"Why, none of you would have detected me had it not been for my Lord on the bench." Patteson was indeed an excellent scholar in an age of scholars, and would turn out a copy of witty and elegant Latin verse while he was waiting his turn to give judgment.

The other anecdote is this: At a public dinner at which the late Duke of Sussex presided, Mr. Justice Patteson sat on the left hand of the chairman and the Bishop of on his right. The wine was of peculiar excellence, and àpropos of its merits the Duke asked his right reverend friend upon his right in what part of the Bible it was said of wine that it "cheereth both God and man?" The Bishop, knowing probably that the Duke was not less celebrated for his love of good cheer than for the number and rarity of the editions of the Bible in his possession, somewhat timidly suggested that the passage to which his Royal Highness alluded was in the Book of Psalms, where the exact words are

"wine that maketh glad the heart of man." "I have puzzled the Bishop," exclaimed his Royal Highness with infinite glee, and turning to his left-hand neighbour he put the question to him. The judge, however, with his usual accuracy of recollection, at once replied, "I think that the passage in question will be found in Jotham's parable." "By !" exclaimed his Royal Highness, with a strength of asseveration worthy of the quarter-deck of other days, "the judge has beaten the Bishop." And presently, turning to Mr. Justice Patteson, he asked him how he happened to remember the quotation. "Your Royal Highness, no doubt, remembers," said the judge, with a humorous twinkle," that the passage is to be found in the Book of Judges."

Mr. Gladstone recently told us that when someone condoled with the late Sir Andrew Clark on the approaching end of his vacation, the distinguished physician warmly replied, "Sir, I love my profession." Patteson loved his profession-the law; loved it so well that he was afraid he might like to go on sitting on the bench and solving delightful legal problems long after his increasing deafness made it expedient in the public interest that he should retire. So he exacted a promise from a friend that he would tell him directly he thought his want of hearing really unfitted him for sitting in court. The time came when it did, and Patteson thankfully accepted and acted on his friend's advice.

There have been many farewells by retiring judges, and much moaning of the Bar" thereat; but it was more than the con

ventional leave-taking-it was a deeply impressive scene when Sir Alexander Cockburn, the then Attorney-General, rose to express, with an eloquence peculiarly his own, the deep and tender sentiments of esteem and veneration felt by all the members of the Profession for the aged Sir John; and no less affecting were the words in which the old judge asked pardon for what he thought his shortcomings. "I am aware," he said, "that on some, and I fear too many occasions, I have given way to complaints and impatient expressions towards the Bar and the witnesses in court as if they were to blame, when in truth it was my own deficiency, and heartily sorry have I been and am for such want of control over myself. I have striven against its recurrence earnestly, though not always successfully." He had no cause for such self-reproach, but, if he had, we may say, as Burke said of Johnson, "It is well for a man, sir, if, at the end of his life, he has nothing worse to look back on than a little roughness of manner."

"Patteson's place,"

His home was Feniton Court, Honiton. said Denman," is really magnificent, with a fine long avenue, and a charming undulation of ground." He had lost his first wife, but in 1826 he married again, a most admirable woman, Frances Coleridge, niece of the poet, and sister of his brother judge and life-long friend, Sir John Taylor Coleridge. One day Selwyn, the Bishop of New Zealand, came on a visit to Feniton Court, and said to Lady Patteson, her little boy standing by, “Lady Patteson, will you give me Coley?" It was said, as such things are, hardly seriously, but it made a deep impression on the boy, and when, years after, the Bishop renewed his offer, young Coleridge Patteson felt that his call had come, and spoke his wishes to his father. We only mention the incident here because it throws a light on the fine character of the old judge. Sir John was startled, but at once said, You have done quite right to speak to me and not to wait. It is my first impulse to say 'No,' but that would be very selfish." Still the struggle was a hard one. “I can't let him go." "God forbid I should stop him." To the Bishop he spoke of the great comfort he had in this son, cut off as he was by his infirmities from so much of society, and enjoying the young man's coming in to talk about his work. "But there," he added, “what right have I to stand in his way? How do I know that I may live another year?" And as the conversation ended, "Mind," he said, "I give him wholly, not

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with any thought of seeing him again. I will not have him thinking he must come home again to see me."

