character of the plaintiff, and throws upon him the onus of proving malice in fact."

Simpson v. Nicholls (3 M. & W. 240) is a warning against Sunday trading. There certain "wines and goods, to wit two bottles of port," were sold and delivered to the defendant on Sunday. This contract was void under the Lord's Day Act, as the seller found when he came to enforce payment; so he tried to get an implied promise to pay out of the fact that the defendant had detained (and probably drunk) the port in question; but this again would not do, for the property had passed, so that no promise could be implied from keeping the wine, and the plaintiff went away, like the wedding guest in "The Ancient Mariner," a sadder and a wiser man."

Partridge v. Scott (3 M. & W. 220) is a very important case. It decided that, if a man builds his house at the extremity of his land, he does not thereby acquire any right of easement for support or otherwise over the land of his neighbour. He has no right to load his own soil so as to make it require the support of that of his neighbour, unless he has some grant to that effect. Angus v. Dalton (44 L. T. Rep. N. S. 844; 6 App. Cas. 740) introduced the further element of one house leaning up against another.

In Earl of Ferrers v. Robins (2 C. M. & R. 152) an auctioneer was held liable for selling furniture for bills instead of ready money; but on a sale of real estate an auctioneer may, it has been decided, accept a cheque for the deposit (Farrer v. Lacey, Hartland, and Co., 54 L. T. Rep. N. S. 396; 31 Ch. Div. 42), this being the usual course of business and a reasonable one.

If your dog bites somebody, you feel disposed to offer him something by way of compensation. Beware. The offer is not proof, but it is some evidence that you knew the dog to be mischievous-technically of the "scienter": (Thomas v. Morgan, 2 C. M. & R. 496).

Thick heads were in Scarlett's time more common among the common juries of the Midland Circuit, Warwick in particular, than elsewhere. A ruffian in the dock was charged with theft. The counsel for the prosecution made a very short story of it. The man, in broad daylight, entered a shop in Warwick, and was seen by a shop-boy to unfasten a coat from a peg and run down the street with it. The shop-boy followed him in a moment, found him in possession of the coat, and gave him in charge to

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the police. This was the case. The Chief Baron turned to the jury and said, "Gentlemen, the story is so clear I need not trouble you with summing up. You may retire and consider your verdict." After ten minutes' absence, the foreman appeared with his colleagues and said, "My Lord, we say he is not guilty." The Chief Baron then turned to the prisoner and said, "Prisoner, take care not to place yourself in the dock again for a similar offence; you may not always be so fortunate as to find a Warwickshire jury to try you. You may go, but remember." Strange that Shakespeare's native county should be the Boeotia of England. But Boeotia had its Hesiod.

LORD TRURO.

IN his "Village School Mistress," Shenstone, moralising, like Gray, on childhood and its destinies, sees with prophetic eye among the dame's scholars

A little bench of heedless bishops here,

And there a chancellor in embryo.

Anyone who visited St. Paul's School (a) about the year of the great French Revolution would have seen a chancellor in embryo in the person of little Thomas Wilde. But there was not much then to foreshadow his future greatness. He had no academic career, brilliant or otherwise. His father was a respectable attorney in the city of London, and Wilde followed in his footsteps, but he felt, as many solicitors justly do, that he had as much capacity as many successful members of the Bar, and, animated by the comparison, he got himself called to the Bar in 1817, though he was then thirty-five. Wiseacres would have called it a highly imprudent step; but "it will not do," as Sydney Smith says, "to be perpetually calculating risks and adjusting nice chances. That did very well before the Flood, when a man could consult his friends for 150 years and then see success afterwards; but at present a man waits and doubts and hesitates and consults his brother and his uncle and particular friends till one day he finds that he is sixty years of age, and has lost so much time in consulting his first cousins that he has no more to follow their advice." Ambition must be made of sterner stuff. words of Queen Elizabeth's spirited rebuke to Raleigh,

He either fears his fate too much,

Or his desert is small,

Who dares not put it to the touch,

To win or lose it all.

In the

Wilde put it to the touch and won, and it was all the more to his

(a) Long afterwards, when Lord Chancellor, Wilde gave £1000 to found the Truro Prize at St. Paul's for an English essay.