salves, electuaries, juleps, and purges, for the use of the poor neighbours. The daily business of this good lady was to scold the maids, collect eggs, feed the turkeys, and to assist at all lyings-in that happened within the parish. Alas! this being is no more seen; and the race is. like that of her pug dog and the black rat, totally extinct.

The Country Squire.

Another character, now worn out and gone, was the little independent gentleman, of £300 per annum, who commonly appeared in a plain drab or plush coat, large silver buttons, a jocky cap, and rarely without boots. His travels never exceeded the distance of the county town, and that only at assize and session time, or to attend an election. Once a week he commonly dined at the next market town with the attornies and justices. This man went to church regularly, read the weekly journal, settled the parochial disputes between the parish officers at the vestry, and afterwards adjourned to the neighbouring ale-house, where he usually got drunk for the good of his country. He never played at cards but at Christmas, when a family pack was produced from the mantle-piece. He was commonly followed by a couple of grey-hounds and a pointer, and announced his arrival at a neighbour's house by smacking his whip, or giving the view-halloo. His drink was generally ale, except at Christmas, the fifth of November, or some other gala days, when he would make a bowl of strong brandy punch, garnished with a toast and nutmeg. A journey to London was, by one of these men, reckoned as - great an undertaking as is at present a voyage to the East Indies, and undertaken with scarcely less precaution and preparation.

the wall were posted King Charles's Golden Rules, Vincent Wing's Almanac, and a portrait of the duke of Marlborough; in his window lay Baker's Chronicle, Fox's Book of Martyrs, Glanvil on Apparitions, Quincey's Dispensatory, the Complete Justice, and a Book of Farriery.

In the corner, by the fire-side, stood a large wooden two-armed chair with a cushion; and within the chimney corner were a couple of seats. Here, at Christmas, he entertained his tenants assembled round a glowing fire made of the roots of trees, and other great logs, and told and heard the traditionary tales of the village respecting ghosts and witches, till fear made them afraid to move. In the mean time the jorum of ale was in continual circulation.

The best parlour, which was never opened but on particular occasions, was furnished with Turk-worked chain, and hung round with portraits of his ancestors; the men in the character of shepherds, with their crooks, dressed in full suits and huge full-bottomed perukes; others in complete armor or buff coats, playing on the bass viol or lute. The females likewise as shepherdesses, with the lamb and crook, all habited in high heads and flowing robes.

Alas! these men and these houses are no more; the luxury of the times has obliged them to quit the country, and become the humble dependents on great men, to solicit a place or commission to live in London, to rack their tenants, and draw their rents before due. The venerable mansion, in the mean time, is suffered to tumble down, or is partly upheld as a farm-house; till, after a few years, the estate is conveyed to the steward of the neighbouring lord, or else to some nabob, contractor, or limb of the law.*

h. m.

5 34

brick, large casemented bow windows, a

Sun rises

7 32

porch with seats in it, and over it a study; the eaves of the house well inhabited by swallows, and the court set round with holly-hocks. Near the gate a horse-block for the convenience of mounting.

The hall was furnished with flitches of bacon, and the mantle-piece with guns and fishing-rods of various dimensions, accompanied by the broad-sword, partizan, and dagger, borne by his ancestors in the civil wars. The vacant spaces were occupied by stags' horns. Against

January 30.

"This being the anniversary of king Charles's Martyrdom (in 1649), the Royal Exchange gates were shut till twelve

Grose.

Anderson's Scots' Pills.

ing

Dr. Patrick Anderson, physician to Charles I., was the inventor of this well-known medicine. In the laye-stone "land" of a house in the Lawn-market, opposite to the Bowhead, Edinburgh, it has been sold for upwards of a century past. The second flat of this "land" was originally entered by an outside stair, giving access to a shop then kept by Mr. Thomas Weir, heir to Miss Lillias Anderson, the doctor's only daughter. Although the shop has long been given up, the pills continue to be sold at this place by Mr. James Main, bookseller, agent for Mrs. Irving, who is sole possessor of the inestimable secret, by inheritance from her husband, the late Dr. Irving, nephew to the above Mr. Weir's daughter. Hence the pills have come through no more than three generations of proprietors since the time of Charles I. "This is to be attributed. doubtless," says Mr. Chambers, "to their virtues, which may have conferred an unusual degree of longevity upon the patentees: in confirmation of which idea, we are given to understand that Mrs, Irving, the present nonagenarian proprietrix, facetiously assigns the constant use of them as the cause of her advanced and healthy old age. Portraits of Dr. Anderson and his daughter are preserved in the house. The Physician is represented in a Vandyke dress, with a book in his hand; while Miss Lillias, a precise-looking dame, displays between her finger and thumb a pill, nearly as large as a walnut; which says a great deal for the stomachs of our ancestors "*

wards

Hilary Term shall begin on the 11th, and end on the 31st of January. Easter Term shall begin on the 15th of April, and end on the 8th of May. Trinity Term shall begin on the 22nd of May, and end on the 12th of June. Michaelmas Term shall begin on the

2nd and end on the 25th of November. This act therefore provides that the Law Terms shall begin and end on days certain; that is to say, on the days abovementioned: except, however, "that if the whole, or any number of the days intervening between the Thursday before, and the Wednesday next after Easter day, shall fall within Easter Term, there shall be no sittings in banco on any of such intervening days, but the Term shall, in such case, be prolonged, and continue for such number of days of business as shall be equal to the number of the intervening days before mentioned, exclusive of Easter day; and the commencement of the ensuing Trinity Term shall, in such case, be postponed, and its continuance be prolonged for an equal number of days of business."

