supplement to Charles Lamb's " Popular Fallacies." One of these fallacies àpropos of wills is that destroying a will revives an earlier will revoked. Another is that the making of a new will revokes an old one-the truth being that a will can only be revoked in one of the ways pointed out by sect. 20 of the Wills Act. The testator in Cheese v. Lovejoy (37 L. T. Rep. 294; 2 P. Div. 161, 251) may be cited as a warning. He drew his pen through the lines of various parts of his will, wrote on the back of it "This is revoked," and threw it among a heap of waste papers in his sitting-room. A servant took it up and put it on a table in the kitchen. It remained lying about the kitchen till the testator's death seven or eight years afterwards, and was then found uninjured, and Sir James Hannen held that it was not revoked; for, whatever the testator intended, the will had not actually been injured. Symbolical destruction will not do. All the destroying in the world, as Lord Justice James put it, will not revoke a will; nor all the intention in the world without destroying. There must be both.

SIR JAMES FITZJAMES STEPHEN.

ENGLISHMEN are seldom philosophers. Of them it may be said, in Cicero's words, "totum illud displicet philosophari." Their genius is practical, not speculative. To this rule Mr. Justice Stephen was an illustrious exception. He loved divine philosophy, not so much metaphysics or transcendental mysticism— these, indeed, he cared little for-he was not built that way; but he was bent on getting at the reason of things, and refused to feed himself on the husks of conventionalities and social shams:

He faced the spectres of the mind,
And laid them

-to his own satisfaction, at all events; and with the inquiring mind he had also the courage of his convictions, and a Johnsonian sturdiness in expressing and maintaining them. His dialectical ingenuity is amusingly illustrated in a little anecdote told of him when a small boy. His mother was holding up his father to him as an example of unselfishness. "Did you ever know your father," she said, "do a thing because it was pleasant?" Yes, once," said the adroit Fitzjames, "when he married you?" It was a household where duty was supreme; where an atmosphere of Puritan gravity, not to say austerity, reigned; where balls and theatres and such-like vanities were forbidden fruit-dangerous temptations. These surroundings helped to foster his constitutional shyness and beget a maturity of mind which unfitted him. for the enjoyment of a public school life.

THE LESSON OF A PUBLIC SCHOOL.

At Eton," he says, "I was like a sensible grown-up woman among a crowd of rough boys. I still think with shame and selfcontempt of my boyish weakness, which, however, did not continue in later years. The process taught me for life the lesson that to be weak was to be wretched; that the state of nature is a state of war, and væ victis the great law of Nature. Many years

afterwards I met Robert Lowe (Lord Sherbrooke) at dinner. He was speaking of Winchester, and said, with much animation, that he had learnt one great lesson there-namely, that a man can count on nothing in this world except what lies between his hat and his boots. I learnt the same lesson at Eton, but, alas! by conjugating, not pulso, but vapulo."

The cause partly of this was that he had no taste for sports and pastimes, and alike at Eton and Cambridge indifferent to those athletic pursuits which make up mainly the lives of schoolboys and undergraduates; he was too preoccupied with the world of ideas. If he took a gun he was rather inclined to complain of grouse as an interruption to his thoughts. Yet, had he so chosen, his fine physique might have given him a high place among the heroes of the cricket field or the river. A prizefighter once said to the burly Whewell, "What a man was lost when they made you a parson!" In the same spirit Fitzjames' brother tells us that one Ritson-the landlord of the Wastdale Head-who had wrestled with Christopher North, lamented in after years that Fitzjames had never entered the ring. His only taste in the direction of athletics was his love of walking; a thirty-three mile walk was with him a common performance. In this contempt or indifference to sports he and his cousin, Tom Macaulay-who was always being held up to him as an examplewere very much alike. Nor did he recommend himself particularly to the school authorities by scholarship.

