rdone with funny
writers. The ghastliest attempts at liveliness surround us on every
side. I would not bring back the grave deportment and stately etiquette
of days gone by, nor could I if I would. But are we not running to
another extreme? Is there not a lack of reverence and dignity? If we
train up our youth to comic Blackstones, and teach them to extract fun
out of the grandest history done in modern Europe--the history of the
Anglo-Saxon race--of the race that has founded civil and religious
liberty, and still nurses it in the face of a frowning continent, what
can we expect? Men are what we make them. "Just as the twig is bent the
tree's inclined." A feeble and contemptible father is succeeded by a
feeble and contemptible son. Have no grand creed of your own to make
your daily path lustrous with the light of heaven. Crack your weak jest
and pun at all men have reverenced. Learn from _Punch_ to titter, no
matter the theme. And can you wonder that your son believes not in man's
honour or woman's love--in God or the devil, but solely in the Holborn
Casino and Cremorne? For instance, is not law one of the most wonderful
achievements of civilisation? I do not go so far as "the judicious
Hooker." I do not say with him that her seat is the throne of God, her
voice the harmony of the universe, but is it not wonderful to think of
the complex arrangements of which the judge seated in his robes on the
bench, administering law, is the outward sign. In the first place, man
must have learnt to give up a primary instinct of his nature--that of
self-revenge. Then the central power in the darkest parts of the land
must have become dominant. What ages must have past before law dared
meddle with privilege, or before its administrators could realize the
fact of the sanctity of the individual man, whether he starved in a
garret or feasted in a palace. And when the judges went on circuit, with
the gorgeous cavalcade of the olden time, what terror was struck into the
hearts of the rustics, and how patent became to them the strength and
dignity of law. Now why burlesque this? The idea is good and true, yet
the burlesque is permitted and exists, aye, even to this day.

It is years since I was at a Judge and Jury Club, but I believe their
character is in no degree changed. The one I speak of met in an hotel
not far from Covent-garden, and was presided over by a man famous in his
day for his power of _double entendre_.