Law and Lawyers.

Lawsuits were formerly as much prolonged by legal chicanery as now; and to involve persons in them was a common mode of revenge. In the letters of the Paston Family, and the Berkeley MSS. there is evidence that this practice prevailed in the fifteenth century.* Among the Harleian collections, at the British Museum, there is an English MS. written about or before the year 1200, containing a satirical ballad on the lawyers. t

Montaigne was no friend to the profession. With ample possessions he had no law-suits. "I am not much pleased with his opinion," he says, "who thought by the multitude of laws to curb the authority of judges, by retrenching them. We have more laws in France than in all the rest of the world besides; and more than would be necessary for the regulation of all the worlds of Epicurus. How comes it to pass that our common lan

* Fosbroke's Ency. of Antiq. † Warton's Hist. English Poetry, 1. 38.

guage, so easy for all other uses, becomes obscure and unintelligible in wills and contracts; and that he who so clearly expresses whatever he speaks or writes, cannot, in these, find any way of declaring himself, which is not liable to doubt and contradiction, if it be not that the great meu of this art (of law), applying themseves with peculiar attention to cull out hard words, and form artful clauses, have so weighed every syllable, and so thoroughly sifted every sort of connexion, that they are now confounded and entangled in the infinity of figures, and so many minute divisions, that they can no longer be liable to any rule or prescription, nor any certain inteligence. As the earth is made fertile the deeper it is ploughed and harrowed, so they, by starting and splitting of questions, make the world fructify and abound in uncertainties and disputes, and hence, as formerly we were plagued with vices, we are now sick of the laws. Nature always gives better than those which we make ourselves; witness the state wherein we see nations live that have

no other. Some there are who, for their only judge, take the first passer-by that travels along their mountains to determine their cause; and others who, on their market-day, choose out some one amongst them who decides all their controversies on the spot. What danger would there be if the wiser should thus determine ours, according to occurrences, and by sight, without obligation of example and consequence? Every shoe to its own foot."

The French have it among their old sayings, that "a good lawyer is a bad neighbour," and Montaigne seems to have entertained the notion. He tells

what he calls "A pleasant story against the practice of lawyers. The baron of Coupene in Chalosse, and I, have between us the advowson of a benefice of great extent, at the foot of our mountains,

called Lahontan. It was with the inhabitants of this angle, as with those of the vale of Angrougne; they lived a peculiar sort of life, had particular fashions, clothes, and manners, and were ruled and governed by certain particular laws and usages received from father to son, to which they submitted without other constraint than the reverence due to custom. This little state had continued from all antiquity in so happy a condition that no neighbouring judge was ever put to the trouble of enquiring into their

quarrels, no advocate was retained to give them counsel, nor stranger ever called in to compose their differences; nor was ever any of them so reduced as to go a begging. They avoided all alliances and traffic with the rest of mankind, that they might not corrupt the purity of their own government; till, as they say, one of them, in the memory of their fathers, having a mind spurred on with a noble ambition, contrived, in order to bring his name into credit and reputation, to make one of his sons something more than ordinary, and, having put him to learn to write, made him at last a brave attorney for the village. This fellow began to disdain their ancient customs, and to buzz into the people's ears the pomp of the other parts of the nation. The first prank he played was to advise a friend of his, whom somebody had offended by sawing off the horns of one of his she-goats, to make his complaint to the king's judges, and so he went on in this practise till he spoiled all."

In 1376 the House of Commons ordered that "no man of the law" should be returned as knight of the shire, and, if returned, that he should have no wages. §

In 1381, Jack Cade's men beheaded all the lawyers they could find, and burnt the Temple and other inns of court, with the records of Chancery, and the books and papers belonging to the students at law. a

In 1454 by an act of parliament, reciting that there had formerly been only six or eight attornies for Suffolk, Norfolk, and Norwich together, that the number had then increased to more than eighty, most part of whom incited the people to suits for small trespasses, it was enacted that thereafter there should be but six for Suffolk, six for Norfolk, and two for the city of Norwich.* There are now above seventy attornies in Norwich alone.

In 1553, the first year of the reign of queen Mary, during Sir Thomas Wyatt's progress towards London with an army, in behalf of the claim of Lady Jade Grey to the throne, so great was the terror of the serjeants at law, and other lawyers, that at Westminster-hall "they pleaded in harness."+