The way to glory at Eton was then by the admired art of Latin versification, the manufacture of " longs and shorts," and at this Fitzjames did not shine. The warning addressed to him by a master is delicious. Stephen Major," said this worthy, "if you do not take more pains, how can you expect to write good longs and shorts? If you do not write good longs and shorts, how can you ever be a man of taste? If you are not a man of taste, how can you ever hope to be of use in the world?" The syllogism failed, however, to appeal to Stephen; he never, either at Eton or Cambridge, became a finished classical scholar or a competent mathematician. More important to his psychological development was his finding among his father's books a copy of the State Trials. There he read the trial of Williams for publishing Paine's " Age of Reason," and it made an indelible

impression on him, and gave a permanent direction to his thoughts:-so potent may the smallest seed become when it falls in congenial soil. Henceforward freedom of thought and criminal law were the two ideas which dominated his mind and engrossed his interest.

THE BAR AND MARRIAGE.

The Church and the Bar were the two careers between which he had to choose, and, after a somewhat pedantic process of logical self-examination, he came to the conclusion that he was better adapted to the Bar than the Church, and he was duly called on Jan. 26th, 1854. A year afterwards he married Mary Cunningham, daughter of the vicar of Harrow and sister of Sir Alian Cunningham, the biographer of Lord Bowen. Love was to him a "blessed revelation "—an awakening like that of the fairy palace in Tennyson's "Sleeping Beauty." It changed him, he says, from a rather heavy, torpid youth into the happiest of men. But marriage with its blessings brings responsibilities,

as Burns says:

"Those moving things ca'ed weans and wife

Wad touch the verra heart o' stanes."

And the Bar is not a career calculated to lessen the anxiety of the outlook. There never was a longer hill than that which barristers have to climb.

THE STAFF OF JOURNALISM.

Fitzjames-as so many young barristers do-varied the monotony of the slow ascent and also eked out his professional earnings by journalism and periodical literature. He wrote regularly for the Saturday Review (then in its palmiest days), for the Cornhill Magazine, and for the Pall Mall Gazette; as Sir Courtenay Ilbert puts it, he was the Pall Mall Gazette. His industry was enormous, but he followed Sir Walter Scott's advice -he used literature as a staff, not as a crutch; made law the substantive, literature the adjective; sticking steadily to his profession, going the Oxford Circuit, and achieving such steps towards advancement as are implied in the Recordership of Newark and a revising barristership. His general plan when in town was to write before breakfast, and then look in at the office of the Pall Mall Gazette, Northumberland-street, Strand, in the course of his walk to chambers. There he talked matters over with Mr. Greenwood, the editor, and occasionally wrote an

article on the spot: the fountain was always full.

What he could

not manage was the light and amusing article. As Sir Walter Scott said in contrasting himself with Miss Austen: "The big bow-wow strain I can do myself like any now going, but the exquisite touch which renders ordinary commonplace things and characters interesting from the truth of the description and the sentiment is denied to me." Fitzjames could also do the big bow-wow strain, but had not the touch of the belle-lettrist.

Mr. Justice Wills, an elder contemporary of his circuit, describes him at this time as self-centred and rather too logical for the tricks of the trade-tricks which, he adds, are learnt only by a long and persistent handling of ordinary business. He did not understand what would go down; his massive intellect was wanting in pliability. He could not change front in the presence of the enemy. The result was that at the Bar, as at Cambridge, he was still distanced by men greatly his inferiors in general force of mind, but better provided with the talent for bringing their gifts to market.

AUTHORSHIP-A VIEW OF THE CRIMINAL LAW.

Possessed with ideas and aims above those of the ordinary crowd, Fitzjames had the feeling that the great bulk of a barrister's work is poor stuff. Barristering was a good vigorous trade which braced the moral and intellectual muscles; but he wished for more longed to write something worth reading, and the desire took shape in his "View of the Criminal Law." One of the many good points he makes in the "View" is the contrast be tween the English and the French system of criminal procedure. We in England are much too fond of girding at what we think the unfairness of French criminal methods. The truth is, we do not understand the French point of view. The English and French systems rest on different theories. Our English system is "litigious," the French "inquisitorial "; in other words, the theory of French law is that the whole process of detecting crime is part of the functions of Government. In France there is a hierarchy of officials who upon hearing of a crime investigate the circumstances in every possible way, and examine everyone who is able, or supposed to be able, to throw any light upon it. The trial is merely the final stage of the investigation at which the various authorities bring out the final result of all their previous proceedings. The theory of English law, on the contrary, is "litigious "—the trial is a proceeding in which the prosecutor