least false step of his steed very dangerous.

I sat next to the Chief Baron in the course of the evening, and had some very interesting talk with him. He told me that he was at Trinity (Cambridge) with Porson and Lord Byron, and added that the former, when Pollock came out senior wrangler of his year, urged him to embrace literature as a profession. "But," said the Chief Baron, "I had no money, and must adopt a less precarious means of living."

The

The Chief Baron must at that time have been verging upon eighty; but Time did not seem to have told upon either his mental or physical powers. brilliancy and originality of his remarks, and his personal activity, were wonderful. In the course of that evening a lawyer's clerk arrived to say that a cause which was the last on the list, and had been set down for the next day, and was likely to last three or four, had been settled out of course, thus at once releasing the Chief Baron from his labours; and his lordship manifested his delight by "polkaing" three times round the drawing room until he was nearly out of breath.

Before we parted for the evening the Chief Baron was so kind as to stipulate with me, as he graciously termed it, that, whenever he was on the Home Summer Circuit, I should come down and dine with him, and "help him to try causes ;" and many a pleasant day have I passed on the bench by his side, enjoying his sotto voce remarks, and admiring his wonderful sagacity. I remember, in a particular cause, there was a fact which, although strongly suspected, did not come out in evidence. "Hand me up that order book," said the judge. After turning over about two

66

thirds of the leaves, he put his finger upon one, and said, "There was a letter about that; where is it ?" After some search and con-ference among the barristers and attorneys, a letter was produced which supplied the missing link in the evidence. When the trial was over, I asked Sir Frederick how he knew about that letter. "Well," he replied, "I did not know about it; but I had a shrewd guess at its existence." Again, there was a cause which involved a question of the direction of a drain, which one of the witnesses was attempting to describe. The Chief Baron took a sheet of foolscap, and, with a broad-nibbed quill pen, made a diagram, and held it up to the witness. "Is that the sort of thing?" inquired the judge. "Not quite," said the witness; "there were curves in it." With two dashes of his pen, the judge held it up again to the witness, who exclaimed at once, Exactly, my lord." I expressed to Sir Frederick my surprise at the readiness with which he had made the diagram, when he said, "Oh, it is quite in my way," and, taking another sheet of paper, he drew, without any instrument, a series of circles, intersected by straight lines, as accurately as many would have done them with rule and compasses.

Once, at the end of an unusually long and tedious trial, I expressed to my kind friend my wonder at the patience with which he had listened to the "damnable iteration of counsel and witness. "Ah, my friend," said the judge,

you don't know the pleasure of eliciting truth, which it is the business of some of these gentlemen (pointing to the bar) to distort or conceal." On another occasion, while one of the counsel was pooh-poohing the entire of certain evidence adduced, the Chief

Baron said, in an aside to me, "But that is the point, though!" and so it proved.

It happened on one occasion of my dining with Sir Frederick I had been repeating to one of his daughters in the drawing room a story which Sir Henry Ellis had recently related to me regarding a matrimonial quarrel between a nobleman and his wife, the result being a separation by deed. It was a subject of much gossip in the fashionable circles at the time, and I asked Sir Henry if he knew what was the casus belli. His explanation was that his lordship, being subject to cold feet, took a bottle of water to bed with him, and her ladyship kicked the cork out. Miss Pollock laughed heartily at the story, when the Chief Baron, turning round, inquired, "What's the joke?" I repeated the tale, and then put it to his lordship as a judge whether it was a legitimate cause for the separation. Frederick, after reflecting with a very judicial countenance for a few seconds, replied that on mature consideration, and speaking as a judge, he thought it was.

IRISH SPARKS.

Sir

I remember a Trinity College (Dublin) story of a student, who having to translate Cæsar, rendered the first sentence, "Omnis Gallia divisa est in partes tres," "All Gaul is quartered into three halves." At the same time I was told of one of the undergraduates of the same college amusing himself with a mirror, by throwing the reflection of the sun's rays on the heads of the Dons as they crossed the quod, for which he was summoned before the authorities, who, however, were puzzled to find a name for the offence, until one of them suggested "casting reflections on the heads of the college."

SCOTTISH HEROISM. Jerdan related to me that he one day witnessed at Haslar Hospital the operation of extracting a ball from a sailor, who had received it in an attempt to cut out some vessels from a French port. During the painful process, the poor fellow never uttered a groan, but once exclaimed to the surgeon, Saftly, saftly over the stanes." When the ball was extracted he asked to look at it. Taking it in his hand he gazed at it wistfully for a few moments, and then said, "Nae sma' dust of a ba' this! but it

shall gang back to them." A quarter of an hour afterwards the poor fellow was a corpse.

THOMAS CARLYLE.

I never saw him but on one occasion, when he called at the house of a friend with whom I had been

dining. I was much struck by his appearance, and perfectly charmed by the unstudied eloquence of his talk. I could have listened to him for hours. John Knox was among the subjects discussed, and was highly eulogised by Carlyle. I admitted that he was a great man in his time, but alleged that he was a persecutor. "Yes, sir," was the rejoinder, "he persecuted the devil

and all his servants." 66 True," I said, Mr. Carlyle, "and sometimes mistook the livery." Either my reply was so stupid that he did not see the point, or there was no point to see, or he did not like the contradiction.

SAMUEL ROGERS.

