equivoques that took place, especially those that referred to foreign parts, would furnish materials for a screaming farce.

"You have been abroad, I presume?" asked the Countess.

"Never, my lady: it was one of my name, no relation, that went across the water at his Majesty's expense.”

in print. In writing to a friend he said, “Unfortunately the house is full of cousins - would they were once removed." He also told us of a remark made by the late Lord Lyttelton after visiting in company with the head master, Dr. Wool, the room at Rugby in which corporal "What motto punishments were inflicted.

would be appropriate?" asked the Dominie. "I thought, perhaps, you might have served" Great cry and little wool," responded the other, in Holland?" she proceeded. looking at the diminutive form of the doctor.

"Your ladyship refers to the Dutchman Dutch

-

This reply was interrupted by the entrance of the groom of the chambers with the newspaper, and her ladyship asked, "What is the hour by St. James's Chapel?" (Harrington house was at that time in the stable yard, St. James's).

"Nine o'clock, my lady."

During a drive to Epsom, says Lord William Lennox,

Hook kept up a regular running fire. Pun, anecdote, song, improviso; jests, a century old, disinterred as good as new; venerable Joe Miller's, revived and decked out in modern fashionable attire; jokes manufactured on the spot, of every conceivable variety and pattern, some bad enough to take rank with the very best. So far from recounting them, I despair of conveying an idea of their profusion. The plainest of pedestrians, or the commonest name over a shop door, was sufficient to start

At this piece of information, the stranger started up abruptly from his chair, dropped a beautiful china cup and saucer from his hands, exclaiming, "Then, I'm blest if we shan't be late for the mill:'it comes off at half-past ten, and we've to call in Windmill street for the bird's-eye fogles, and to pick up Heavy-and-him off. Handy, the fighting Life Guardsman, at the Barracks."

At this moment Lord Petersham, accompanied by Fitzroy Stanhope, entered the room, and at once saw the state of affairs. The Countess had sat down to breakfast with Mr. William (commonly called "Bill") Gibbons, the Commissary General of the P.C., or Pugilistic Club. Lord Petersham hurried his friend away, leavhis brother to explain matters, and make all smooth. This he accomplished with such consummate skill, such infinite good-humour, and kind-heartedness, that the Countess was soon appeased and laughed heartily, or rather smiled magnificently, when she was informed that "crossing the water" referred to a case of transportation; and that her guest's knowledge of Holland was confined to his acquaintance with Dutch Sam. Her ladyship was rendered truly happy, when, upon the return of her first-born, she heard from him that his first appearance at Mousley Hurst would be his last. Lord Petersham was too refined a gentleman to take pleasure in pugilistic encounters, then so much patronised by the higher classes, and had only attended on the above occasion to judge for himself what a fight really was.

Lord William Lennox, also, had not much liking for the Ring, or much acquaintance with blacklegs. But he was fond of play-going, and he tells much of the actors and actresses, stage-managers, and playwrights of former times. He tells yet more about the wits of the last generation, with Hook and Barham for their leaders. Here are some of his reminiscences of them:

Barham related a bon-mot attributed to Sydney Smith, which I believe has never appeared

"Ah!" said my companion, "Hawes, surgeon;' that reminds me of two lines I made on a sawbone of that name during the severe winter of 1814:

'Perpetual freezings and perpetual thaws, Though bad for hips are good for Hawes.'

As we reached Vauxhall bridge, "I wonder if this bridge pays?" I remarked.

"Go over it, and you'll be tolled," replied the ever-ready punster.

66

So," said he, addressing the gatekeeper, who was hoarse, " You haven't recovered your voice yet?"

No, sir," was the answer, "I've caught a fresh cold."

"But why did you catch a fresh one?" asked Hook; Why didn't you have it cured? On we went from subject to subject, and pun to pun. The sign of the "Three Ravens," at Sutton, as we passed it, suggested the reflection, "That fellow must be raven mad.”

Immediately after, we discerned a party of labourers employed in sinking a well.

