and distress is a sort of private war carried on by the landlord— a survival of those "wild times" of which Lord Justice Bowen lately spoke in American Must Company v. Hendry (68 L. T. Rep. 742; 5 R. 331). But the war game must be played now according to rules of law, and one of such rules is that an entry into a house for the purpose of distraining by opening a window which is shut, but not fastened, is unlawful: (Nash v. Lucas, 16 L. T. Rep. 610; L. Rep. 2 Q. B. 590).

Our law of larceny is full of anomalies, and Reg. v. Prince (32 L. T. Rep. 700; 11 Cox C. C. 193) reveals one, namely, that where money has been obtained from a cashier at a bank on a forged cheque knowingly, it does not amount to the crime of larceny, the legal reason being that a cashier of a bank has a general authority to part with his employer's money in payment of such cheques as he may think genuine. Reg. v. Holmes (49 L. T. Rep. 540; 12 Cox C. C. 137) is another noticeable criminal case. It decides that, on a charge of indecent assault or rape, where the defence is consent, and the prosecutrix is asked as to her improper intimacy with other men, and denies it, evidence cannot be given to disprove her denial. The evidence is too remote, so the Court of Crown Cases Reserved held; but surely such evidence goes directly to the issue, and not merely to character.

In Austin v. Great Western Railway Company (16 L. T. Rep. 320; L. Rep. 2 Q. B. 442) the plaintiff's mother, carrying in her arms the plaintiff, a child of three years and two months old, took a ticket for herself, but did not take a ticket for the plaintiff. In the course of the journey an accident occurred through the negligence of the railway company, and the plaintiff was injured. At the time the plaintiff's mother took her ticket no question was asked by the company's servants as to the age of the child, and there was no intention on the part of the mother to defraud the company. The child was held entitled to recover. "I think," said Mr. Justice Lush, "there was a contract to carry mother and child, and that contract operated in favour of each party. The only question is whether the facts negative the existence of any such contract. I think they show there was an undertaking to carry the plaintiff. If the company enter into it under a mistake as to the age of the child, that does not make it less a contract."

Not long ago there was an action in Ireland (Walker v. Great

Northern Railway Company of Ireland, L. Rep. Ir. 28 Q. B. 69) brought by a child who at the date of the accident was en ventre sa mère, but was born deformed, or at least damaged in health. A child en ventre sa mère is a remarkable being in law, may or might be an executor, may or might be vouched to warranty, have an injunction, and do many wonderful things, but the Court allowed a demurrer. Said Mr. Justice O'Brien : "In law, in reason, in the common language of mankind, in the dispensations of nature, in the bond of physical union and the instinct of duty and solicitude, on which the continuance of the world depends, a woman is the common carrier of her unborn child, and not a railway company." This is quite the best quality of Irish

rhetoric, but is it law?

8

LORD BLACKBURN.

DR. JOHNSON would not allow Scotland to derive any credit from Lord Mansfield, for he was educated in England. "Much," he said to Boswell, "may be done with a Scotchman if he be caught young." Blackburn, like Lord Mansfield, may be said to have been caught young; that is to say, he was sent to school to the famous seat of learning on the banks of "silver streaming" Thames :

Where grateful science still adores
Her holy Henry's shade.

Eton refined the Gaelic barbarism of Selkirkshire, his native county, and Cambridge completed the civilising process. The intelligent foreigner in the person of a certain Baron X. has lately been informing us that most of the young men at Cambridge are jeunes farceurs given up to boating, cricket, tandemdriving, and so on, with a sprinkling of serious students whom he reckons at about fifty. Blackburn was certainly no jeune farceur either at Cambridge or in after life. He studied hard, and he emerged a high wrangler. It would make, by the way, an interesting thesis whether mathematics or scholarship form the best training for success in the Law. Mathematics seem to have the greater affinity for Law. They discipline the mind, they teach concentration, they form habits of close reasoning, and yet, when we look at the names of the present and recent occupants of the Bench, we find far more distinguished as scholars than as mathematicians. On the one side we have Lord Justice Bowen, and Chief Justice Coleridge, and Lord Chancellor Selborne, and Lords Davey and Macnaghten, and Justices Denman, and Kennedy, and Wright, and Chitty, and Reid, A.G., and, on the other side-trained in mathematics-Justices Romer and Stirling and Lord Justice Rigby-eminent judges, but numerically few.