clad princesses shiver on a garden-seat. The only spot of colourin the scene is a red despatch-box, and the whole forms the highest tribute of English art to a national disaster and a Queenly sorrow.Black, and intensely black, were all the trappings of courtly woe—black crape, black gloves, black feathers, black jewellery. The State-robes were worn no longer; the State-coach stood unused in the coach-house. The footmen wore black bands round their arms. It was only by slow degrees, and on occasions of high and rare solemnity, that white lace and modest plumes and diamonds and decorations were permitted to enliven the firmament of courtly woe. But we of the twentieth century live in an age of æsthetic revival, and, though perhaps we do not mourn so heartily, we certainly mourn more prettily. One lady at least there is who knows how to combine the sincerity of sorrow with its becoming manifestation; and Queen Alexandra in mourning garb is as delightful a vision as was Queen Alexandra in her clothing of wrought gold, when she knelt before the altar of Westminster Abbey and bowed her head to receive her diamond crown.Queen Victoria's devotion to the memory of those whom she had lost had one definite consequence which probably she little contemplated. The annual service, conducted in the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore on the anniversary of the Prince Consort's death, accustomed English people to the idea, which since the Reformation hadbecome strangely unfamiliar, of devotional commemoration of the Departed. To the Queen's religious instincts, deeply tinged as they had been by Prince Albert's Lutheranism, such commemorations were entirely natural; for German Protestantism has always cherished a much livelier sense of the relation between the living and the departed than was realized by English Puritanism. The example set in high quarters quickly spread. Memorial Services became an established form of English mourning. Beginning with simple prayers and hymns, they gradually developed into Memorial Eucharists. The splendid, wailing music of theDies Iræwas felt to be the Christian echo of theDomine, Refugium; and the common instinct of mourning humanity found its appropriate expression when, over the coffin of Prince Henry of Battenberg, the choir of St. George's Chapel sang the Russian hymn of supplication, "Give rest, O Christ, to Thy servant with Thy Saints."VIIWILLSIf there is any one still left who knows his "Christian Year," he will remember that Keble extolled "a sober standard of feeling" as a special virtue of the English Prayer-book. I have always thought that this "sober standard" is peculiarly well exemplified by the rubric about Will-making in the Order for the Visitation of the Sick: "If the sick person hath not before disposed of his goods, let him then be admonished to make his Will and to declare his Debts, what he oweth and what is owing unto him, for the better discharging of his conscience and the quietness of his Executors. But men should often be put in remembrance to take order for the settling of their temporal estates whilst they are in health." There is something in these directions which is curiously English and commonplace and unrhapsodical, and therefore exactly congruous with the temper of a people who have never set a high value on unpractical religions. To this general duty of Will-making there may, of course, be exceptions. Thus Dr. Pusey in his old age, when his family was reduced to one and hehad no possessions left except his books, said: "In a case like mine, the Law is the best willmaker." A pietistic admirer, who had caught the words imperfectly, in relating them substituted "Lord" for "Law"; but the substitution did not really affect the sense. In cases where no great interests are involved and the requirements of justice are not altogether clear, we can wisely leave the eventual fate of our possessions to "God's scheme for governing the Universe, by men miscalled Chance."There is, I believe, a certain school of economic reformers who would wholly abolish the prerogative of Will-making, and would decree that whatever a man leaves behind him should pass automatically to his children, or, failing them, to the State. On the social and fiscal results of such a system I forbear to speculate; but, as a sincere friend to Literature in all its branches, I would ask, if that were law, what would become of the Novelists and the Playwrights? The law of Stageland has been codified for us by the laborious care of Mr. Jerome K. Jerome, and among its best-established principles seem to be these: If a man dies without leaving a will, then all his property goes to the nearest villain; but, if a man dies and leaves a will, then all his property goes to whoever can get possession of that will. Here are the raw materials of dramatic litigation enough to hold the Stage for a century; and ill would it fare with theembarrassed playwright if a mechanical process of law were substituted for the strange possibilities of Will-making, with its startling caprices, its incalculable miscarriages, and its eventual triumph of injured innocence. Then again, as to Fiction. Foul fall the day when our fiction-writers shall be unable to traffic any longer in testamentary mystification. How would their predecessors have fared if they had laboured under such a disability? I am by nature too cautious to "intromit with" the mysteries of Scotch law, and in the romances of the beloved Sir Walter the complications of Entail and of Will-making are curiously intertwined. Certainly it was under the provisions of an entail that Harry Bertram recovered the estates of Ellangowan, and I am inclined to think that it was an Entail which prompted the Countess of Glenallan to her hideous crime; but it was by will that Miss Margaret Bertram devised the lands of Singleside, and it was under old Sir Hildebrand's will that Francis Osbaldistone succeeded to Osbaldistone Hall.Even greater are the obligations of our English novelists to the testamentary law. Miss Edgeworth made admirable use of it in "Almeria." Had Englishmen no power of making wills, the "wicked Lord Hertford" could not have executed the notorious instrument which gave such unbounded delight to the scandalmongers of 1842-1843, and then Lord Beaconsfield could not havedrawn his Hogarth-like picture of the reading of Lord Monmouth's will in "Coningsby." Thackeray did not traffic very much in wills, though, to be sure, Jos Sedley left £1000 to Becky Sharp, and the opportune discovery of Lord Ringwood's will in the pocket of his travelling-carriage simplified Philip's career. The insolvent swindler Dr. Firmin, who had robbed his son and absconded to America, left his will "in the tortoiseshell secretaire in the consulting-room, under the picture of Abraham offering up Isaac." Dickens was a great Will-maker. We know that if Dick Swiveller had been a steadier youth he would have inherited more than £150 a year from his aunt Rebecca. That loyal-hearted lover Mr. Barkis, in spite of all rebuffs, made the obdurate Peggotty his residuary legatee. Mr. Finching left "a beautiful will," and Madeline Bray was the subject of a very complicated one. Mr. Dorrit's unexpected fortune accrued to him, I think, as Heir-at-law; but the litigation in Jarndycev.Jarndyce arose, as all the world knows, out of a disputed will; and the Thellusson Will Case, on which Dickens relied, in later years supplied Henry Kingsley with the plot of "Reginald Hetherege." Perhaps Dickens's best piece of Will-making is given in the case of Mr. Spenlow, who, being a practitioner in Doctors' Commons, spoke about his own will with "a serenity, a tranquillity, a calm sunset air" which quite affected DavidCopperfield; and then shattered all poor David's hopes by dying intestate.Anthony Trollope made good use of a Will and a Codicil in the plot of "Orley Farm." George Eliot, whose disagreeable characters always seem a good deal nearer life than her heroes and heroines, made Mr. Casaubon behave very characteristically in the odious will by which he tried to prevent Dorothea from marrying Will Ladislaw; and her picture of the disappointment which fell upon the company when Peter Featherstone's will was read is perhaps her best achievement in the way of humour. "Nobody present had a farthing; but Mr. Trumbull had the gold-headed cane," which, considered as an acknowledgment of his professional services to the deceased, he was ungrateful enough to call "farcical."The Law of Settlement and Entail is no part of our present study; but it may be remarked in passing that the legal Opinion on the Base Fee by which Harold Transome in "Felix Holt" held the Transome Estates was written, at George Eliot's request, by a young Chancery Barrister, who still survives, a brilliant figure in the world of Letters.This is enough, and perhaps more than enough, about Wills in fiction; but Wills in real life are fully as interesting. The late Sir Charles Butt, who presided over the Divorce Court and theProbate Court, once told me that, though the aspect of human nature which is exhibited in Divorce is not ideally beautiful, it is far less repulsive than that which is disclosed by Probate. None of the stories which one has read about forged wills, forced wills, wills made under pressure, wills made under misrepresentation, are too strange to be true. A century ago the daughter of a great landowner in the North of England succeeded to his wealth under circumstances which, to put it mildly, caused surprise. In later life she had a public quarrel with a high-born but intemperate dame, who concluded the colloquy by observing, with mordant emphasis, "Well, at any rate I didn't hold my dying father's hand to make him sign a will he never saw, and then murder the Butler to prevent his telling." "Ouida," or Miss Braddon, or some other novelist of High Life might, I think, make something of this scene.Spiteful Wills—wills which, by rehearsing and revoking previous bequests, mortify the survivors when the testator is no longer in a position to do soviva voce—form a very curious branch of the subject. Lord Kew was a very wealthy peer of strict principles and peculiarly acrid temper, and, having no wife or children to annoy, he "took it out," as the saying is, of his brothers, nephews, and other expectant kinsfolk. One gem from his collection I recall, in some such words as these:"By a previous will I had left £50,000 to my brother John; but, as he has sent his son to Oxford instead of Cambridge, contrary to my expressed wish, I reduce the legacy to £500." May the earth lie light on that benevolent old despot! Eccentricities of bequest, again, might make a pleasant chapter. The present writer, though not yet in tottering age, can recall an annuitant whose claim to £20 a year was founded (in part) on the skill with which he had tied his master's pigtail, and that master died in 1830. The proverbial longevity of annuitants was illustrated in the case of a grey parrot, for whose maintenance his departed mistress left £10 a year. The bird was not very young when the annuity began to accrue; and, as years went on and friends dropped off, he began to feel the loneliness of his lot. With a tenderness of heart which did them infinite credit, the good couple to whose care the bird had been left imported a companion exactly like himself to cheer his solitude. Before long one of the parrots died, and the mourners remarked that these younger birds had not half the constitution of the older generation. So, as long as they lived, the parrot lived, and the pension lived also.Let my closing word on Wills bear the authority of a great name. To a retailer of news who informed him that Lord Omnium, recently deceased,had left a large sum of money to charities, Mr. Gladstone replied with characteristic emphasis: "Thank him for nothing! He was obliged to leave it. He couldn't carry it with him."VIIIPENSIONS"There is no living in this country under twenty thousand a year—not that that suffices, but it entitles one to ask a pension for two or three lives." This was the verdict of Horace Walpole, who, as Sir George Trevelyan antithetically says, "lived in the country and on the country during more than half a century, doing for the country less than half a day's work in half a year." Talleyrand said that no one could conceive how enjoyable a thing existence was capable of being who had not belonged to theAncienne Noblesseof France before the Revolution; but really the younger son of an important Minister, General, Courtier, or Prelate under our English Georges had a good deal to be thankful for. It is pleasant to note the innocent candour with which, in Walpole's manly declaration, one enormity is made to justify another. A father who held great office in Church or State or Law gave, as a matter of course, all his most desirable preferments to his sons. These preferments enabled the sons to live in opulence at the public charge, their duties being performed by deputy.The Clerk of the Rolls and the Clerk of the Hanaper had no personal contact with the mysterious articles to which they are attached. The Clerk of the Irons, the Surveyor of the Meltings, and the Accountant of Slops lived far remote from such "low-thoughtéd cares." The writer of this book deduces his insignificant being from a gentleman who divided with a brother the lucrative sinecure of Scavenger of Dublin, though neither ever set foot in that fragrant city. A nephew of Lord-Chancellor Thurlow (who survived till 1874) drew pensions for abolished offices to the amount of £11,000 a year; and a son of Archbishop Moore was Principal Registrar of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury from his boyhood till the abolition of his Court in 1858, when he was pensioned off with £10,000 a year.When the sands of life were running in the glass, it was customary for a filial placeman to obtain further pensions for his sons and daughters, on the obvious plea that it was cruel to cast young men and women, who had been reared in comfort on the mercies of a rough world. Thus the golden chain of Royal bounty held at least three lives together. The grandfather was First Lord of the Treasury or Chancellor of the Exchequer or Paymaster-General, and into his personal profits it would be invidious, even indecent, to enquire. He might make his eldest son, while still a boy at Eton, Clerk of the Estreats, and his second, beforehe took his degree at Cambridge, Usher of the Exchequer. Thus Lord-Chancellor Erskine made his son Secretary of Presentations when he was eighteen, and Charles Greville was appointed Secretary of Jamaica (where he never set his foot) before he was twenty. And then when, after fifty or sixty years of blameless enjoyment, the amiable sinecurist was nearing his last quarter-day, a benevolent Treasury intervened to save his maiden daughters or orphan nieces from pecuniary embarrassment. It was of such "near and dear relations" of a public man that Sydney Smith affirmed that their "eating, drinking, washing, and clothing cost every man in the United Kingdom twopence or threepence a year"; and, to the critics who deprecated this commercial way of regarding the situation, he replied, with characteristic vigour: "I have no idea that the Sophias and Carolines of any man breathing are to eat national veal, to drink public tea, to wear Treasury ribands, and then that we are to be told that it is coarse to animadvert upon this pitiful and eleemosynary splendour. If this is right, why not mention it? If it is wrong, why should not he who enjoys the ease of supporting his sisters in this manner bear the shame of it?" In thus writing of the Pension List as it stood in 1807, the admirable Sydney was at once the successor of Burke and the forerunner of Lord Grey. In 1780 Burke had addressed all the resources of his genius to the task of restoringthe independence of Parliament by economical reform. It was, as Mr. Morley says, the number of sinecure places and unpublished pensions which "furnished the Minister with an irresistible lever." Burke found that "in sweeping away those factitious places and secret pensions he would be robbing the Court of its chief implements of corruption and protecting the representative against his chief motive in selling his country." His power of oratory was reinforced by a minute knowledge of all the shady and shabby abuses, all the manifold and complicated corruptions, which had accumulated under the protection of the Royal name. The reformer's triumph was signal and complete. Vast numbers of sinecures were swept away, but some remained. The Pension List was closely curtailed, but pensions were still conferred. No public servant ever more richly earned a provision for his old age and decrepitude than Burke himself; but when, broken by years and sorrows, he accepted a pension from the Crown, a Whig Duke of fabulous wealth, just thirty years old, had the temerity to charge him with a discreditable departure from his former principles of economic reform. The Duke was a booby: but his foolhardiness enriched English literature with "A Letter to a Noble Lord on the Attacks made on Mr. Burke and his Pension." To read that Letter, even after the lapse of 110 years, is to realize that, in spite of all corruption and allabuse, pecuniary rewards for political service need not be dishonourable or unreasonable.But corruption and abuse there were, and in sufficient quantities to justify all the bitter fun which "Peter Plymley" poured upon the Cannings, the Jenkinsons, and the Percevals. The reform of the Pension List became a cardinal object of reforming Radicals; and politicians like Joseph Hume, publicists like Albany Fonblanque, pursued it with incessant perseverance,"Till Grey went forth in 'Thirty-two to storm Corruption's hold."In 1834 the first Reformed Parliament overhauled the whole system and brought some curious transactions into the light of day. Whereas up to that time the Pension List amounted to £145,000 a year, it was now reduced to £75,000; and its benefits were restricted to "servants of the Crown and public, and to those who by their useful discoveries in science or attainments in literature and the arts had merited the gracious consideration of their Sovereign and the gratitude of their country." Vested interests were, of course, respected; for had we not even compensated the slaveholders? Two years ago one of these beneficiaries survived in a serene old age, and, for all I know, there may be others still spared to us, for, as Mr. G. A. Sala truly remarked, it never is safe to say that any one is dead, for if you do he issure to write from the country and say he is only ninety-seven and never was better.A typical representative of the unreformed system was John Wilson Croker (1780-1857), whose literary efforts Macaulay trounced, and whose political utterances were thus described by Lord Beaconsfield:—"There never was a fellow for giving a good hearty kick to the people like Rigby. Himself sprung from the dregs of the populace, this was disinterested. What could be more patriotic and magnanimous than his jeremiads over the fall of the Montmorencis and the Crillions, or the possible catastrophe of the Percys and the Seymours? The truth of all this hullabaloo was that Rigby had a sly pension which, by an inevitable association of ideas, he always connected with the maintenance of an aristocracy. All his rigmarole dissertations on the French Revolution were impelled by this secret influence; and, when he moaned like a mandrake over Nottingham Castle in flames, the rogue had an eye all the while to quarter-day."It was an evil day for those who love to grow rich upon the public money when Mr. Gladstone became the controller of the National Purse. One of his first acts was to revise the system of political pensions, which by an Act of 1869 was reconstituted as it stands to-day. There are now three classes of persons entitled to pensions for servicesrendered in political office; and the scale is arranged on that curious principle which also regulates the "tips" to servants in a private house—that the larger your wage is, the larger your gratuity shall be. Thus a Minister who has drawn £5000 a year is entitled after four years' service to a pension of £2000 a year; he who has drawn £3000 a year for six years is entitled to £1200 a year; while he who has laboured for ten years for the modest remuneration of £1000 a year must be content with a pittance of £800 a year.Qui habet, dabitur ei; but with this restriction—that only four pensions of any one class can run concurrently.Politicians who had been brought up in the "spacious days" and generous methods of the older dispensation were by no means enamoured of what they used to call "Gladstone's cheeseparing economies." Sir William Gregory used to relate how, when, as a child, he asked Lord Melbourne for a fine red stick of official sealing-wax, that genial Minister thrust it into his hand, together with a bundle of quill pens, saying, "You can't begin too early. All these things belong to the public, and your business in life must be to get out of the public all you can." An eminent statesman, trained in these traditions, had drawn from very early days a pension for an abolished office in Chancery. In due course he became a Cabinet Minister, and, when he fell from that highestate, he duly pocketed his £2000 a year. Later he came into a very large income, but this he obligingly saved for his nephews and nieces, living meanwhile on his twofold pension.I will conclude with a pleasanter anecdote. Until half-way through the last century it was customary to give a Speaker on retiring from the House of Commons a pension of £2000 a year for two lives. It is related that in 1857 Mr. Speaker Shaw-Lefevre, on his elevation to the peerage as Lord Eversley, said that he could not endure the thought of imposing a burden on posterity, and would therefore take £4000 a year for his own life instead of £2000 a year for two. This public-spirited action was highly commended, and, as he lived till 1888, virtue was, as it ought always to be, its own reward.IXTHE SEASON AS IT WASThe subject is worthy to be celebrated both in verse and in prose. Exactly sixty years ago Bulwer-Lytton, in his anonymous satire "The New Timon," thus described the nocturnal aspect of the West End in that choice period of the year which to us Londoners is pre-eminently "The Season":—"O'er Royal London, in luxuriant May,While lamps yet twinkle, dawning creeps the day.Home from the hell the pale-eyed gamester steals;Home from the ball flash jaded Beauty's wheels;From fields suburban rolls the early cart;So rests the Revel—so awakes the Mart."Twenty-four years later Lord Beaconsfield, in "Lothair," gave a vivid sketch of the same scenes as beheld by daylight:—"Town was beginning to blaze. Broughams whirled and bright barouches glanced, troops of social cavalry cantered and caracolled in morning rides, and the bells of prancing ponies, lashed by delicate hands, gingled in the laughing air. There were stoppages in Bond Street—which seems tocap the climax of civilization, after crowded clubs and swarming parks."It is curious that of the two descriptions the earlier needs much less revision than the later. Lamps still "twinkle" (though, to be sure, they are electric, whereas when Bulwer-Lytton wrote gas had barely ousted oil from its last fastness in Grosvenor Square). "Hells," though more euphemistically named, still invite the domiciliary visits of our much-aspersed police. "Beauty" dances even more vigorously than in 1846, for Waltzes and Kitchen-Lancers and Washington Posts have superseded the decorous quadrilles which our mothers loved. And still the market-gardens of Acton and Ealing and Hounslow send their "towering squadrons" of waggons laden heavens-high with the fruits and vegetables for to-morrow's luncheon. In this merry month of May 1906 an observer, standing at Hyde Park Corner "when the night and morning meet," sees London substantially as Bulwer-Lytton saw it.But, when we turn to Lord Beaconsfield's description, the changes wrought by six-and-thirty years are curiously marked. "Bright barouches glanced." In the present day a Barouche, the handsomest and gracefullest of all open carriages, is as rare as an Auk's Egg or an original Folio of Shakespeare. Only two or three survive. One, richly dight in royal crimson, bears the Queen, beautiful as Cleopatra in her barge. In another,almost imperially purple, Lady Londonderry sits enthroned; a third, palely blue as the forget-me-not, carries Lady Carysfort; but soon the tale of barouches ends. Victorias and landaus and "Clarences" and "Sociables" make the common throng of carriages, and their serried ranks give way to the impetuous onrush of the noxious Motor or the milder impact of the Electric Brougham."Troops of social cavalry" were, when Lord Beaconsfield wrote "Lothair," the characteristic glories of Rotten Row; but horses and horsemanship alike have waned. Men take their constitutional canter in costumes anciently confined to rat-catching, and the general aspect of Rotten Row suggests the idea of Mounted Infantry rather than of "Cavalry." Alongside the ride forty years ago ladies drove their pony-phaetons—a pretty practice and a pretty carriage; but both have utterly disappeared, and the only bells that "gingle in the laughing air" are the warning signals of the Petrol Fiend, as, bent on destruction, he swoops down from Marble Arch to Piccadilly. Does a captious critic gaze enquiringly on the unfamiliar verb to "gingle"? It was thus that Lord Beaconsfield wrote it in "Lothair"; even as in the same high romance he described a lady with a rich bunch of "Stephanopolis" in her hand. It is not for the ephemeral scribbler to correctthe orthography of the immortal dead. As to "stoppages in Bond Street," they were isolated and noteworthy incidents in 1870; in 1906, thanks to the admission of omnibuses into the narrow thoroughfare, they are occurrences as regular as the postman's knock or the policeman's mailed tread.We have seen the aspects in which the London Season presented itself to two great men of yore. Let me now descend to a more personal level. We will imagine ourselves transported back to the year 1880, and to the month of May. A young gentleman—some five-and-twenty summers, as Mr. G. P. R. James would have said, have passed over his fair head—is standing near the steps of St. George's Hospital between the hours of eleven and midnight. He is smartly dressed in evening clothes, with a white waistcoat, a gardenia in his button-hole, and a silver-crutched stick in his hand. He is smoking a cigarette and pondering the question where he shall spend his evening, or, more strictly, the early hours of next day. He is in a state of serene contentment with himself and the world, for he has just eaten an excellent dinner, where plovers' eggs and asparagus have reminded him that the Season has really begun. To the pleasure-seeking Londoner these symptoms of returning summer mean more, far more, than the dogrose in the hedgerow or the first note of the nightingale in the copse. Since dinner he hasjust looked in at an evening party, which bored him badly, and has "cut" two others where he was not so likely to be missed. And now arises the vital question of the Balls. I use the plural number, for there will certainly be two, and probably three, to choose from. Here, at St. George's Hospital, our youth is at the centre of the world's social concourse. A swift and unbroken stream of carriages is pouring down from Grosvenor Square and Mayfair to Belgrave Square and Eaton Square and Chesham Place, and it meets as it goes the ascending procession which begins in Belgravia and ends in Portman Square. To-night there is a Royal Ball at Grosvenor House, certainly the most stately event of the season; a little dance, exquisitely gay and bright, in Piccadilly; and a gorgeous entertainment in Prince's Gate, where the aspiring Distiller is struggling, with enormous outlay, into social fame. All these have solicited the honour of our young friend's presence, and now is the moment of decision. It does not take long to repudiate Prince's Gate; there will be the best band in London, and ortolans for supper, but there will be no one there that one ever saw before, and it is too sickening to be called "My boy" by that bow-windowed bounder, the master of the house. There remain Grosvenor House and Piccadilly, and happily these can be combined in a harmonious perfection. Grosvenor House shall come first, for the arrival ofthe Prince and Princess is a pageant worth seeing—the most gracious host and the most beautiful hostess in London ushering the Royal guests, with courtly pomp, into the great gallery, walled with the canvases of Rubens, which serves as the dancing-room. Then the fun begins, and the bright hours fly swiftly, till one o'clock suggests the tender thought of supper, which is served on gold plate and Sèvres china in a garden-tent of Gobelins tapestry. And now it is time for a move; and our youth, extricating himself from the undesired attentions of the linkmen, pops into a hansom and speeds to Piccadilly, where he finds delights of a different kind—no Royalty, no pomp, no ceremony; but a warm welcome, and all his intimate friends, and the nicest girls in London eager for a valse.As day begins to peep, he drinks his crowning tumbler of champagne-cup, and strolls home under the opalescent dawn, sniffing the fragrance from pyramids of strawberries as they roll towards Covent Garden, and exchanging a friendly "Good night" with the policeman on the beat, who seems to think that "Good morning" would be a more suitable greeting. So to bed, with the cheerful consciousness of a day's work well done, and the even more exhilarating prospect of an unbroken succession of such days, full of feasting and dancing and riding and polo and lawn-tennis, till August stifles the Season withits dust and drives the revellers to Homburg or the moors.But I awake, and lo! it is a dream, though a dream well founded on reality. For I have been describing the London Season as it was when the world was young."When all the world is old, lad,And all the trees are brown;And all the sport is stale, lad,And all the wheels run down;Creep home, and take your place there,The spent and maimed among:God grant you find one face there,You loved when all was young."