"Sir John Patteson," as Sir John Taylor Coleridge wrote, "has left few literary monuments to record what his intellectual powers were; even in our common profession the ordinary course and practice are so changed that I doubt whether many lawyers. are familiar with his masterly judgments." The lament is true; but there are some changes over which we cannot drop a tear. Thus in Reg. v. Bissett (1 Cox C. C. 148) Mr. Justice Patteson held, as the law then stood, that, in setting out a former conviction in an indictment for uttering counterfeit coin, a variance in the name of one of the magistrates before whom the previous trial had been held was fatal. On the other hand, stating the day in the indictment to be “in the seventh year of our Sovereign Lady Victoria the Fourth was held not fatal, "Fourth" being mere surplusage (Reg. v. Bevis, 1 Cox. C. C. 27)-it came, by the way, of using a William the Fourth form-curious and interesting points; but what we feel on reading such things is, that on subtleties like these life and liberty ought not to hang.

Ayre v. Craven (2 Ad. & Ell. 2) indicates an anomaly which still exists in our law-to wit, that an action does not lie for imputing adultery to a medical man because such imputation does not go to his professional skill; just as you may say of a lawyer he has no more wit than a jackanapes, but you must not say he has no more law than a jackanapes. In fact, we know that nothing could be more damaging to a doctor in his profession than such a charge. The inadequacy of this professional criterion was well illustrated in the recent case of Alexander v. Jenkins (66 L. T. Rep. N. S. 391; (1892) 1 Q. B. 79), where the imputation was one of drunkenness against a town councillor. Drunkenness, like licentiousness and swearing, was once admired as a gentlemanly failing, but it has quite ceased to be looked on in that light; and even in regard to swearing, we doubt whether there are many young ladies to-day to agree with the Scotch lassie who, while lamenting her brother's addiction to the habit, admitted that swearing was a great set off to conversation.”

Sutton v. Tatham (10 Ad. & Ell. 27) lays down a principle which has been recognised in many recent cases, that a person who employs a broker on the Stock Exchange gives him authority to act in accordance with the rules there established, though such principal may himself be ignorant of the rules. Reg. v. Stewart

(12 Ad. & Ell. 773) affirms the proposition, that every person dying in this country (and not within certain ecclesiastical prohibitions) is entitled to Christian burial. The subject of this leading case had died in a hospital. Her husband could not, and the hospital would not, bury her; there was no obligation on the overseers to do so under the Poor Law statutes of Elizabeth, so the Court had to discover the good old common law that, when a pauper dies in any parish house, or union, that circumstance casts on the union the duty to bury such pauper. By this same fine old common law there is an obligation on parishioners, of which all are not aware, to repair the body of the parish church, and this is not voluntary, but absolute and imperative: (Burder v. Veley, 12 Ad. & Ell. 233).

It was at one time supposed--and still is by a good manythat, if a person who is not a medical practitioner takes upon himself to prescribe for a patient, and the patient dies, the prescriber would be amenable to the law. But this is not so. If the prescriber does his best, but, owing to some unfortunate mistake, the patient dies, he is not any more amenable to the law than a regular practitioner. There must be gross rashness or want of caution, so Mr. Justice Patteson held in Reg. v. Salmon (unreported). This is too encouraging to the amateur doctorworst form of all amateurism. When we find that the prisoner in the case in question had prescribed twenty of No. 1 of Morrison's Pills at night and twenty of No. 2 in the morning, we feel the jury could hardly do anything else but find him guilty, though they recommended him to mercy.

LORD WESTBURY.

ONE day in October, 1814, a struggling country doctor, Dr. Bethell, of Bradford-on-Avon, took his son Richard, aged fourteen, to Oxford to Wadham College, and presented him to Dr. Tourney, the Warden, for matriculation. On seeing the small, eager-faced boy in his round jacket and frilled collar, Dr. Tourney turned to the father and remarked that children were not admitted to the college. "You will not find my son a child, sir, when he is examined; moreover, he has determined to win a scholarship for himself," was the reply. "What!" exclaimed the astonished Warden, "you will allow him to try for a scholarship at his age? Do you know that he will have to compete with young men of seventeen and eighteen? You must indeed think your son a prodigy?" Sir, I do think him a prodigy," was the proud rejoinder.

Parents' estimates are not always to be trusted, but Dr. Bethell was not far wrong. The small boy in the "Toby " frill, if not a prodigy, had the stuff in him of which successful ambition is made, the energy and will which were destined to seat him on the woolsack. We guess little of what goes on in the youthful mind. Warren Hastings was only seven years old when, one bright summer day, lying on the bank of the rivulet which flows through the old domain of his house, he formed the resolution that he would recover the estate which had belonged to his fathers, that he would be Hastings of Daylesford. Chatterton, "the marvellous boy," was only a few years older when he planned the whole scheme of his famous literary forgeries. Bethell was a boy of this mettle. He was naturally ambitious, and the res angustæ domi helped to harden his resolution. He rose every morning at five winter and summer; he worked, as Mr. Gladstone once said of himself, " unmercifully"; he supported himself entirely from his seventeenth year; he got his first