speech in which, he declares, the Genoese indulge, telling us they
call their superb city _Gena_, and not _Genoa_. He refers their
'chopping' pronunciation to their habitual economy--an economy
distinctly traceable to their mercantile habits. 'Telle est leur
economie,' he says, 'ils rognent tout jusqu'aux paroles.'

The old English law-writer, Bracton, desiring to account for the
ancient doctrine of English law, that inheritances shall lineally
descend, and never lineally ascend, finds a reason in the fact, that a
bowl being trundled, runs down a hill and never up a hill; and
Littleton, the first great writer on English real property-law, traces
the origin of the phrase 'hotchpot'--a familiar legal term--to the
archaic denomination of a pudding, in our English tongue. 'It
seemeth,'he says, 'that this word, hotchpot, is in English a pudding;
for in this pudding is not commonly put one thing alone, and
_therefore_ it behoveth, in this case, to put the lands given in
frank-marriage,' &c. Erasmus used to say of lawyers, that of ignorant
people, they were the most learned. Questionless they are not always
sound logicians. When the clown in Hamlet disserts so learnedly on
'crowner's quest-law,' he is only parodying, and that closely, a
scarcely less ludicrous judgment which had actually been pronounced,
not long before, in the Court of Queen's Bench. Dr Clarke, the
traveller, tells an amusing story to the purpose. According to him,
the Turkish lawyers recognise as an offence what they style 'homicide
by an intermediate cause'--an instance of which offence our traveller
details in these words: 'A young man, desperately in love with a girl
of Stanchio--the ancient Cos, the birthplace of Hippocrates
and Apelles, the lovely isle renowned for its lettuces and
turpentine--eagerly sought to marry her. But his proposals were
rejected. In consequence, he destroyed himself by poison. The Turkish
police arrested the father of the obdurate fairy, and tried him for
culpable homicide. "If the accused," they argued, with becoming
gravity, "had not had a daughter, the deceased would not have fallen
in love; consequently, he would not have been disappointed;
consequently, he would not have died: but he (the accused) had a
daughter, and the deceased had fallen in love," &c. &c. Upon all these
counts he was called upon to pay the price of the young man's life;
and this, being eighty piastres, was accordingly exacted.' When the
amiable and gent