VDOCTORS AND DOCTORINGSydney Smith, who was fond of quacking his parishioners, and had a poor opinion of "professional and graduated homicides," observes that "the Sixth Commandment is suspended by one medical diploma from the North of England to the South." Personally, I have experienced the attentions of the Faculty north, south, east, and west, and I began in London. In my first appearance on this planet I was personally conducted by a smart gentleman, who came straight from a dinner-party, in a large white cravat and turquoise studs. Those studs still exist, and have descended, with the practice, to his grandson. May they beam on births more propitious than my own.My knowledge of the first act of life's drama is necessarily traditional. But, as I approach the second, memory begins to operate. I seem to remember a black silhouette of a gentleman in an elbow-chair, with a pigtail and knee-breeches; and this icon was revered as the likeness of "old Doctor P——." This "old Dr. P.'s" son, "Tom P——," was a sturdy stripling of seventy odd,who had never used a stethoscope, and dismissed a rival practitioner who talked about heart-sounds as "an alarmist." To these succeeded a third generation of the same drug-stained dynasty, represented to me by a gentleman in shiny black, who produced a large gold watch when he felt one's pulse, and said "Hah!" when he looked at one's tongue. These three generations, for something more than a century, monopolized all the best practice of Loamshire, were immensely respected, and accumulated a great deal of money. Echoes of the dialogue between doctor and patient still haunt the ear of memory:—Nervous and Dyspeptic Lady."Do you know, Dr. P., I felt so very uncomfortable after luncheon—quite a sensation of sinking through the floor. Of course I had some brandy and water—about half and half—at once, but I feel that I ought to have a little champagne at dinner. Nothing helps me so much."Dr. P."Your ladyship is no inconsiderable physician. I was about to make the same suggestion. But pray be careful that it is a dry wine."All this was very comfortable and friendly, and tended to promote the best relations between doctor and patient. I do not recollect that the doctor was supposed to effect cures; but his presence at a deathbed created the pleasant sense that all had been done which could be done, and that the patient was dying with the dignity properto his station. It may be remarked, in passing, that the two elder generations did all their rounds, early and late, summer and winter, on horseback; while the third subsided into a brougham drawn by a pair of horses afflicted with stringhalt, and presumably bought cheap on account of that infirmity.So much for the men. What was their method? To my infant palate the oils of castor and cod were as familiar as mother's milk. I dwelt in a land flowing with rhubarb and magnesia. The lively leech was a household pet. "Two nocturnes in blue and an arrangement in black," as the Æsthete said, were of frequent occurrence. But other parts of the system were more palatable. I seem to have drunk beer from my earliest infancy. A glass of port wine at eleven, with a teaspoonful of bark in it, was the recognized tonic, and brandy (which the doctor, who loved periphrasis, always called "the domestic stimulant") was administered whenever one looked squeamish, while mulled claret was "exhibited" as a soporific. The notion of pouring all this stuff down a child's throat sounds odd to a generation reared on Apollinaris and barley-water, but it had this one advantage—that when one grew up it was impossible to make one drunk.From childhood we pass on to schooldays. Wild horses should not drag from me the name of the seminary where I was educated, for itsmedical arrangements left a good deal to be desired. There were three doctors in this place, and they shared the care of some six hundred boys. Dr. A. was certainly very old, and was reputed to be very good, insomuch that his admirers said that, if they were dying, they should wish to have Dr. A. with them, as he was better than any clergyman. If, however, they were so carnally-minded as to wish to recover, they sent for Dr. B., a bluff gentleman, who told his patients that they were not half as ill as they thought, and must pull themselves together—a prescription which, if there was nothing the matter, answered admirably. The third was a grievous gentleman, who took a dark view of life, and, sitting by my sick-bed, would inform me of the precarious condition of a schoolfellow, who, to use his own phrase, was "slipping through his fingers," and "had no more constitution than a fly." Regarding this triumvirate in the light of my subsequent experience, I cannot affect surprise that there were fifteen deaths among the boys during the five years that I was in the school.From the anonymous school I proceeded to an anonymous university, where the medical world was dominated by the bland majesty of Sir Omicron Pie (the name is Trollope's, but it will serve). Who that ever saw them can forget that stately bearing, that Jove-like brow, that sublime air of omniscience and omnipotence? Who that ever heard it, that even flow of mellifluous eloquence and copiousnarrative? Who that ever experienced it, the underlying kindness of heart?A nervous undergraduate is ushered into the consulting-room, and the great man advances with a paternal smile."Mr. Bumpstead? Ah! I think I was at school with your good father. No? Then it must have been your uncle. You are very like him. We ran a neck-and-neck race at the University. I won the Gold Medal, and he wasproximè. In those days I little thought of settling down in Oxbridge. I had destined myself for a London practice; but Sir Thomas Watson—you have heard of 'Watson's style'? He was the Cicero of Medicine—well, Watson said, 'No, my dear Pie, it won't do. In ten years you will be at the head of the profession, and will have made £100,000. But, mark my words,the blade will wear out the scabbard. You are not justified in risking your life.' I was disappointed, of course. All young men like the idea of fame. But I saw that Watson was right, and I came here, and found my life's work. The Medical School was then in a very decayed condition, and I have made it what it is. Why am I telling you all this——?"(Enter the butler.) "Please, Sir Omicron, you've an appointment at Battle-axe Castle at four o'clock, and the carriage is at the door."Sir O. P."Ah! well. I must tell you the rest another day. Let me see, what was thematter? Palpitation? Let me listen for a moment. It is as I thought—only a little functional irritability. Lead a sensible life; avoid excess; cultivate the philosophic temper. Take this prescription, and come again next week. Thank you, thank you."Fortified by four years of Sir Omicron's care, I came up to London somewhere between 1870 and 1880. The practice of the West End was then divided between three men—Sir A. B., Sir C. D., and Sir E. F.Sir A. B. was bluff and brutal, fashioned himself on the traditions of Abernethy, and ruled his patients by sheer terrorism. He had an immense influence over hysterical women and weak-minded men, and people who might otherwise have resented his ursine manner were reconciled to it by the knowledge that he officially inspected the most illustrious Tongue in the kingdom.His principal rival was Sir C. D., who ruled by love. "Well, my dear sir, there is not much the matter. A day or two's hunting will set you right. You don't ride? Ah! well, it doesn't much matter. A fortnight at Monte Carlo will do just as well. All you want is change of scene and plenty of amusement.""As to your ladyship's diet, it should be light and nutritious. I should recommend you to avoid beefsteaks and boiled mutton. A little turtle soup, some devilled whitebait, and a slice of a turkeytruffewould be the sort of dinner to suit you. If the insomnia is at all urgent, I have found a light supper of pâté de foie gras work wonders."Sir E. F. operated on a theological system. His discourse on the Relations between Natural and Revealed Religion profoundly impressed those who heard it for the first time, and his tractate on Medical Missions in India ran into a third edition. In his waiting-room one found, instead of last month'sPunchor the Christmas number ofMadame, devotional works inscribed "From his grateful patient, the author." In his consulting-room a sacred picture of large dimensions crowned the mantelpiece, and signed portraits of bishops whom he had delivered from dyspepsia adorned the walls. Ritualistic clergy frequented him in great numbers, and—what was better still—recommended their congregations to the "beloved physician." Ecclesiastically-minded laymen delighted in him, and came away with a comfortable conviction, syllogistically arranged, that (1) one's first duty is to maintain one's health; (2) whatever one likes is healthy; therefore (3) one's first duty is to like exactly as one likes.A water-drinking adherent of Mr. Gladstone once saw that eminent man crowning a banquet of champagne with a glass of undeniable port. "Oh! Mr. Gladstone," he exclaimed in the bitterness of his soul, "what would Sir E. F. say if he could see you mixing your liquors?" The great man'sdefence was ready to his hand: "Sir E. F. assures me that, if I let fifteen minutes elapse between two kinds of wine, there is no mixture."Somehow these lively oracles of Sir E. F.'s, with which I was always coming in contact, left on my mind a dim impression that he must have been related to the doctor who attended Little Nell and prescribed the remedies which the landlady had already applied: "Everybody said he was a very shrewd doctor indeed, and knew perfectly well what people's constitutions were, which there appears some reason to suppose he did."