"What are you about?" inquired Hook. "Boring for water," replied a gaping clod. "Water's a bore at any time," rejoined Hook; "besides, you're quite wrong; remember the old proverb, 'Let well alone.""

Lord William Lennox repeats two anecdotes of Lord Shaftesbury. On one occasion he was examining the girls of a ragged school. "Who made your vile body?" he asked of one of the elder children." Please, my Lord," was the answer, "Betsy Jones made my body, but I made my skirt "myself." At another school examination, after a reading from the Psalms, he asked, "What is the pestilence that walketh by darkness?" "Please, sir, bugs."

One often wonders how such slang phrases as "There you go with your eye out," "Go it my cripples, crutches is cheap," "Who's your hatter?" and "How's your poor feet?" originally get into fashion. Lord William Lennox gives the history of

one:

One summer, when returning from Hampton Court races, on the box of a four-horse drag, with poor Charley Sheridan, who possessed a large portion of the talents of that truly able family, by my side, we overtook an elderly gentleman on the bridge, whose rotund appearance no amount of Bantingism could have reduced,

and who hailed us to pull up. Our well-bred amateur coachman, Fitzroy Stanhope, obeyed the summons, and Sheridan, descending from his seat, asked the stranger his pleasure.

"I see you are full outside and in," was the reply; "you drive a little too fast, coachman, during these crowded days; who is the proprietor of your coach? "

"I am not aware," responded the descendant of the immortal Richard Brinsley.

"Not aware!" echoed the other, the blood mounting in his rubicund face, and giving us the idea that a fit of apoplexy would follow. "When does the next coach go by? tinued, “I prefer a pair horse to your scampering four."

he con

"I am not aware," again said Charley, with a most bland and winning smile.

"And your name, Sir, for I presume you are guard.

"I am not aware.' ""

we

"Come along, my boy," said Fitzroy, shall be late," as Sheridan proceeded to resume

his seat.

"Late!" exclaimed the obese gentleman, "why, what o'clock is it?"

drove off, at the rate of twelve miles an hour,
"I am not aware," shouted Charley, as we
towards London, leaving our "fat friend" in
ner, which took place that evening at Crock-
a great state of excitement. During our din-
ford's Club, the subject turned upon
words," and a small wager was made by Sheri-
dan that he would get "I'm not aware" into
as great a popularity as belonged to other sen-

tences.

cant

The expiration of the Goodwood raceweek, which was shortly to follow, was the time allowed for the general introduction of the phrase.

Of course you'll assist me," said Charley, addressing me.

"

"You may depend upon my services," I responded, and fully did I act up to my promise. questions were put to me, as honorary secretary Upon reaching Goodwood House, where fifty of the racing club, I replied, "I am not aware," until, at last, others caught up the words, and the phrase became general. After dinner, on the second day, I replied to General Peel, who asked me what time the races began, in the cant phrase; but he retorted upon me, for on my asking the name of one of his young horses, he answered, "I am not aware."

and from that moment the son of Tranby was "So let it be," said I, "an excellent name," called "I am not aware."

With such notoriety the phrase soon became universal, and Sheridan won his wager.

One other page, and our extracts must come to an end:

"In England, during the French revolution, the Duke of Bedford invited the emigrant Duc de Grammont to a splendid dinner, one of those magnificent entertainments which English noblemen pride themselves on giving to

crowned heads, and their good feeling prompts them to offer to exiles. During dessert, a bottle of Constantia was produced, which for age and flavour was supposed to be matchless. It was liquid gold in a crystal flagon, a ray of the sun descending into a goblet, it was nectar which was worthy of Jove, and in which Bacchus would have revelled. The noble head of the house of Russell himself helped his guest to a glass of this choice wine, and De Grammont on tasting it declared it to be excellent. The Duke of Bedford, anxious to judge of its quality, poured out a glass, which no sooner approached his lips than with a horrible contortion he exclaimed, Why what on earth is this?' The butler approached, took the bottle, applied it to his nostrils, and to the dismay of his master pronounced it to be castor oil! The Duc de Grammont had swallowed this horrid draught without wincing.