Jerdan told me that he was once at the printing office of the Literary Gazette, where Mr. Rogers's "Jacqueline" was being printed. Glancing through some sheets Jerdan noticed some imperfect rhymes, and pointed them out to

the printer, who, in turn, mentioned them to Rogers. The poet cancelled every page in which they occurred. He was a wonderful polisher, as was Basil Hall, whose printer told me that the corrections of his proofs cost more than the composition of the type. A gentle man of great literary celebrity, and who was a frequent guest at Rogers's breakfasts, told me that on one occasion the poet referred to the following lines as the best he had ever written :

"Long," he exclaimed, "long may such goodness live,

'Twas all he gave-'twas all he had to give."

"I was in bed," added Rogers, "when I made them, and I put my hands outside on the counterpane and treated myself to three rounds of applause. Rogers had a reputation for saying disagreeable things; and, I am told, alleged in defence of the practice, that if he said clever things in society no one listened to him, whereas if he said bitter things, the company was all attention. I heard of an instance in point. He was dining at Holland House when Lady Holland remarked to him, that "there was nothing worth living for in the world." "Did you ever try to do any good in it, Lady Holland?" rejoined Rogers. I was never at his house, but his breakfast gatherings must have been charming. I have heard that his dinners were showy and splendid, but I believe not frequent. It is said that Moore and other guests complained of paucity of wine, and that they adjourned to a tavern to finish the evening; but when the anacreonism of the bard is taken into account, the complaint is very likely to have originated in the fact that the host knew when his guests had had enough and they did not. It was also said of him that he was close in money matters, an assertion

which is somewhat contradicted by the fact which came under my personal knowledge, of his having advanced to a poor author to set him up in a business, three hundred pounds, which he must have known he should never see again. Rogers had a singularly formed head, and a memento mori expression of countenance; and it is reported of him that when he visited the catacombs at Paris, the janitor, as the poet was going out, exclaimed in a tone of pathetic remonstrance, "You are not going to leave us?" I saw him at the Royal Academy a short time before the accident which crippled him for the remainder of his life, and was much struck by his light step and almost jaunty air. His exquisite taste was in no instance more distinguished than in the illustrations from Turner and Stothard, of his "Italy," and "Poems," engraved with a care and delicacy never surpassed in the history of the art.

ROBERT BELL,

Novelist, dramatist, critic, and journalist, a very extraordinary, though much underrated man. His "Wayside Pictures" is one of the most charming books I ever met with. I read it long before I made his acquaintance. The committee of the Literary Fund had been for a series of years attacked, at their annual meetings, by a party of which Mr. Charles Wentworth Dilke, grandfather of Citizen Dilke, was the head. At last, on the eve of the annual meeting of the 10th March, 1858, there was circulated among the members of the corporation at large, a pamphlet entitled "The Case of the Reformers in the Literary Fund, stated by Charles W. Dilke, Charles Dickens, and John Forster," in which was a string of grave charges against the

General Committee of Management. Bell, who had joined the committee in 1851, took great interest in the affairs of, the society, and, seeing the importance of meeting these charges, thoroughly mastered its history, and undertook to answer the allegations of the reformers, which he did, dealing with the charges seriatim. The result was that the motion of censure founded on the pamphlet was negatived by the general body, the numbers being 70 to 14. Professor Whewell, who had been invited to attend by the opposing party, said, as he was quitting the room, in reference to the reformers' pamphlet, "He has torn it to tatters ;" and some years afterwards Dr. Whewell, referring to the meeting, said to me that Mr. Bell's reply was "the most complete refutation he had ever heard." We have no right to impugn the motives of the three "reformers," but I suspect the truth to be that Messrs. Dickens and Forster trusted to Dilke for their facts, and he blundered egregiously. The committee were never molested again on the score of their management. The last time I saw Bell, I called at his house, York-street, Portman-square, on the evening of the day on which he underwent an operation on the sole of his foot, performed under the freezing process, my object being to know how he was after it, and not intending to go beyond the street door. He, however, insisted on seeing me, and then pleaded so hard for my staying to dine with him, that I could not refuse. He was in wonderful spirits, and I passed a charming evening; but the relief was not lasting, and he shortly afterwards fell a victim to the disease. He was a most delightful companion, and had a most musical voice; which, I well remember, during the whole of his defence of the man

agement of the Literary Fund, notwithstanding interruptions, was never once raised above its ordinary pitch. A few days before the battle came off, he was pointing out the formidable character of the opposition, but he added, "By the blessing of God, we will beat them yet." It was a most remarkable literary quarrel, and its history would be a curious one; but it must not be written until the combatants are in their graves.

RICHARD HARRIS BARHAM (THOMAS INGOLDSBY),

Was as witty and entertaining in his conversation as in his celebrated "Legends ;" and he had a wonderful faculty of pouring oil on the troubled waters of a stormy meeting by some adroitly introduced joke which was irresistible. I met him one foggy November day, and asked him how he was, "O not well at all," was his reply, "I have a nasty wheezing cold, I feel as if I had a chest full of penny whistles." He told me he was at the first meeting of the Archæological Society, which took place at Canterbury, under the presidency of Lord Albert Coningham, afterwards Lord Londesborough, and at which some discussion arose with reference to the state of the cathedral. The architect, who was a very little man, and, though quite competent to his duties, was a little behind his age in educational acquirements, got up to explain, when the chairman, who could scarcely discern him, remarked that the gentleman had better rise. "I am riz, my lord," exclaimed the little man, rising on tiptoe, and craning his neck.

I had occasion once to ascertain if the office of "Confessor to the Household," which I had seen in a not very old "Red Book," was still in existence, and, if so, I pre