DOCTORS AND DOCTORING

Sydney Smith, who was fond of quacking his parishioners, and had a poor opinion of "professional and graduated homicides," observes that "the Sixth Commandment is suspended by one medical diploma from the North of England to the South." Personally, I have experienced the attentions of the Faculty north, south, east, and west, and I began in London. In my first appearance on this planet I was personally conducted by a smart gentleman, who came straight from a dinner-party, in a large white cravat and turquoise studs. Those studs still exist, and have descended, with the practice, to his grandson. May they beam on births more propitious than my own.

My knowledge of the first act of life's drama is necessarily traditional. But, as I approach the second, memory begins to operate. I seem to remember a black silhouette of a gentleman in an elbow-chair, with a pigtail and knee-breeches; and this icon was revered as the likeness of "old Doctor P——." This "old Dr. P.'s" son, "Tom P——," was a sturdy stripling of seventy odd,who had never used a stethoscope, and dismissed a rival practitioner who talked about heart-sounds as "an alarmist." To these succeeded a third generation of the same drug-stained dynasty, represented to me by a gentleman in shiny black, who produced a large gold watch when he felt one's pulse, and said "Hah!" when he looked at one's tongue. These three generations, for something more than a century, monopolized all the best practice of Loamshire, were immensely respected, and accumulated a great deal of money. Echoes of the dialogue between doctor and patient still haunt the ear of memory:—

Nervous and Dyspeptic Lady."Do you know, Dr. P., I felt so very uncomfortable after luncheon—quite a sensation of sinking through the floor. Of course I had some brandy and water—about half and half—at once, but I feel that I ought to have a little champagne at dinner. Nothing helps me so much."

Dr. P."Your ladyship is no inconsiderable physician. I was about to make the same suggestion. But pray be careful that it is a dry wine."

All this was very comfortable and friendly, and tended to promote the best relations between doctor and patient. I do not recollect that the doctor was supposed to effect cures; but his presence at a deathbed created the pleasant sense that all had been done which could be done, and that the patient was dying with the dignity properto his station. It may be remarked, in passing, that the two elder generations did all their rounds, early and late, summer and winter, on horseback; while the third subsided into a brougham drawn by a pair of horses afflicted with stringhalt, and presumably bought cheap on account of that infirmity.

So much for the men. What was their method? To my infant palate the oils of castor and cod were as familiar as mother's milk. I dwelt in a land flowing with rhubarb and magnesia. The lively leech was a household pet. "Two nocturnes in blue and an arrangement in black," as the Æsthete said, were of frequent occurrence. But other parts of the system were more palatable. I seem to have drunk beer from my earliest infancy. A glass of port wine at eleven, with a teaspoonful of bark in it, was the recognized tonic, and brandy (which the doctor, who loved periphrasis, always called "the domestic stimulant") was administered whenever one looked squeamish, while mulled claret was "exhibited" as a soporific. The notion of pouring all this stuff down a child's throat sounds odd to a generation reared on Apollinaris and barley-water, but it had this one advantage—that when one grew up it was impossible to make one drunk.

From childhood we pass on to schooldays. Wild horses should not drag from me the name of the seminary where I was educated, for itsmedical arrangements left a good deal to be desired. There were three doctors in this place, and they shared the care of some six hundred boys. Dr. A. was certainly very old, and was reputed to be very good, insomuch that his admirers said that, if they were dying, they should wish to have Dr. A. with them, as he was better than any clergyman. If, however, they were so carnally-minded as to wish to recover, they sent for Dr. B., a bluff gentleman, who told his patients that they were not half as ill as they thought, and must pull themselves together—a prescription which, if there was nothing the matter, answered admirably. The third was a grievous gentleman, who took a dark view of life, and, sitting by my sick-bed, would inform me of the precarious condition of a schoolfellow, who, to use his own phrase, was "slipping through his fingers," and "had no more constitution than a fly." Regarding this triumvirate in the light of my subsequent experience, I cannot affect surprise that there were fifteen deaths among the boys during the five years that I was in the school.

From the anonymous school I proceeded to an anonymous university, where the medical world was dominated by the bland majesty of Sir Omicron Pie (the name is Trollope's, but it will serve). Who that ever saw them can forget that stately bearing, that Jove-like brow, that sublime air of omniscience and omnipotence? Who that ever heard it, that even flow of mellifluous eloquence and copiousnarrative? Who that ever experienced it, the underlying kindness of heart?

A nervous undergraduate is ushered into the consulting-room, and the great man advances with a paternal smile.

"Mr. Bumpstead? Ah! I think I was at school with your good father. No? Then it must have been your uncle. You are very like him. We ran a neck-and-neck race at the University. I won the Gold Medal, and he wasproximè. In those days I little thought of settling down in Oxbridge. I had destined myself for a London practice; but Sir Thomas Watson—you have heard of 'Watson's style'? He was the Cicero of Medicine—well, Watson said, 'No, my dear Pie, it won't do. In ten years you will be at the head of the profession, and will have made £100,000. But, mark my words,the blade will wear out the scabbard. You are not justified in risking your life.' I was disappointed, of course. All young men like the idea of fame. But I saw that Watson was right, and I came here, and found my life's work. The Medical School was then in a very decayed condition, and I have made it what it is. Why am I telling you all this——?"

(Enter the butler.) "Please, Sir Omicron, you've an appointment at Battle-axe Castle at four o'clock, and the carriage is at the door."