This is a book that can only be reviewed by quoting from it, and we have drawn our quotations from its light and more amusing parts. There is also in it much of more solid character, in descriptions of famous people and in comments upon byegone customs, that is well worth reading.

From The Spectator.
MADNESS IN NOVELS.*

THE hint given by Miss Braddon has
been very quickly taken.
For her purpose
it was necessary to strengthen the old ma-
chinery of novel-writing, to introduce
changes more frequent, acts more unaccoun-
table, catastrophes more violent and appall-
ing. She did not wish, being artist after
her kind, to introduce these things absolute-
ly without explanation, and yet where was
the explanation to be found? The world,
strangely tolerant of supernatural machin-
ery in real life, half inclined to believe in
instructions from the dead and messages
from above, in people who can float through
the air and people for whose sake the souls
of the just are willing to proclaim them-
selves arrant fools, is nevertheless very in-
tolerant of the supernatural in novels. If
any young lady kills somebody because an
angel told her to do it, which, granted the
angelic command, might not be an unnatu-
ral proceeding, we simply shut the book,
and refuse to read anything its author may
subsequently have to produce. On the
* St. Martin's Eve. By Mrs. H. Wood. London:

Tinsley.

The Clyffards of Clyffe. By the Author of Lost Sir Massingberd. London: Hurst and Blackett.

66

other hand, the author cannot avail himself
of the old instrument, self-will as developed
among those who never felt any external
restraint. Gilles de Retz would simply be
disgusting in a modern novel. If the ty-
rannous baron in a story sends retainers to
kill his daughter's low-born lover, we un-
consciously inquire why the lover does not
apply to the police. Even the machinery
of passion must be kept within due bounds.
The nineteenth century believes in love and
jealousy, and in a feeble way even in hate,
but it is aware nevertheless that the mental
concentrativeness out of which these pas-
sions spring is in this age rare, that it is
hard for John to hate Thomas up to the
point of killing him if John reads the Times
every morning at breakfast, that when
there are ten Jills for one Jack love cân
hardly be intensely individual, that jeal-
ousy, of all passions, dies amid a multiplici-
ty of interests and pursuits. It believes in
fact in Trollope rather than in Mrs. Rad-
cliffe. The sensationalist was at fault, for
to make a sensational novel "harrowing
there must be motive, impulse, human act,
and human suffering, as well as mere inci-
dent. To bring your 'art to your mouth"
there must be a soul as well as a life in peril.
A tumble down a well is nothing, a wife
who throws her husband down one is much.
One does not tumble down wells, but in the
murder one may, if it is only artistically
told, recognize the undeveloped wild beast
in one's own heart. Miss Braddon per-
ceived this, and it is to her credit that she
discerned a mode of restoring the lost sen-
sational effect to character. Madness may
intensify any quality, courage, or hate, or
jealousy, or wickedness, and she made La-
dy Audley mad. Thenceforward she was
released from the irksome regime of the
probable. Nobody could say that a yellow-
haired goddess, surrounded with every lux-
ury, and delighting in them all, fond of
dress, and furniture, and high feeding, with
intense appreciation of art, and of art in its
domesticated form, would not for very' re-
finement push her husband down a well or
burn a village inn. Who knows what a
mad woman would or would not do? Who
realizes her impulses, or those wild tempta-
tions which are not impulses, which so far
from developing the character, are so un-
like it that the Oriental world to this day
holds madness and possession synonymous,
and reverences the mad. Probability be-
came unnecessary, vraisemblance a burden,
naturalness a mistake in art, everything
was possible, and the less possible the emo-
tion the greater the surprise and pleasure.

clude art as much as the data of the novelists who used to employ ghosts, and revengeful Italians, and secret passages, and all the rest of it, to produce impossible or exaggerated results. As a picture of a mad woman cursed with an invisible form of madness St. Martin's Eve is not good, as a story of crime dictated by undiscovered mania it seems natural, and that being the one quality it would otherwise lack, it may be pronounced a good novel. It curdles the blood without exciting the feeling of contempt.

