Burning a dead body may jar on some people's religious sentiment, but that does not make it a crime. "It may be," he concludes in summing up to the jury, "that it would be well for Parliament to regulate or to forbid the burning of bodies, but the great leading rule of criminal law is that nothing is a crime unless it is plainly forbidden by law," and he could find no prohibition on this point in the law of England.

SOME OTHER DECISIONS.

Cundy v. Le Cocq (51 L. T. Rep. 265; 13 Q. B. Div. 207) deals with the question of publicans serving drunken persons. This may be said to be the key of the whole drink question, because if nobody is, as Mr. Pepys was at Cambridge, "scandalously overserved with drink," no one will have a chance of indulging to excess. In Cundy v. Le Cocq the question was whether it is any defence that the publican honestly believed that the customer had not had too much. The court held that it was not--the prohibition was absolute. Any other construction would offer a great temptation to the publican to sell liquor without regard to the sobriety of customers. Only how shall we reconcile with this admirable strictness of the law the fact that so many persons are observed to come reeling out of publichouses?

In London School Board v. Duggan (13 Q. B. Div. 176) a girl of twelve, the daughter of a labourer in poor circumstances and the eldest of several children, was earning 3s. a week and her food as a nursery-maid, and gave the 3s. to her mother for the support of the family. The father was summoned for not sending her to school, but Mr. Justice Stephen would have none of it. There was a reasonable excuse," he held. "She has been discharging the honourable duty of helping her parents and there is nothing I should read with greater reluctance in any Act of Parliament than that a child was bound to postpone the direct necessity of her family to the advantage of getting a little more elementary education for herself."

What is a place of dramatic entertainment" within sect. 2 of 3 & 4 Will. 4, c. 15? Our law is extremely cautious-and wisely so about giving definitions, for definition-giving is, as George Eliot says of prophesying, the most gratuitous form of error; but Mr. Justice Stephen had no difficulty in determining that the board-room of Guy's Hospital is not a place of dramatic

A A

entertainment because Our Boys is got up for the entertainment, free of charge, of the nurses, attendants, and surgeons.

LARCENY AT COMMON LAW.

Sir Thomas More puzzled the wiseacres of Bruges by propounding to them the question, "Utrum averia in witheramnia sint irreplegibilia"; but what was this to the simple point-so it looked-which arose in Reg. v. Ashwell (53 L. T. Rep. 773; 16 Q. B. Div. 190)? The prisoner had asked the prosecutor for the loan of a shilling. The prosecutor gave the prisoner a sovereign, believing it to be a shilling, and the prisoner took the coin under the same belief. Soon afterwards he discovered that the coin was a sovereign, and then and there fraudulently appropriated it to his own use. Was he guilty of larceny at Common Law? Fourteen judges robed in scarlet and ermine sat to hear the case, and seven said it was larceny, and seven said it was not. Mr. Justice Stephen, in a judgment of great weight and learning covering fourteen pages of the Law Reports, sided with those who held it was not larceny; he declined to recognise a constructive "taking," to make what was an innocent act a guilty one by carrying back the animo furandi. The true moral of the case, apart from its casuistical refinements (and it is a moral which should make the Englishman's heart swell with pride), is that, whatever he may have done, he can only be dealt with according to law-and how carefully and how patiently administered! But what a time it must have been when a man's life was hanging on the technicalities of our law of larceny!

LORD CHIEF JUSTICE COLERIDGE.

THERE are certain men on the crowded stage of modern life who fill the public eye, whose personality has somehow a peculiar potency of attraction. Lord Coleridge was one of these. Something of this attraction he doubtless owed to the fact that he was the inheritor of a great and honoured name the son of his father, the great-nephew of the poet-but not all. He had his own individuality-and a very marked one. He was an accomplished man of the world, with a touch of genius and a manysided culture-polished, courteous, urbane, a graceful oratorsuch as Lord Chesterfield would have delighted in-a brilliant talker, a scholar, a litterateur, a Churchman.

Ottery St. Mary is a picturesque little village in Devonshire, a few miles from Exeter. Here, at Heath's Court-with its delightful garden close to an ancient church, the residence of his father the blameless Sir John Taylor Coleridge, a judge of the King's Bench and the lifelong friend of Arnold and Keble-the future Chief Justice, John Duke Coleridge, was born on Dec. 3rd, 1820.

EARLY DAYS AT OXFORD.