Sir O. P."Ah! well. I must tell you the rest another day. Let me see, what was thematter? Palpitation? Let me listen for a moment. It is as I thought—only a little functional irritability. Lead a sensible life; avoid excess; cultivate the philosophic temper. Take this prescription, and come again next week. Thank you, thank you."

Fortified by four years of Sir Omicron's care, I came up to London somewhere between 1870 and 1880. The practice of the West End was then divided between three men—Sir A. B., Sir C. D., and Sir E. F.

Sir A. B. was bluff and brutal, fashioned himself on the traditions of Abernethy, and ruled his patients by sheer terrorism. He had an immense influence over hysterical women and weak-minded men, and people who might otherwise have resented his ursine manner were reconciled to it by the knowledge that he officially inspected the most illustrious Tongue in the kingdom.

His principal rival was Sir C. D., who ruled by love. "Well, my dear sir, there is not much the matter. A day or two's hunting will set you right. You don't ride? Ah! well, it doesn't much matter. A fortnight at Monte Carlo will do just as well. All you want is change of scene and plenty of amusement."

"As to your ladyship's diet, it should be light and nutritious. I should recommend you to avoid beefsteaks and boiled mutton. A little turtle soup, some devilled whitebait, and a slice of a turkeytruffewould be the sort of dinner to suit you. If the insomnia is at all urgent, I have found a light supper of pâté de foie gras work wonders."

Sir E. F. operated on a theological system. His discourse on the Relations between Natural and Revealed Religion profoundly impressed those who heard it for the first time, and his tractate on Medical Missions in India ran into a third edition. In his waiting-room one found, instead of last month'sPunchor the Christmas number ofMadame, devotional works inscribed "From his grateful patient, the author." In his consulting-room a sacred picture of large dimensions crowned the mantelpiece, and signed portraits of bishops whom he had delivered from dyspepsia adorned the walls. Ritualistic clergy frequented him in great numbers, and—what was better still—recommended their congregations to the "beloved physician." Ecclesiastically-minded laymen delighted in him, and came away with a comfortable conviction, syllogistically arranged, that (1) one's first duty is to maintain one's health; (2) whatever one likes is healthy; therefore (3) one's first duty is to like exactly as one likes.

A water-drinking adherent of Mr. Gladstone once saw that eminent man crowning a banquet of champagne with a glass of undeniable port. "Oh! Mr. Gladstone," he exclaimed in the bitterness of his soul, "what would Sir E. F. say if he could see you mixing your liquors?" The great man'sdefence was ready to his hand: "Sir E. F. assures me that, if I let fifteen minutes elapse between two kinds of wine, there is no mixture."

Somehow these lively oracles of Sir E. F.'s, with which I was always coming in contact, left on my mind a dim impression that he must have been related to the doctor who attended Little Nell and prescribed the remedies which the landlady had already applied: "Everybody said he was a very shrewd doctor indeed, and knew perfectly well what people's constitutions were, which there appears some reason to suppose he did."

VIMOURNINGMy infant mind was "suckled in a creed outworn," in the form of a book called, by a strange misnomer, a "Book of Useful Knowledge." It was there stated, if my memory serves me, that "the Chinese mourn in yellow, but Kings and Cardinals mourn in purple." In what do modern English people mourn? That is the subject of to-day's enquiry.Lord Acton, in one of his most impressive passages, speaks of England as living under "institutions which incorporate tradition and prolong the reign of the dead." But the very notion of "prolonging the reign of the dead" is an anachronism in an age which forgets its friends the moment it has buried them. "Out of sight, out of mind" is an adage which nowadays verifies itself with startling rapidity. Mourning is as much out of date as Suttee; and, as to the Widow's Cap, the admirable Signora Vesey Neroni in "Barchester Towers" was only a little in advance of her age when she exclaimed, "The death of twenty husbands should not make me undergo such a penance.It is as much a relic of paganism as the sacrifice of a Hindoo woman at the burning of her husband's body. If not so bloody, it is quite as barbarous and quite as useless."In days gone by, a death in a family extinguished all festivity. Engagements were cancelled, social plans were laid aside, and the mourners went into retreat for a twelvemonth. Men wore black trousers; women swathed themselves in black crape. "Mourning Jewellery"—hideous combinations of jet and bogwood—twinkled and jingled round the necks of the bereaved, and widows wrote on letter-paper which was virtually black, with a small white space in the middle of the sheet. Harry Foker, we know, honoured his father's memory by having his brougham painted black; and I have known a lady who, when she lost her husband, had her boudoir lined with black velvet, after the fashion of Lord Glenallan in "The Antiquary."But nowadays people shrink (with amiable considerateness) from thus inflicting their griefs on their friends; and if (as we must in charity assume) they feel emotion, they studiously conceal it in their own bosoms. The ball follows the funeral with a celerity and a frank joyousness which suggest a Wake; and the keen pursuers of pleasure protest, with quite a religious air, that for their own part they would think it absolutely wicked to sorrow as those without hope. Weedless widows, becomingly "gowned," as Ladies' Papers say, inpale grey or black and white, sacrifice to propriety by forswearing the Opera or the Racecourse for twelve months or so, but find a little fresh air on the River or at Hurlingham absolutely necessary for health; and, if they dine out quietly or even give a little dance at home, are careful to protest that they have lost all pleasure in life, but must struggle to keep up for the sake of the dear children. Surely, as Master Shallow says, "good phrases are, and ever were, very commendable." The old-fashioned manifestations of mourning were no doubt overdone, but the modern disregard of the dead seems to me both heartless and indecent.The supreme exemplar of Mourning was, of course, Queen Victoria. During her reign, and in her personal practice, the custom of Mourning reached its highest point of persistence and solemnity. In 1844 Lady Lyttelton, who was governess to the present King and his sister the Princess Royal, wrote from Court, "We are such a 'boundless contiguity of shade' just now." The immediate cause of that shade was the death of Prince Albert's father; and although in Queen Victoria's life there was a fair allowance of sunshine, still, as Ecclesiastes said, "the clouds return after the rain"; and, in a family where cousinship is recognized to the third and fourth generation, the "shade" of mourning must constantly recur. The late Duke of Beaufort, head of the most numerous family in the Peerage, always wore a black bandround his white hat, because, as he said, one of his cousins was always dead and he would not be wanting in respect for the deceased; and, similarly, a Maid of Honour once said to me, "I never see the Queen's jewels, because she is almost always in mourning for some German prince or princess, and then she only wears black ornaments." Of course, in a case where there was this natural predisposition to mournful observance, the supreme loss of a husband meant a final renunciation of the world and its gaieties. I suppose it is no exaggeration to say that from her bereavement in 1861 to her death in 1901 Queen Victoria lived in unbroken communion with the unseen but unforgotten. The necessary business of the State was not, even for a week, laid aside; but pomps and ceremonies and public appearances are profoundly distasteful to shattered nerves and broken hearts. Yielding to the urgent advice of her Ministers, Queen Victoria emerged from four years' seclusion to open the new Parliament in 1866; and her reward was reaped in the following December, when a peculiarly rancorous politician rebuked her at a great meeting of reformers in St. James's Hall for a lack of popular sympathies. It was then that, on the spur of the moment, John Bright, who himself had known so well what bereavement meant, uttered his chivalrous defence of the absent and lonely Sovereign:—"I am not accustomed to stand up in defenceof those who are possessors of crowns. But I could not sit and hear that observation without a sensation of wonder and of pain. I think there has been, by many persons, a great injustice done to the Queen in reference to her desolate and widowed position. And I venture to say this—that a woman, be she the Queen of a great realm or be she the wife of one of your labouring men, who can keep alive in her heart a great sorrow for the lost object of her life and affection, is not at all likely to be wanting in a great and generous sympathy with you."Admirable and reverend as was this abiding sorrow, contemporary observers felt that its outward manifestations were not always harmonious. The Mausoleum at Frogmore is not a "poem in stone," and the Monument of Gilt opposite the Albert Hall has supplied the frivolous with an appropriate pun. Landseer, who, when once he forsook his stags and deerhounds, was surely the most debased painter of a hideous age, attained his worst in a picture of the Slopes at Windsorcirca1862. Under an inky sky, in the forefront of a sunless landscape, stands a black pony, and on its back is a lady dressed in the deepest weeds, with a black riding-skirt and a black bonnet. A retainer in subfusc kilt holds the pony's head, a dingy terrier looks on with melancholy eyes, and, in the distant background, two darkly-clad princesses shiver on a garden-seat. The only spot of colourin the scene is a red despatch-box, and the whole forms the highest tribute of English art to a national disaster and a Queenly sorrow.Black, and intensely black, were all the trappings of courtly woe—black crape, black gloves, black feathers, black jewellery. The State-robes were worn no longer; the State-coach stood unused in the coach-house. The footmen wore black bands round their arms. It was only by slow degrees, and on occasions of high and rare solemnity, that white lace and modest plumes and diamonds and decorations were permitted to enliven the firmament of courtly woe. But we of the twentieth century live in an age of æsthetic revival, and, though perhaps we do not mourn so heartily, we certainly mourn more prettily. One lady at least there is who knows how to combine the sincerity of sorrow with its becoming manifestation; and Queen Alexandra in mourning garb is as delightful a vision as was Queen Alexandra in her clothing of wrought gold, when she knelt before the altar of Westminster Abbey and bowed her head to receive her diamond crown.Queen Victoria's devotion to the memory of those whom she had lost had one definite consequence which probably she little contemplated. The annual service, conducted in the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore on the anniversary of the Prince Consort's death, accustomed English people to the idea, which since the Reformation hadbecome strangely unfamiliar, of devotional commemoration of the Departed. To the Queen's religious instincts, deeply tinged as they had been by Prince Albert's Lutheranism, such commemorations were entirely natural; for German Protestantism has always cherished a much livelier sense of the relation between the living and the departed than was realized by English Puritanism. The example set in high quarters quickly spread. Memorial Services became an established form of English mourning. Beginning with simple prayers and hymns, they gradually developed into Memorial Eucharists. The splendid, wailing music of theDies Iræwas felt to be the Christian echo of theDomine, Refugium; and the common instinct of mourning humanity found its appropriate expression when, over the coffin of Prince Henry of Battenberg, the choir of St. George's Chapel sang the Russian hymn of supplication, "Give rest, O Christ, to Thy servant with Thy Saints."

MOURNING

My infant mind was "suckled in a creed outworn," in the form of a book called, by a strange misnomer, a "Book of Useful Knowledge." It was there stated, if my memory serves me, that "the Chinese mourn in yellow, but Kings and Cardinals mourn in purple." In what do modern English people mourn? That is the subject of to-day's enquiry.

Lord Acton, in one of his most impressive passages, speaks of England as living under "institutions which incorporate tradition and prolong the reign of the dead." But the very notion of "prolonging the reign of the dead" is an anachronism in an age which forgets its friends the moment it has buried them. "Out of sight, out of mind" is an adage which nowadays verifies itself with startling rapidity. Mourning is as much out of date as Suttee; and, as to the Widow's Cap, the admirable Signora Vesey Neroni in "Barchester Towers" was only a little in advance of her age when she exclaimed, "The death of twenty husbands should not make me undergo such a penance.It is as much a relic of paganism as the sacrifice of a Hindoo woman at the burning of her husband's body. If not so bloody, it is quite as barbarous and quite as useless."

In days gone by, a death in a family extinguished all festivity. Engagements were cancelled, social plans were laid aside, and the mourners went into retreat for a twelvemonth. Men wore black trousers; women swathed themselves in black crape. "Mourning Jewellery"—hideous combinations of jet and bogwood—twinkled and jingled round the necks of the bereaved, and widows wrote on letter-paper which was virtually black, with a small white space in the middle of the sheet. Harry Foker, we know, honoured his father's memory by having his brougham painted black; and I have known a lady who, when she lost her husband, had her boudoir lined with black velvet, after the fashion of Lord Glenallan in "The Antiquary."

But nowadays people shrink (with amiable considerateness) from thus inflicting their griefs on their friends; and if (as we must in charity assume) they feel emotion, they studiously conceal it in their own bosoms. The ball follows the funeral with a celerity and a frank joyousness which suggest a Wake; and the keen pursuers of pleasure protest, with quite a religious air, that for their own part they would think it absolutely wicked to sorrow as those without hope. Weedless widows, becomingly "gowned," as Ladies' Papers say, inpale grey or black and white, sacrifice to propriety by forswearing the Opera or the Racecourse for twelve months or so, but find a little fresh air on the River or at Hurlingham absolutely necessary for health; and, if they dine out quietly or even give a little dance at home, are careful to protest that they have lost all pleasure in life, but must struggle to keep up for the sake of the dear children. Surely, as Master Shallow says, "good phrases are, and ever were, very commendable." The old-fashioned manifestations of mourning were no doubt overdone, but the modern disregard of the dead seems to me both heartless and indecent.