It was a great discovery, and novelists have not been slow to seize it. Here is Mrs. H. Wood in want of a strongly sensational machinery. She wants to paint jealousy in its extreme forms, and she has not of course the power to create Othello, or the art to paint, as Thackeray or Trollope might have done, the morbid passion in its naturalistic nineteenth-century dress. She could not paint the being who should commit murder before the eyes of his audience and seem not only natural but even noble, and still less could she draw the figure of to-day, in whom all passions ought to be The author of the Clyffards of Clyffe has lukewarm, yet who can be made by this gone farther. In his story everybody is feeling murderous in purpose, can be pro- mad except the first hero and his betrothed. voked to taunt, and bite, and starve, and The chief sufferer is insane evidently, and slander the victim of his animosity, who can the second hero, the bad heroine has helped think murder and do it provided only he to keep a madhouse, and has insanity lurkor she is not called on to use the dagger ing in her veins, and both the bad villains the spurting blood would spoil her dress are mad doctors, and make a trade of toror offer the bowl. Herapath would say ture. A lurid horror is thrown over the what it was made of. But Mrs. Wood can, drama, such as a Greek tragedian would being familiar with medical lore, make a have obtained from the presence of his inevmad woman do anything. If any ordinary itable Avayκn, the remorseless fate pressnovelist made an ordinary woman do what ing equally upon the evil and the good. Charlotte Norris does in St. Martin's Eve, Every one either is mad, or fears he may fascinate the man she loves, then hate be mad, or is sought in love in order to his child, and then either burn to death the keep away madness, or drives a debasing poor infant of four years old who loves her, trade in the sufferings of the mad, and of or seeing him on fire leave him to burn, we course everything is possible. It is possible should condemn her as ignorant of the first that a man might believe his own wife the truths of the human heart, and her story as haunting spirit of his ancestral home, possia meaningless tissue of improbabilities. ble that his mad son might hunt by night as But then Charlotte Norris is mad, secretly a wild eccentricity, possible that the stepmad, and an access of jealousy brings out mother might, with insanity lurking in her, homicidal mania. She has been born just plot or carry out any extent of murders. It after her father has gone mad, and dis- is possible that a madhouse-keeper given to played his madness in a fit of raging jeal- torture might taunt his victim as he hung ousy, and her mother has striven through from the cliff, possible to the excited reader life to keep her from marrying at all. The that he might hate a crab till he dug for him idea of her congenital insanity - which, by in the sand in a such position that a rock fell the way, in a physiological point of view is on his arm and held him fast to die of expobadly put, the father having been sane till sure and starvation. What is impossible in just before her birth- is kept carefully be- an asylum, and Clyffe is merely an asylum fore the reader, and he throughout expects without apparent keepers? Such incidents from it some such crime as he is barely told by a strong pen of course attract, just aware throughout the last volume has been as a horrible newspaper report attracts, committed. All therefore seems to him and The Clyffards will have readers. We natural, the horrible hatred of the step- do not object, except when we are told that child, the equally horrible detestation of the there is high art in such books. There is nurse who in delirious ravings has declared not, for the very object of using such a maher suspicions of her mistress's crime, and chinery is to conceal the absence of art, the the calm worldly demeanour through it all. inability to invest human motives, and natWe say it is natural, but at all events the ural impulses, and acts, and incidents such unnaturalness disappears, for no one except as we see around us with sufficient interest Dr. Forbes Winslow knows what is natural to enchain the reader. The infinite majorin a patient with intermittent lunacy taking ity of civilized persons are not mad, very the form of jealousy on behalf of another. few of them are murderers. Not many of Granted her data, Mrs. Wood has worked them are adulterers, or haters, or madly jealout her story well, but then her data ex-ous, or permeated with any passion save