Eton was his school, and at Eton, like Horace, he had his "plagosus Orbilius" in the person of Dr. Keate; but Keate, like Orbilius, had the art of making scholars, and Coleridge, when he went to the University, carried off the blue ribbon of Oxford distinctions" the Balliol." His friend, Principal Shairp, has given a poetical sketch of him at this period:

"Fair-haired and tall, slim, but of stately mien,
Another, in the bright bloom of nineteen,
Fresh from the fields of Eton, came.

Whate'er of beautiful or poet sung,

Or statesman uttered, round his memory clung.
Before him shone resplendent heights of fame,

With friends around to bind; no wit so fine
To wing the jest, the sparkling tale to tell,
Yet oftimes listening in St. Mary's shrine
Profounder mood upon his spirit fell;

We heard him then-England has heard him since—
Uphold the fallen, make the guilty wince,

And the hushed Senate has confessed his spell.”

Those early years at Oxford, when the mind is opening like a flower under the sun of knowledge and of the genius loci amid a circle of chosen friends—is there anything quite like them in after life? Young Coleridge threw himself with ardour into the intellectual and spiritual life of the place. A band of youthful friends, Clough and Matthew Arnold, Dean Church and Lord Lingen-they held debate, like Tennyson and Arthur Hallam at the sister University,

On mind and art,

And labour and the changing mart,
And all the framework of the land.
Discussed the books to love and hate,

Or threaded some Socratic dream.

"We met in one another's rooms," says Coleridge, "we discussed all things human and divine-we thought we stripped things to the very bone-we believed we dragged recondite truths into the light of common day, and subjected them to the scrutiny of what we were pleased to call our minds. We fought to the very stumps of our intellects, and I believe that many of us—I can speak for one-would generally admit that many a fruitful seed of knowledge was sown in those pleasant, if pugnacious, evenings. In the larger arena of the Union, too, he shone conspicuous. Whatever career he had chosen he was marked for pre-eminence. What a bishop he would have made, for instance! What a dignified ecclesiastic! What a college head! But destiny decreed that he should go to the Bar, and family influence led him, naturally, to choose the Western Circuit.

THE WESTERN CIRCUIT AND THE LIGHT WHICH FAILED.

Serjeant Manning used to say that the more he went the Western Circuit the better he understood how it was that the wise men came from the East; but when Coleridge joined the circuit in 1847 it numbered many names then or afterwards illustrious-Cockburn, Crowder, Follett, Karslake, Hobhouse,

A. Hayward, Roxburgh, Thring. Sir William Follett was a friend of Coleridge's father, and gave young Coleridge some useful professional " tips." 'Never overstate your case in opening; leave something to the jury to discover-they like it." Second piece of advice: If there is a weak point in your case, state it yourself; do not leave it to your adversary to do so. It is probable you will state it less to your disadvantage than he will." Coleridge was one who knew how to profit by hints like these. A trifling accident shows his readiness and resource. He was defending a prisoner on trial for his life before a Devonshire jury on a winter afternoon. Suddenly during his address the light in court went out. It was soon restored, but Coleridge saw his way in the brief interval to turn the incident to account. "Gentlemen," he said, resuming his address, "you have all seen how speedily the light in this court was extinguished, and with what ease it has been renewed. It is in your power to extinguish the light of the prisoner's life, but remember, if you do so, it cannot under any circumstances be replaced." The prisoner was acquitted. Coleridge was then an unknown advocate, but he was wont in later years to regard this success as the first stepping-stone to fame. As years went on, and his merits as an advocate became better known, his practice grew rapidly, and "Long John "-his circuit soubriquet-and "Handsome Jack" (Sir John Karslake) were pitted against each other as leaders in every case of consequence; but for some time after his call Coleridge probably made as much by his pen-writing reviews for the Guardian, the Edinburgh, and the Quarterly as he did by his profession. The Western Circuit did not introduce him to the commercial work which abounded at Guildhall and on the Northern Circuit. With his oratorical talents and connections it is matter for wonder that he did not earlier essay politics.

PARLIAMENT AND UNIVERSITY TESTS.

Perhaps he was deterred by expense-a seat in Parliament was a much more costly luxury then than now-perhaps he was following the advice of an eminent authority that a barrister should not go into Parliament until he has pretensions to the Solicitor-Generalship. At all events he was forty-five, Recorder of Plymouth, a Q.C., and Bencher of his Inn before he entered Parliament as Liberal member for Exeter in 1865.

He at once sprang into prominence as the eloquent advocate