The supreme exemplar of Mourning was, of course, Queen Victoria. During her reign, and in her personal practice, the custom of Mourning reached its highest point of persistence and solemnity. In 1844 Lady Lyttelton, who was governess to the present King and his sister the Princess Royal, wrote from Court, "We are such a 'boundless contiguity of shade' just now." The immediate cause of that shade was the death of Prince Albert's father; and although in Queen Victoria's life there was a fair allowance of sunshine, still, as Ecclesiastes said, "the clouds return after the rain"; and, in a family where cousinship is recognized to the third and fourth generation, the "shade" of mourning must constantly recur. The late Duke of Beaufort, head of the most numerous family in the Peerage, always wore a black bandround his white hat, because, as he said, one of his cousins was always dead and he would not be wanting in respect for the deceased; and, similarly, a Maid of Honour once said to me, "I never see the Queen's jewels, because she is almost always in mourning for some German prince or princess, and then she only wears black ornaments." Of course, in a case where there was this natural predisposition to mournful observance, the supreme loss of a husband meant a final renunciation of the world and its gaieties. I suppose it is no exaggeration to say that from her bereavement in 1861 to her death in 1901 Queen Victoria lived in unbroken communion with the unseen but unforgotten. The necessary business of the State was not, even for a week, laid aside; but pomps and ceremonies and public appearances are profoundly distasteful to shattered nerves and broken hearts. Yielding to the urgent advice of her Ministers, Queen Victoria emerged from four years' seclusion to open the new Parliament in 1866; and her reward was reaped in the following December, when a peculiarly rancorous politician rebuked her at a great meeting of reformers in St. James's Hall for a lack of popular sympathies. It was then that, on the spur of the moment, John Bright, who himself had known so well what bereavement meant, uttered his chivalrous defence of the absent and lonely Sovereign:—

"I am not accustomed to stand up in defenceof those who are possessors of crowns. But I could not sit and hear that observation without a sensation of wonder and of pain. I think there has been, by many persons, a great injustice done to the Queen in reference to her desolate and widowed position. And I venture to say this—that a woman, be she the Queen of a great realm or be she the wife of one of your labouring men, who can keep alive in her heart a great sorrow for the lost object of her life and affection, is not at all likely to be wanting in a great and generous sympathy with you."

Admirable and reverend as was this abiding sorrow, contemporary observers felt that its outward manifestations were not always harmonious. The Mausoleum at Frogmore is not a "poem in stone," and the Monument of Gilt opposite the Albert Hall has supplied the frivolous with an appropriate pun. Landseer, who, when once he forsook his stags and deerhounds, was surely the most debased painter of a hideous age, attained his worst in a picture of the Slopes at Windsorcirca1862. Under an inky sky, in the forefront of a sunless landscape, stands a black pony, and on its back is a lady dressed in the deepest weeds, with a black riding-skirt and a black bonnet. A retainer in subfusc kilt holds the pony's head, a dingy terrier looks on with melancholy eyes, and, in the distant background, two darkly-clad princesses shiver on a garden-seat. The only spot of colourin the scene is a red despatch-box, and the whole forms the highest tribute of English art to a national disaster and a Queenly sorrow.

Black, and intensely black, were all the trappings of courtly woe—black crape, black gloves, black feathers, black jewellery. The State-robes were worn no longer; the State-coach stood unused in the coach-house. The footmen wore black bands round their arms. It was only by slow degrees, and on occasions of high and rare solemnity, that white lace and modest plumes and diamonds and decorations were permitted to enliven the firmament of courtly woe. But we of the twentieth century live in an age of æsthetic revival, and, though perhaps we do not mourn so heartily, we certainly mourn more prettily. One lady at least there is who knows how to combine the sincerity of sorrow with its becoming manifestation; and Queen Alexandra in mourning garb is as delightful a vision as was Queen Alexandra in her clothing of wrought gold, when she knelt before the altar of Westminster Abbey and bowed her head to receive her diamond crown.

Queen Victoria's devotion to the memory of those whom she had lost had one definite consequence which probably she little contemplated. The annual service, conducted in the Royal Mausoleum at Frogmore on the anniversary of the Prince Consort's death, accustomed English people to the idea, which since the Reformation hadbecome strangely unfamiliar, of devotional commemoration of the Departed. To the Queen's religious instincts, deeply tinged as they had been by Prince Albert's Lutheranism, such commemorations were entirely natural; for German Protestantism has always cherished a much livelier sense of the relation between the living and the departed than was realized by English Puritanism. The example set in high quarters quickly spread. Memorial Services became an established form of English mourning. Beginning with simple prayers and hymns, they gradually developed into Memorial Eucharists. The splendid, wailing music of theDies Iræwas felt to be the Christian echo of theDomine, Refugium; and the common instinct of mourning humanity found its appropriate expression when, over the coffin of Prince Henry of Battenberg, the choir of St. George's Chapel sang the Russian hymn of supplication, "Give rest, O Christ, to Thy servant with Thy Saints."

VIIWILLSIf there is any one still left who knows his "Christian Year," he will remember that Keble extolled "a sober standard of feeling" as a special virtue of the English Prayer-book. I have always thought that this "sober standard" is peculiarly well exemplified by the rubric about Will-making in the Order for the Visitation of the Sick: "If the sick person hath not before disposed of his goods, let him then be admonished to make his Will and to declare his Debts, what he oweth and what is owing unto him, for the better discharging of his conscience and the quietness of his Executors. But men should often be put in remembrance to take order for the settling of their temporal estates whilst they are in health." There is something in these directions which is curiously English and commonplace and unrhapsodical, and therefore exactly congruous with the temper of a people who have never set a high value on unpractical religions. To this general duty of Will-making there may, of course, be exceptions. Thus Dr. Pusey in his old age, when his family was reduced to one and hehad no possessions left except his books, said: "In a case like mine, the Law is the best willmaker." A pietistic admirer, who had caught the words imperfectly, in relating them substituted "Lord" for "Law"; but the substitution did not really affect the sense. In cases where no great interests are involved and the requirements of justice are not altogether clear, we can wisely leave the eventual fate of our possessions to "God's scheme for governing the Universe, by men miscalled Chance."There is, I believe, a certain school of economic reformers who would wholly abolish the prerogative of Will-making, and would decree that whatever a man leaves behind him should pass automatically to his children, or, failing them, to the State. On the social and fiscal results of such a system I forbear to speculate; but, as a sincere friend to Literature in all its branches, I would ask, if that were law, what would become of the Novelists and the Playwrights? The law of Stageland has been codified for us by the laborious care of Mr. Jerome K. Jerome, and among its best-established principles seem to be these: If a man dies without leaving a will, then all his property goes to the nearest villain; but, if a man dies and leaves a will, then all his property goes to whoever can get possession of that will. Here are the raw materials of dramatic litigation enough to hold the Stage for a century; and ill would it fare with theembarrassed playwright if a mechanical process of law were substituted for the strange possibilities of Will-making, with its startling caprices, its incalculable miscarriages, and its eventual triumph of injured innocence. Then again, as to Fiction. Foul fall the day when our fiction-writers shall be unable to traffic any longer in testamentary mystification. How would their predecessors have fared if they had laboured under such a disability? I am by nature too cautious to "intromit with" the mysteries of Scotch law, and in the romances of the beloved Sir Walter the complications of Entail and of Will-making are curiously intertwined. Certainly it was under the provisions of an entail that Harry Bertram recovered the estates of Ellangowan, and I am inclined to think that it was an Entail which prompted the Countess of Glenallan to her hideous crime; but it was by will that Miss Margaret Bertram devised the lands of Singleside, and it was under old Sir Hildebrand's will that Francis Osbaldistone succeeded to Osbaldistone Hall.Even greater are the obligations of our English novelists to the testamentary law. Miss Edgeworth made admirable use of it in "Almeria." Had Englishmen no power of making wills, the "wicked Lord Hertford" could not have executed the notorious instrument which gave such unbounded delight to the scandalmongers of 1842-1843, and then Lord Beaconsfield could not havedrawn his Hogarth-like picture of the reading of Lord Monmouth's will in "Coningsby." Thackeray did not traffic very much in wills, though, to be sure, Jos Sedley left £1000 to Becky Sharp, and the opportune discovery of Lord Ringwood's will in the pocket of his travelling-carriage simplified Philip's career. The insolvent swindler Dr. Firmin, who had robbed his son and absconded to America, left his will "in the tortoiseshell secretaire in the consulting-room, under the picture of Abraham offering up Isaac." Dickens was a great Will-maker. We know that if Dick Swiveller had been a steadier youth he would have inherited more than £150 a year from his aunt Rebecca. That loyal-hearted lover Mr. Barkis, in spite of all rebuffs, made the obdurate Peggotty his residuary legatee. Mr. Finching left "a beautiful will," and Madeline Bray was the subject of a very complicated one. Mr. Dorrit's unexpected fortune accrued to him, I think, as Heir-at-law; but the litigation in Jarndycev.Jarndyce arose, as all the world knows, out of a disputed will; and the Thellusson Will Case, on which Dickens relied, in later years supplied Henry Kingsley with the plot of "Reginald Hetherege." Perhaps Dickens's best piece of Will-making is given in the case of Mr. Spenlow, who, being a practitioner in Doctors' Commons, spoke about his own will with "a serenity, a tranquillity, a calm sunset air" which quite affected DavidCopperfield; and then shattered all poor David's hopes by dying intestate.Anthony Trollope made good use of a Will and a Codicil in the plot of "Orley Farm." George Eliot, whose disagreeable characters always seem a good deal nearer life than her heroes and heroines, made Mr. Casaubon behave very characteristically in the odious will by which he tried to prevent Dorothea from marrying Will Ladislaw; and her picture of the disappointment which fell upon the company when Peter Featherstone's will was read is perhaps her best achievement in the way of humour. "Nobody present had a farthing; but Mr. Trumbull had the gold-headed cane," which, considered as an acknowledgment of his professional services to the deceased, he was ungrateful enough to call "farcical."The Law of Settlement and Entail is no part of our present study; but it may be remarked in passing that the legal Opinion on the Base Fee by which Harold Transome in "Felix Holt" held the Transome Estates was written, at George Eliot's request, by a young Chancery Barrister, who still survives, a brilliant figure in the world of Letters.This is enough, and perhaps more than enough, about Wills in fiction; but Wills in real life are fully as interesting. The late Sir Charles Butt, who presided over the Divorce Court and theProbate Court, once told me that, though the aspect of human nature which is exhibited in Divorce is not ideally beautiful, it is far less repulsive than that which is disclosed by Probate. None of the stories which one has read about forged wills, forced wills, wills made under pressure, wills made under misrepresentation, are too strange to be true. A century ago the daughter of a great landowner in the North of England succeeded to his wealth under circumstances which, to put it mildly, caused surprise. In later life she had a public quarrel with a high-born but intemperate dame, who concluded the colloquy by observing, with mordant emphasis, "Well, at any rate I didn't hold my dying father's hand to make him sign a will he never saw, and then murder the Butler to prevent his telling." "Ouida," or Miss Braddon, or some other novelist of High Life might, I think, make something of this scene.Spiteful Wills—wills which, by rehearsing and revoking previous bequests, mortify the survivors when the testator is no longer in a position to do soviva voce—form a very curious branch of the subject. Lord Kew was a very wealthy peer of strict principles and peculiarly acrid temper, and, having no wife or children to annoy, he "took it out," as the saying is, of his brothers, nephews, and other expectant kinsfolk. One gem from his collection I recall, in some such words as these:"By a previous will I had left £50,000 to my brother John; but, as he has sent his son to Oxford instead of Cambridge, contrary to my expressed wish, I reduce the legacy to £500." May the earth lie light on that benevolent old despot! Eccentricities of bequest, again, might make a pleasant chapter. The present writer, though not yet in tottering age, can recall an annuitant whose claim to £20 a year was founded (in part) on the skill with which he had tied his master's pigtail, and that master died in 1830. The proverbial longevity of annuitants was illustrated in the case of a grey parrot, for whose maintenance his departed mistress left £10 a year. The bird was not very young when the annuity began to accrue; and, as years went on and friends dropped off, he began to feel the loneliness of his lot. With a tenderness of heart which did them infinite credit, the good couple to whose care the bird had been left imported a companion exactly like himself to cheer his solitude. Before long one of the parrots died, and the mourners remarked that these younger birds had not half the constitution of the older generation. So, as long as they lived, the parrot lived, and the pension lived also.Let my closing word on Wills bear the authority of a great name. To a retailer of news who informed him that Lord Omnium, recently deceased,had left a large sum of money to charities, Mr. Gladstone replied with characteristic emphasis: "Thank him for nothing! He was obliged to leave it. He couldn't carry it with him."

WILLS

If there is any one still left who knows his "Christian Year," he will remember that Keble extolled "a sober standard of feeling" as a special virtue of the English Prayer-book. I have always thought that this "sober standard" is peculiarly well exemplified by the rubric about Will-making in the Order for the Visitation of the Sick: "If the sick person hath not before disposed of his goods, let him then be admonished to make his Will and to declare his Debts, what he oweth and what is owing unto him, for the better discharging of his conscience and the quietness of his Executors. But men should often be put in remembrance to take order for the settling of their temporal estates whilst they are in health." There is something in these directions which is curiously English and commonplace and unrhapsodical, and therefore exactly congruous with the temper of a people who have never set a high value on unpractical religions. To this general duty of Will-making there may, of course, be exceptions. Thus Dr. Pusey in his old age, when his family was reduced to one and hehad no possessions left except his books, said: "In a case like mine, the Law is the best willmaker." A pietistic admirer, who had caught the words imperfectly, in relating them substituted "Lord" for "Law"; but the substitution did not really affect the sense. In cases where no great interests are involved and the requirements of justice are not altogether clear, we can wisely leave the eventual fate of our possessions to "God's scheme for governing the Universe, by men miscalled Chance."

There is, I believe, a certain school of economic reformers who would wholly abolish the prerogative of Will-making, and would decree that whatever a man leaves behind him should pass automatically to his children, or, failing them, to the State. On the social and fiscal results of such a system I forbear to speculate; but, as a sincere friend to Literature in all its branches, I would ask, if that were law, what would become of the Novelists and the Playwrights? The law of Stageland has been codified for us by the laborious care of Mr. Jerome K. Jerome, and among its best-established principles seem to be these: If a man dies without leaving a will, then all his property goes to the nearest villain; but, if a man dies and leaves a will, then all his property goes to whoever can get possession of that will. Here are the raw materials of dramatic litigation enough to hold the Stage for a century; and ill would it fare with theembarrassed playwright if a mechanical process of law were substituted for the strange possibilities of Will-making, with its startling caprices, its incalculable miscarriages, and its eventual triumph of injured innocence. Then again, as to Fiction. Foul fall the day when our fiction-writers shall be unable to traffic any longer in testamentary mystification. How would their predecessors have fared if they had laboured under such a disability? I am by nature too cautious to "intromit with" the mysteries of Scotch law, and in the romances of the beloved Sir Walter the complications of Entail and of Will-making are curiously intertwined. Certainly it was under the provisions of an entail that Harry Bertram recovered the estates of Ellangowan, and I am inclined to think that it was an Entail which prompted the Countess of Glenallan to her hideous crime; but it was by will that Miss Margaret Bertram devised the lands of Singleside, and it was under old Sir Hildebrand's will that Francis Osbaldistone succeeded to Osbaldistone Hall.

Even greater are the obligations of our English novelists to the testamentary law. Miss Edgeworth made admirable use of it in "Almeria." Had Englishmen no power of making wills, the "wicked Lord Hertford" could not have executed the notorious instrument which gave such unbounded delight to the scandalmongers of 1842-1843, and then Lord Beaconsfield could not havedrawn his Hogarth-like picture of the reading of Lord Monmouth's will in "Coningsby." Thackeray did not traffic very much in wills, though, to be sure, Jos Sedley left £1000 to Becky Sharp, and the opportune discovery of Lord Ringwood's will in the pocket of his travelling-carriage simplified Philip's career. The insolvent swindler Dr. Firmin, who had robbed his son and absconded to America, left his will "in the tortoiseshell secretaire in the consulting-room, under the picture of Abraham offering up Isaac." Dickens was a great Will-maker. We know that if Dick Swiveller had been a steadier youth he would have inherited more than £150 a year from his aunt Rebecca. That loyal-hearted lover Mr. Barkis, in spite of all rebuffs, made the obdurate Peggotty his residuary legatee. Mr. Finching left "a beautiful will," and Madeline Bray was the subject of a very complicated one. Mr. Dorrit's unexpected fortune accrued to him, I think, as Heir-at-law; but the litigation in Jarndycev.Jarndyce arose, as all the world knows, out of a disputed will; and the Thellusson Will Case, on which Dickens relied, in later years supplied Henry Kingsley with the plot of "Reginald Hetherege." Perhaps Dickens's best piece of Will-making is given in the case of Mr. Spenlow, who, being a practitioner in Doctors' Commons, spoke about his own will with "a serenity, a tranquillity, a calm sunset air" which quite affected DavidCopperfield; and then shattered all poor David's hopes by dying intestate.

Anthony Trollope made good use of a Will and a Codicil in the plot of "Orley Farm." George Eliot, whose disagreeable characters always seem a good deal nearer life than her heroes and heroines, made Mr. Casaubon behave very characteristically in the odious will by which he tried to prevent Dorothea from marrying Will Ladislaw; and her picture of the disappointment which fell upon the company when Peter Featherstone's will was read is perhaps her best achievement in the way of humour. "Nobody present had a farthing; but Mr. Trumbull had the gold-headed cane," which, considered as an acknowledgment of his professional services to the deceased, he was ungrateful enough to call "farcical."

The Law of Settlement and Entail is no part of our present study; but it may be remarked in passing that the legal Opinion on the Base Fee by which Harold Transome in "Felix Holt" held the Transome Estates was written, at George Eliot's request, by a young Chancery Barrister, who still survives, a brilliant figure in the world of Letters.

This is enough, and perhaps more than enough, about Wills in fiction; but Wills in real life are fully as interesting. The late Sir Charles Butt, who presided over the Divorce Court and theProbate Court, once told me that, though the aspect of human nature which is exhibited in Divorce is not ideally beautiful, it is far less repulsive than that which is disclosed by Probate. None of the stories which one has read about forged wills, forced wills, wills made under pressure, wills made under misrepresentation, are too strange to be true. A century ago the daughter of a great landowner in the North of England succeeded to his wealth under circumstances which, to put it mildly, caused surprise. In later life she had a public quarrel with a high-born but intemperate dame, who concluded the colloquy by observing, with mordant emphasis, "Well, at any rate I didn't hold my dying father's hand to make him sign a will he never saw, and then murder the Butler to prevent his telling." "Ouida," or Miss Braddon, or some other novelist of High Life might, I think, make something of this scene.

Spiteful Wills—wills which, by rehearsing and revoking previous bequests, mortify the survivors when the testator is no longer in a position to do soviva voce—form a very curious branch of the subject. Lord Kew was a very wealthy peer of strict principles and peculiarly acrid temper, and, having no wife or children to annoy, he "took it out," as the saying is, of his brothers, nephews, and other expectant kinsfolk. One gem from his collection I recall, in some such words as these:"By a previous will I had left £50,000 to my brother John; but, as he has sent his son to Oxford instead of Cambridge, contrary to my expressed wish, I reduce the legacy to £500." May the earth lie light on that benevolent old despot! Eccentricities of bequest, again, might make a pleasant chapter. The present writer, though not yet in tottering age, can recall an annuitant whose claim to £20 a year was founded (in part) on the skill with which he had tied his master's pigtail, and that master died in 1830. The proverbial longevity of annuitants was illustrated in the case of a grey parrot, for whose maintenance his departed mistress left £10 a year. The bird was not very young when the annuity began to accrue; and, as years went on and friends dropped off, he began to feel the loneliness of his lot. With a tenderness of heart which did them infinite credit, the good couple to whose care the bird had been left imported a companion exactly like himself to cheer his solitude. Before long one of the parrots died, and the mourners remarked that these younger birds had not half the constitution of the older generation. So, as long as they lived, the parrot lived, and the pension lived also.

Let my closing word on Wills bear the authority of a great name. To a retailer of news who informed him that Lord Omnium, recently deceased,had left a large sum of money to charities, Mr. Gladstone replied with characteristic emphasis: "Thank him for nothing! He was obliged to leave it. He couldn't carry it with him."

VIIIPENSIONS"There is no living in this country under twenty thousand a year—not that that suffices, but it entitles one to ask a pension for two or three lives." This was the verdict of Horace Walpole, who, as Sir George Trevelyan antithetically says, "lived in the country and on the country during more than half a century, doing for the country less than half a day's work in half a year." Talleyrand said that no one could conceive how enjoyable a thing existence was capable of being who had not belonged to theAncienne Noblesseof France before the Revolution; but really the younger son of an important Minister, General, Courtier, or Prelate under our English Georges had a good deal to be thankful for. It is pleasant to note the innocent candour with which, in Walpole's manly declaration, one enormity is made to justify another. A father who held great office in Church or State or Law gave, as a matter of course, all his most desirable preferments to his sons. These preferments enabled the sons to live in opulence at the public charge, their duties being performed by deputy.The Clerk of the Rolls and the Clerk of the Hanaper had no personal contact with the mysterious articles to which they are attached. The Clerk of the Irons, the Surveyor of the Meltings, and the Accountant of Slops lived far remote from such "low-thoughtéd cares." The writer of this book deduces his insignificant being from a gentleman who divided with a brother the lucrative sinecure of Scavenger of Dublin, though neither ever set foot in that fragrant city. A nephew of Lord-Chancellor Thurlow (who survived till 1874) drew pensions for abolished offices to the amount of £11,000 a year; and a son of Archbishop Moore was Principal Registrar of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury from his boyhood till the abolition of his Court in 1858, when he was pensioned off with £10,000 a year.When the sands of life were running in the glass, it was customary for a filial placeman to obtain further pensions for his sons and daughters, on the obvious plea that it was cruel to cast young men and women, who had been reared in comfort on the mercies of a rough world. Thus the golden chain of Royal bounty held at least three lives together. The grandfather was First Lord of the Treasury or Chancellor of the Exchequer or Paymaster-General, and into his personal profits it would be invidious, even indecent, to enquire. He might make his eldest son, while still a boy at Eton, Clerk of the Estreats, and his second, beforehe took his degree at Cambridge, Usher of the Exchequer. Thus Lord-Chancellor Erskine made his son Secretary of Presentations when he was eighteen, and Charles Greville was appointed Secretary of Jamaica (where he never set his foot) before he was twenty. And then when, after fifty or sixty years of blameless enjoyment, the amiable sinecurist was nearing his last quarter-day, a benevolent Treasury intervened to save his maiden daughters or orphan nieces from pecuniary embarrassment. It was of such "near and dear relations" of a public man that Sydney Smith affirmed that their "eating, drinking, washing, and clothing cost every man in the United Kingdom twopence or threepence a year"; and, to the critics who deprecated this commercial way of regarding the situation, he replied, with characteristic vigour: "I have no idea that the Sophias and Carolines of any man breathing are to eat national veal, to drink public tea, to wear Treasury ribands, and then that we are to be told that it is coarse to animadvert upon this pitiful and eleemosynary splendour. If this is right, why not mention it? If it is wrong, why should not he who enjoys the ease of supporting his sisters in this manner bear the shame of it?" In thus writing of the Pension List as it stood in 1807, the admirable Sydney was at once the successor of Burke and the forerunner of Lord Grey. In 1780 Burke had addressed all the resources of his genius to the task of restoringthe independence of Parliament by economical reform. It was, as Mr. Morley says, the number of sinecure places and unpublished pensions which "furnished the Minister with an irresistible lever." Burke found that "in sweeping away those factitious places and secret pensions he would be robbing the Court of its chief implements of corruption and protecting the representative against his chief motive in selling his country." His power of oratory was reinforced by a minute knowledge of all the shady and shabby abuses, all the manifold and complicated corruptions, which had accumulated under the protection of the Royal name. The reformer's triumph was signal and complete. Vast numbers of sinecures were swept away, but some remained. The Pension List was closely curtailed, but pensions were still conferred. No public servant ever more richly earned a provision for his old age and decrepitude than Burke himself; but when, broken by years and sorrows, he accepted a pension from the Crown, a Whig Duke of fabulous wealth, just thirty years old, had the temerity to charge him with a discreditable departure from his former principles of economic reform. The Duke was a booby: but his foolhardiness enriched English literature with "A Letter to a Noble Lord on the Attacks made on Mr. Burke and his Pension." To read that Letter, even after the lapse of 110 years, is to realize that, in spite of all corruption and allabuse, pecuniary rewards for political service need not be dishonourable or unreasonable.But corruption and abuse there were, and in sufficient quantities to justify all the bitter fun which "Peter Plymley" poured upon the Cannings, the Jenkinsons, and the Percevals. The reform of the Pension List became a cardinal object of reforming Radicals; and politicians like Joseph Hume, publicists like Albany Fonblanque, pursued it with incessant perseverance,"Till Grey went forth in 'Thirty-two to storm Corruption's hold."In 1834 the first Reformed Parliament overhauled the whole system and brought some curious transactions into the light of day. Whereas up to that time the Pension List amounted to £145,000 a year, it was now reduced to £75,000; and its benefits were restricted to "servants of the Crown and public, and to those who by their useful discoveries in science or attainments in literature and the arts had merited the gracious consideration of their Sovereign and the gratitude of their country." Vested interests were, of course, respected; for had we not even compensated the slaveholders? Two years ago one of these beneficiaries survived in a serene old age, and, for all I know, there may be others still spared to us, for, as Mr. G. A. Sala truly remarked, it never is safe to say that any one is dead, for if you do he issure to write from the country and say he is only ninety-seven and never was better.A typical representative of the unreformed system was John Wilson Croker (1780-1857), whose literary efforts Macaulay trounced, and whose political utterances were thus described by Lord Beaconsfield:—"There never was a fellow for giving a good hearty kick to the people like Rigby. Himself sprung from the dregs of the populace, this was disinterested. What could be more patriotic and magnanimous than his jeremiads over the fall of the Montmorencis and the Crillions, or the possible catastrophe of the Percys and the Seymours? The truth of all this hullabaloo was that Rigby had a sly pension which, by an inevitable association of ideas, he always connected with the maintenance of an aristocracy. All his rigmarole dissertations on the French Revolution were impelled by this secret influence; and, when he moaned like a mandrake over Nottingham Castle in flames, the rogue had an eye all the while to quarter-day."It was an evil day for those who love to grow rich upon the public money when Mr. Gladstone became the controller of the National Purse. One of his first acts was to revise the system of political pensions, which by an Act of 1869 was reconstituted as it stands to-day. There are now three classes of persons entitled to pensions for servicesrendered in political office; and the scale is arranged on that curious principle which also regulates the "tips" to servants in a private house—that the larger your wage is, the larger your gratuity shall be. Thus a Minister who has drawn £5000 a year is entitled after four years' service to a pension of £2000 a year; he who has drawn £3000 a year for six years is entitled to £1200 a year; while he who has laboured for ten years for the modest remuneration of £1000 a year must be content with a pittance of £800 a year.Qui habet, dabitur ei; but with this restriction—that only four pensions of any one class can run concurrently.Politicians who had been brought up in the "spacious days" and generous methods of the older dispensation were by no means enamoured of what they used to call "Gladstone's cheeseparing economies." Sir William Gregory used to relate how, when, as a child, he asked Lord Melbourne for a fine red stick of official sealing-wax, that genial Minister thrust it into his hand, together with a bundle of quill pens, saying, "You can't begin too early. All these things belong to the public, and your business in life must be to get out of the public all you can." An eminent statesman, trained in these traditions, had drawn from very early days a pension for an abolished office in Chancery. In due course he became a Cabinet Minister, and, when he fell from that highestate, he duly pocketed his £2000 a year. Later he came into a very large income, but this he obligingly saved for his nephews and nieces, living meanwhile on his twofold pension.I will conclude with a pleasanter anecdote. Until half-way through the last century it was customary to give a Speaker on retiring from the House of Commons a pension of £2000 a year for two lives. It is related that in 1857 Mr. Speaker Shaw-Lefevre, on his elevation to the peerage as Lord Eversley, said that he could not endure the thought of imposing a burden on posterity, and would therefore take £4000 a year for his own life instead of £2000 a year for two. This public-spirited action was highly commended, and, as he lived till 1888, virtue was, as it ought always to be, its own reward.

PENSIONS

"There is no living in this country under twenty thousand a year—not that that suffices, but it entitles one to ask a pension for two or three lives." This was the verdict of Horace Walpole, who, as Sir George Trevelyan antithetically says, "lived in the country and on the country during more than half a century, doing for the country less than half a day's work in half a year." Talleyrand said that no one could conceive how enjoyable a thing existence was capable of being who had not belonged to theAncienne Noblesseof France before the Revolution; but really the younger son of an important Minister, General, Courtier, or Prelate under our English Georges had a good deal to be thankful for. It is pleasant to note the innocent candour with which, in Walpole's manly declaration, one enormity is made to justify another. A father who held great office in Church or State or Law gave, as a matter of course, all his most desirable preferments to his sons. These preferments enabled the sons to live in opulence at the public charge, their duties being performed by deputy.The Clerk of the Rolls and the Clerk of the Hanaper had no personal contact with the mysterious articles to which they are attached. The Clerk of the Irons, the Surveyor of the Meltings, and the Accountant of Slops lived far remote from such "low-thoughtéd cares." The writer of this book deduces his insignificant being from a gentleman who divided with a brother the lucrative sinecure of Scavenger of Dublin, though neither ever set foot in that fragrant city. A nephew of Lord-Chancellor Thurlow (who survived till 1874) drew pensions for abolished offices to the amount of £11,000 a year; and a son of Archbishop Moore was Principal Registrar of the Prerogative Court of Canterbury from his boyhood till the abolition of his Court in 1858, when he was pensioned off with £10,000 a year.

When the sands of life were running in the glass, it was customary for a filial placeman to obtain further pensions for his sons and daughters, on the obvious plea that it was cruel to cast young men and women, who had been reared in comfort on the mercies of a rough world. Thus the golden chain of Royal bounty held at least three lives together. The grandfather was First Lord of the Treasury or Chancellor of the Exchequer or Paymaster-General, and into his personal profits it would be invidious, even indecent, to enquire. He might make his eldest son, while still a boy at Eton, Clerk of the Estreats, and his second, beforehe took his degree at Cambridge, Usher of the Exchequer. Thus Lord-Chancellor Erskine made his son Secretary of Presentations when he was eighteen, and Charles Greville was appointed Secretary of Jamaica (where he never set his foot) before he was twenty. And then when, after fifty or sixty years of blameless enjoyment, the amiable sinecurist was nearing his last quarter-day, a benevolent Treasury intervened to save his maiden daughters or orphan nieces from pecuniary embarrassment. It was of such "near and dear relations" of a public man that Sydney Smith affirmed that their "eating, drinking, washing, and clothing cost every man in the United Kingdom twopence or threepence a year"; and, to the critics who deprecated this commercial way of regarding the situation, he replied, with characteristic vigour: "I have no idea that the Sophias and Carolines of any man breathing are to eat national veal, to drink public tea, to wear Treasury ribands, and then that we are to be told that it is coarse to animadvert upon this pitiful and eleemosynary splendour. If this is right, why not mention it? If it is wrong, why should not he who enjoys the ease of supporting his sisters in this manner bear the shame of it?" In thus writing of the Pension List as it stood in 1807, the admirable Sydney was at once the successor of Burke and the forerunner of Lord Grey. In 1780 Burke had addressed all the resources of his genius to the task of restoringthe independence of Parliament by economical reform. It was, as Mr. Morley says, the number of sinecure places and unpublished pensions which "furnished the Minister with an irresistible lever." Burke found that "in sweeping away those factitious places and secret pensions he would be robbing the Court of its chief implements of corruption and protecting the representative against his chief motive in selling his country." His power of oratory was reinforced by a minute knowledge of all the shady and shabby abuses, all the manifold and complicated corruptions, which had accumulated under the protection of the Royal name. The reformer's triumph was signal and complete. Vast numbers of sinecures were swept away, but some remained. The Pension List was closely curtailed, but pensions were still conferred. No public servant ever more richly earned a provision for his old age and decrepitude than Burke himself; but when, broken by years and sorrows, he accepted a pension from the Crown, a Whig Duke of fabulous wealth, just thirty years old, had the temerity to charge him with a discreditable departure from his former principles of economic reform. The Duke was a booby: but his foolhardiness enriched English literature with "A Letter to a Noble Lord on the Attacks made on Mr. Burke and his Pension." To read that Letter, even after the lapse of 110 years, is to realize that, in spite of all corruption and allabuse, pecuniary rewards for political service need not be dishonourable or unreasonable.

But corruption and abuse there were, and in sufficient quantities to justify all the bitter fun which "Peter Plymley" poured upon the Cannings, the Jenkinsons, and the Percevals. The reform of the Pension List became a cardinal object of reforming Radicals; and politicians like Joseph Hume, publicists like Albany Fonblanque, pursued it with incessant perseverance,

"Till Grey went forth in 'Thirty-two to storm Corruption's hold."

In 1834 the first Reformed Parliament overhauled the whole system and brought some curious transactions into the light of day. Whereas up to that time the Pension List amounted to £145,000 a year, it was now reduced to £75,000; and its benefits were restricted to "servants of the Crown and public, and to those who by their useful discoveries in science or attainments in literature and the arts had merited the gracious consideration of their Sovereign and the gratitude of their country." Vested interests were, of course, respected; for had we not even compensated the slaveholders? Two years ago one of these beneficiaries survived in a serene old age, and, for all I know, there may be others still spared to us, for, as Mr. G. A. Sala truly remarked, it never is safe to say that any one is dead, for if you do he issure to write from the country and say he is only ninety-seven and never was better.

A typical representative of the unreformed system was John Wilson Croker (1780-1857), whose literary efforts Macaulay trounced, and whose political utterances were thus described by Lord Beaconsfield:—

"There never was a fellow for giving a good hearty kick to the people like Rigby. Himself sprung from the dregs of the populace, this was disinterested. What could be more patriotic and magnanimous than his jeremiads over the fall of the Montmorencis and the Crillions, or the possible catastrophe of the Percys and the Seymours? The truth of all this hullabaloo was that Rigby had a sly pension which, by an inevitable association of ideas, he always connected with the maintenance of an aristocracy. All his rigmarole dissertations on the French Revolution were impelled by this secret influence; and, when he moaned like a mandrake over Nottingham Castle in flames, the rogue had an eye all the while to quarter-day."

It was an evil day for those who love to grow rich upon the public money when Mr. Gladstone became the controller of the National Purse. One of his first acts was to revise the system of political pensions, which by an Act of 1869 was reconstituted as it stands to-day. There are now three classes of persons entitled to pensions for servicesrendered in political office; and the scale is arranged on that curious principle which also regulates the "tips" to servants in a private house—that the larger your wage is, the larger your gratuity shall be. Thus a Minister who has drawn £5000 a year is entitled after four years' service to a pension of £2000 a year; he who has drawn £3000 a year for six years is entitled to £1200 a year; while he who has laboured for ten years for the modest remuneration of £1000 a year must be content with a pittance of £800 a year.Qui habet, dabitur ei; but with this restriction—that only four pensions of any one class can run concurrently.

Politicians who had been brought up in the "spacious days" and generous methods of the older dispensation were by no means enamoured of what they used to call "Gladstone's cheeseparing economies." Sir William Gregory used to relate how, when, as a child, he asked Lord Melbourne for a fine red stick of official sealing-wax, that genial Minister thrust it into his hand, together with a bundle of quill pens, saying, "You can't begin too early. All these things belong to the public, and your business in life must be to get out of the public all you can." An eminent statesman, trained in these traditions, had drawn from very early days a pension for an abolished office in Chancery. In due course he became a Cabinet Minister, and, when he fell from that highestate, he duly pocketed his £2000 a year. Later he came into a very large income, but this he obligingly saved for his nephews and nieces, living meanwhile on his twofold pension.

I will conclude with a pleasanter anecdote. Until half-way through the last century it was customary to give a Speaker on retiring from the House of Commons a pension of £2000 a year for two lives. It is related that in 1857 Mr. Speaker Shaw-Lefevre, on his elevation to the peerage as Lord Eversley, said that he could not endure the thought of imposing a burden on posterity, and would therefore take £4000 a year for his own life instead of £2000 a year for two. This public-spirited action was highly commended, and, as he lived till 1888, virtue was, as it ought always to be, its own reward.

IXTHE SEASON AS IT WASThe subject is worthy to be celebrated both in verse and in prose. Exactly sixty years ago Bulwer-Lytton, in his anonymous satire "The New Timon," thus described the nocturnal aspect of the West End in that choice period of the year which to us Londoners is pre-eminently "The Season":—"O'er Royal London, in luxuriant May,While lamps yet twinkle, dawning creeps the day.Home from the hell the pale-eyed gamester steals;Home from the ball flash jaded Beauty's wheels;From fields suburban rolls the early cart;So rests the Revel—so awakes the Mart."Twenty-four years later Lord Beaconsfield, in "Lothair," gave a vivid sketch of the same scenes as beheld by daylight:—"Town was beginning to blaze. Broughams whirled and bright barouches glanced, troops of social cavalry cantered and caracolled in morning rides, and the bells of prancing ponies, lashed by delicate hands, gingled in the laughing air. There were stoppages in Bond Street—which seems tocap the climax of civilization, after crowded clubs and swarming parks."It is curious that of the two descriptions the earlier needs much less revision than the later. Lamps still "twinkle" (though, to be sure, they are electric, whereas when Bulwer-Lytton wrote gas had barely ousted oil from its last fastness in Grosvenor Square). "Hells," though more euphemistically named, still invite the domiciliary visits of our much-aspersed police. "Beauty" dances even more vigorously than in 1846, for Waltzes and Kitchen-Lancers and Washington Posts have superseded the decorous quadrilles which our mothers loved. And still the market-gardens of Acton and Ealing and Hounslow send their "towering squadrons" of waggons laden heavens-high with the fruits and vegetables for to-morrow's luncheon. In this merry month of May 1906 an observer, standing at Hyde Park Corner "when the night and morning meet," sees London substantially as Bulwer-Lytton saw it.But, when we turn to Lord Beaconsfield's description, the changes wrought by six-and-thirty years are curiously marked. "Bright barouches glanced." In the present day a Barouche, the handsomest and gracefullest of all open carriages, is as rare as an Auk's Egg or an original Folio of Shakespeare. Only two or three survive. One, richly dight in royal crimson, bears the Queen, beautiful as Cleopatra in her barge. In another,almost imperially purple, Lady Londonderry sits enthroned; a third, palely blue as the forget-me-not, carries Lady Carysfort; but soon the tale of barouches ends. Victorias and landaus and "Clarences" and "Sociables" make the common throng of carriages, and their serried ranks give way to the impetuous onrush of the noxious Motor or the milder impact of the Electric Brougham."Troops of social cavalry" were, when Lord Beaconsfield wrote "Lothair," the characteristic glories of Rotten Row; but horses and horsemanship alike have waned. Men take their constitutional canter in costumes anciently confined to rat-catching, and the general aspect of Rotten Row suggests the idea of Mounted Infantry rather than of "Cavalry." Alongside the ride forty years ago ladies drove their pony-phaetons—a pretty practice and a pretty carriage; but both have utterly disappeared, and the only bells that "gingle in the laughing air" are the warning signals of the Petrol Fiend, as, bent on destruction, he swoops down from Marble Arch to Piccadilly. Does a captious critic gaze enquiringly on the unfamiliar verb to "gingle"? It was thus that Lord Beaconsfield wrote it in "Lothair"; even as in the same high romance he described a lady with a rich bunch of "Stephanopolis" in her hand. It is not for the ephemeral scribbler to correctthe orthography of the immortal dead. As to "stoppages in Bond Street," they were isolated and noteworthy incidents in 1870; in 1906, thanks to the admission of omnibuses into the narrow thoroughfare, they are occurrences as regular as the postman's knock or the policeman's mailed tread.We have seen the aspects in which the London Season presented itself to two great men of yore. Let me now descend to a more personal level. We will imagine ourselves transported back to the year 1880, and to the month of May. A young gentleman—some five-and-twenty summers, as Mr. G. P. R. James would have said, have passed over his fair head—is standing near the steps of St. George's Hospital between the hours of eleven and midnight. He is smartly dressed in evening clothes, with a white waistcoat, a gardenia in his button-hole, and a silver-crutched stick in his hand. He is smoking a cigarette and pondering the question where he shall spend his evening, or, more strictly, the early hours of next day. He is in a state of serene contentment with himself and the world, for he has just eaten an excellent dinner, where plovers' eggs and asparagus have reminded him that the Season has really begun. To the pleasure-seeking Londoner these symptoms of returning summer mean more, far more, than the dogrose in the hedgerow or the first note of the nightingale in the copse. Since dinner he hasjust looked in at an evening party, which bored him badly, and has "cut" two others where he was not so likely to be missed. And now arises the vital question of the Balls. I use the plural number, for there will certainly be two, and probably three, to choose from. Here, at St. George's Hospital, our youth is at the centre of the world's social concourse. A swift and unbroken stream of carriages is pouring down from Grosvenor Square and Mayfair to Belgrave Square and Eaton Square and Chesham Place, and it meets as it goes the ascending procession which begins in Belgravia and ends in Portman Square. To-night there is a Royal Ball at Grosvenor House, certainly the most stately event of the season; a little dance, exquisitely gay and bright, in Piccadilly; and a gorgeous entertainment in Prince's Gate, where the aspiring Distiller is struggling, with enormous outlay, into social fame. All these have solicited the honour of our young friend's presence, and now is the moment of decision. It does not take long to repudiate Prince's Gate; there will be the best band in London, and ortolans for supper, but there will be no one there that one ever saw before, and it is too sickening to be called "My boy" by that bow-windowed bounder, the master of the house. There remain Grosvenor House and Piccadilly, and happily these can be combined in a harmonious perfection. Grosvenor House shall come first, for the arrival ofthe Prince and Princess is a pageant worth seeing—the most gracious host and the most beautiful hostess in London ushering the Royal guests, with courtly pomp, into the great gallery, walled with the canvases of Rubens, which serves as the dancing-room. Then the fun begins, and the bright hours fly swiftly, till one o'clock suggests the tender thought of supper, which is served on gold plate and Sèvres china in a garden-tent of Gobelins tapestry. And now it is time for a move; and our youth, extricating himself from the undesired attentions of the linkmen, pops into a hansom and speeds to Piccadilly, where he finds delights of a different kind—no Royalty, no pomp, no ceremony; but a warm welcome, and all his intimate friends, and the nicest girls in London eager for a valse.As day begins to peep, he drinks his crowning tumbler of champagne-cup, and strolls home under the opalescent dawn, sniffing the fragrance from pyramids of strawberries as they roll towards Covent Garden, and exchanging a friendly "Good night" with the policeman on the beat, who seems to think that "Good morning" would be a more suitable greeting. So to bed, with the cheerful consciousness of a day's work well done, and the even more exhilarating prospect of an unbroken succession of such days, full of feasting and dancing and riding and polo and lawn-tennis, till August stifles the Season withits dust and drives the revellers to Homburg or the moors.But I awake, and lo! it is a dream, though a dream well founded on reality. For I have been describing the London Season as it was when the world was young."When all the world is old, lad,And all the trees are brown;And all the sport is stale, lad,And all the wheels run down;Creep home, and take your place there,The spent and maimed among:God grant you find one face there,You loved when all was young."

THE SEASON AS IT WAS

The subject is worthy to be celebrated both in verse and in prose. Exactly sixty years ago Bulwer-Lytton, in his anonymous satire "The New Timon," thus described the nocturnal aspect of the West End in that choice period of the year which to us Londoners is pre-eminently "The Season":—

"O'er Royal London, in luxuriant May,While lamps yet twinkle, dawning creeps the day.Home from the hell the pale-eyed gamester steals;Home from the ball flash jaded Beauty's wheels;From fields suburban rolls the early cart;So rests the Revel—so awakes the Mart."

Twenty-four years later Lord Beaconsfield, in "Lothair," gave a vivid sketch of the same scenes as beheld by daylight:—

"Town was beginning to blaze. Broughams whirled and bright barouches glanced, troops of social cavalry cantered and caracolled in morning rides, and the bells of prancing ponies, lashed by delicate hands, gingled in the laughing air. There were stoppages in Bond Street—which seems tocap the climax of civilization, after crowded clubs and swarming parks."

It is curious that of the two descriptions the earlier needs much less revision than the later. Lamps still "twinkle" (though, to be sure, they are electric, whereas when Bulwer-Lytton wrote gas had barely ousted oil from its last fastness in Grosvenor Square). "Hells," though more euphemistically named, still invite the domiciliary visits of our much-aspersed police. "Beauty" dances even more vigorously than in 1846, for Waltzes and Kitchen-Lancers and Washington Posts have superseded the decorous quadrilles which our mothers loved. And still the market-gardens of Acton and Ealing and Hounslow send their "towering squadrons" of waggons laden heavens-high with the fruits and vegetables for to-morrow's luncheon. In this merry month of May 1906 an observer, standing at Hyde Park Corner "when the night and morning meet," sees London substantially as Bulwer-Lytton saw it.

But, when we turn to Lord Beaconsfield's description, the changes wrought by six-and-thirty years are curiously marked. "Bright barouches glanced." In the present day a Barouche, the handsomest and gracefullest of all open carriages, is as rare as an Auk's Egg or an original Folio of Shakespeare. Only two or three survive. One, richly dight in royal crimson, bears the Queen, beautiful as Cleopatra in her barge. In another,almost imperially purple, Lady Londonderry sits enthroned; a third, palely blue as the forget-me-not, carries Lady Carysfort; but soon the tale of barouches ends. Victorias and landaus and "Clarences" and "Sociables" make the common throng of carriages, and their serried ranks give way to the impetuous onrush of the noxious Motor or the milder impact of the Electric Brougham.

"Troops of social cavalry" were, when Lord Beaconsfield wrote "Lothair," the characteristic glories of Rotten Row; but horses and horsemanship alike have waned. Men take their constitutional canter in costumes anciently confined to rat-catching, and the general aspect of Rotten Row suggests the idea of Mounted Infantry rather than of "Cavalry." Alongside the ride forty years ago ladies drove their pony-phaetons—a pretty practice and a pretty carriage; but both have utterly disappeared, and the only bells that "gingle in the laughing air" are the warning signals of the Petrol Fiend, as, bent on destruction, he swoops down from Marble Arch to Piccadilly. Does a captious critic gaze enquiringly on the unfamiliar verb to "gingle"? It was thus that Lord Beaconsfield wrote it in "Lothair"; even as in the same high romance he described a lady with a rich bunch of "Stephanopolis" in her hand. It is not for the ephemeral scribbler to correctthe orthography of the immortal dead. As to "stoppages in Bond Street," they were isolated and noteworthy incidents in 1870; in 1906, thanks to the admission of omnibuses into the narrow thoroughfare, they are occurrences as regular as the postman's knock or the policeman's mailed tread.

We have seen the aspects in which the London Season presented itself to two great men of yore. Let me now descend to a more personal level. We will imagine ourselves transported back to the year 1880, and to the month of May. A young gentleman—some five-and-twenty summers, as Mr. G. P. R. James would have said, have passed over his fair head—is standing near the steps of St. George's Hospital between the hours of eleven and midnight. He is smartly dressed in evening clothes, with a white waistcoat, a gardenia in his button-hole, and a silver-crutched stick in his hand. He is smoking a cigarette and pondering the question where he shall spend his evening, or, more strictly, the early hours of next day. He is in a state of serene contentment with himself and the world, for he has just eaten an excellent dinner, where plovers' eggs and asparagus have reminded him that the Season has really begun. To the pleasure-seeking Londoner these symptoms of returning summer mean more, far more, than the dogrose in the hedgerow or the first note of the nightingale in the copse. Since dinner he hasjust looked in at an evening party, which bored him badly, and has "cut" two others where he was not so likely to be missed. And now arises the vital question of the Balls. I use the plural number, for there will certainly be two, and probably three, to choose from. Here, at St. George's Hospital, our youth is at the centre of the world's social concourse. A swift and unbroken stream of carriages is pouring down from Grosvenor Square and Mayfair to Belgrave Square and Eaton Square and Chesham Place, and it meets as it goes the ascending procession which begins in Belgravia and ends in Portman Square. To-night there is a Royal Ball at Grosvenor House, certainly the most stately event of the season; a little dance, exquisitely gay and bright, in Piccadilly; and a gorgeous entertainment in Prince's Gate, where the aspiring Distiller is struggling, with enormous outlay, into social fame. All these have solicited the honour of our young friend's presence, and now is the moment of decision. It does not take long to repudiate Prince's Gate; there will be the best band in London, and ortolans for supper, but there will be no one there that one ever saw before, and it is too sickening to be called "My boy" by that bow-windowed bounder, the master of the house. There remain Grosvenor House and Piccadilly, and happily these can be combined in a harmonious perfection. Grosvenor House shall come first, for the arrival ofthe Prince and Princess is a pageant worth seeing—the most gracious host and the most beautiful hostess in London ushering the Royal guests, with courtly pomp, into the great gallery, walled with the canvases of Rubens, which serves as the dancing-room. Then the fun begins, and the bright hours fly swiftly, till one o'clock suggests the tender thought of supper, which is served on gold plate and Sèvres china in a garden-tent of Gobelins tapestry. And now it is time for a move; and our youth, extricating himself from the undesired attentions of the linkmen, pops into a hansom and speeds to Piccadilly, where he finds delights of a different kind—no Royalty, no pomp, no ceremony; but a warm welcome, and all his intimate friends, and the nicest girls in London eager for a valse.

As day begins to peep, he drinks his crowning tumbler of champagne-cup, and strolls home under the opalescent dawn, sniffing the fragrance from pyramids of strawberries as they roll towards Covent Garden, and exchanging a friendly "Good night" with the policeman on the beat, who seems to think that "Good morning" would be a more suitable greeting. So to bed, with the cheerful consciousness of a day's work well done, and the even more exhilarating prospect of an unbroken succession of such days, full of feasting and dancing and riding and polo and lawn-tennis, till August stifles the Season withits dust and drives the revellers to Homburg or the moors.

But I awake, and lo! it is a dream, though a dream well founded on reality. For I have been describing the London Season as it was when the world was young.

"When all the world is old, lad,And all the trees are brown;

And all the sport is stale, lad,And all the wheels run down;

Creep home, and take your place there,The spent and maimed among:

God grant you find one face there,You loved when all was young."

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