"Oh yes! The poor thing died before you went away. She was very fond of it."

"Exactly. Well, I have brought home a beautiful paroquet from Australia. It does all sorts of strange things. I meant it for you, but it will be the very thing for her unless you think she would like a monkey better!"

"Oh no! By all means let her have the paroquet."

"The woman at the lodge told me she was out for a drive. When do you expect her back ?"

Arabella looked at her watch.

"She will be back very soon now.

hour."

"Shall I stay and see her to-day?"

Luncheon will be ready in half an

"You don't want papa to know you are returned ?" Certainly not, just yet."

"Then you had better not stay. It is hard to say so-but I think it will be safer. Aunt could be propitiated, no doubt, but there's that dreadful boy Tommy. If he was told not to say anything, he would be sure to tell."

"Do you mean the little fellow I left in a frock and frills ?" brother's child. He is nearly ten now. Never was a boy

Yes-my

so full of mischief!"

"I'll give him the monkey. Arabella shook her head.

Make friends of him that way."

"Ah, you don't know the treacherous little thing!" she said. is positively dangerous."

"He

"Master Tommy shall be brought to his bearings. I'll manage him by-and-by. Our first move must be to try and circumvent this-how do call him this Colonel Tippy."

you

Ralph then gave Arabella the address of the hotel where he was staying, requesting her to write to him as soon as she knew the result of her father's visit to his rival; and after a few more words—not the least affectionate of those uttered during their interview-the lovers separated.

Passing through the lodge-gate, Ralph heard the sound of wheels approaching. It was the carriage containing Mrs. Nibbletit and Tommy, but he merely glanced towards it without turning his head, and pursued his way to the inn where he had left the cab, which, at a more leisurely pace than before, conveyed him back to town.

HANDY-DANDY, JUSTICE AND THIEF.

A CUE FROM SHAKSPEARE.

BY FRANCIS JACOX.

You see how this world goes, is once and again one of poor raving Lear's incoherent yet pregnant exclamations to now sightless Gloster, too credulous and too cruelly outcast fathers, both of them. Gloster says, he sees it feelingly. Lear tells him, in reply, a man may see how this world goes, with no eyes-which is Gloster's case. "Look with thine ears:

see how yon justice rails upon yon simple thief. Hark, in thine ear: Change places; and, handy-dandy, which is the justice, which is the thief?"*

Lear is for ever, in his wild ramblings, giving terse, pungent, mordant expression to thoughts extraordinary for acuteness and depth. But he seldom, among them all, surpasses this handy-dandy transformation scene, in respect of suggestive import and vivid presentment.

He develops the theme with exuberant earnestness of detail. The "rascal beadle" would fain commit the sin for which his "bloody hand" lashes his culprit. Change places-and handy-dandy, there is no knowing the whipper from the whipped. The beadle should strip his own back. The usurer hangs the cozener.

Through tatter'd clothes small vices do appear;

Robes, and furr'd gowns, hide all. Plate sin with gold,
And the strong lance of justice hurtless breaks :
Arm it in rags, a pigmy's straw doth pierce it.

The close of the inspired madman's outburst of wild and whirling words, prompts pitying Edgar to the note of admiration, "O, matter and impertinency mixed! reason in madness!" But so much of the digressive rhapsody as is here quoted, gives solid matter unmixed with what is not pertinent; and reason without the marring madness.

Shakspeare was keenly alive, as many a passage in his plays might prove, to the philosophic interest, for all students of man's natural history, of this handy-dandy scheme of transformation. Hear Timon musing in the woods:

-Twinn'd brothers of one womb,

Whose procreation, residence, and birth,

Scarce is dividant,-touch them with several fortunes;

The greater scorns the lesser. . .

Raise me this beggar, and denude that lord;

The senator shall bear contempt hereditary,

The beggar native honour.†

A severe judge is Lord Angelo, and will listen to no intercessions for Claudio. Escalus believes his colleague to be most strait in virtue, yet pleads for the young gentleman with a gently hypothetical Tu quoque.

* King Lear, Act. IV. Sc. 6.

†Timon of Athens, Act IV. Sc. 3.

Had time cohered with place, and place with wishing, might not even Angelo, some time in his life, have erred in this point for which Claudio is now condemned, and so have pulled the law upon himself? Angelo's mode of meeting and disposing of this quasi argumentum ad hominem, is very finely significant of Shakspeare's impartial insight and manysidedness:

Ang. 'Tis one thing to be tempted, Escalus,
Another thing to fall. I not deny,

The jury, passing on the prisoner's life,

May, in the sworn twelve, have a thief or two

Guiltier than him they try. What's open made to justice,
That justice seizes.*

In the next scene, Isabella, pleading for her doomed brother, and pleading in vain, tells Angelo,

-If he had been as you,

And you as he, you would have slipt like him;
But he, like you, would not have been so stern.

Ang. Pray you, be gone.

Isab. I would to heaven I had your potency,

And you were Isabel!

Should it then be thus ?

No; I would tell what 'twere to be a judge,

And what a prisoner.†

Go to your bosom, she afterwards bids this unrelenting judge,-knock
there; and ask your heart, what it doth know that's like my brother's
fault if it confess a natural guiltiness, such as is his, let it not sound a
thought upon your tongue against my brother's life. The consequence
of her importunate and searching appeal is, that, handy-handy, Angelo
sees himself changing places with Claudio, or at least joining him in the
condemned cell; and, on her exit, is heard to commune with himself,
-O let her brother live!

Thieves for their robbery have authority,
When judges steal themselves.

The very title of such a book by Mr. Douglas Jerrold as "St. Giles

* Measure for Measure, Act II. Sc. 1.

Sydney Smith, in an assize sermon on the Judge that Smites contrary to the Law, urges, among "the topics of mercy," the temptations to the culprit, and his moral weakness; the severity of the law, and its error; the altered state of society and feeling; and above all, the "distressing doubt whether a human being in the lowest abyss of poverty and ignorance, has not done injustice to himself, and is not perishing from the want of knowledge, the want of fortune, and the want of friends."- Sermon at York, before Justices Bayley and Holroyd, March 28,

1824.

In another, and much later discourse, on the accession of Queen Victoria, the same preacher refers to the practice of submitting to the Sovereign the names of malefactors, and the nature of their crimes; and asks, "How is it possible that a Sovereign, with the fine feelings of youth, and with all the gentleness of her sex, should not ask herself, whether the human being whom she dooms to death, or at least does not rescue from death, has been properly warned in early youth of the horrors of that crime, for which his life is forfeited-'Did he ever receive any education at all?-did a father and mother watch over him?'" &c.-Sermon on the Duties of the Queen.

+ Measure for Measure, Act II. Se. 2, passim.

and St. James" seems to indicate a systematic embodiment, after its author's manner, and according to his amount of skill, of the Handydandy transformation philosophy. Mr. Dickens has worked it into fiction over and over again from the early days of " Oliver Twist," and "The Chimes" (with its "Come, Alderman! Balance those scales. Throw me into this, the empty one, no dinner, and Nature's founts in some poor woman, dried by starving misery and rendered obdurate to claims for which her offspring has authority in holy mother Eve. Weigh me the two, you Daniel, going to judgment, when your day shall come"*), to

the mature time that now is.

Adopting which philosophy in its length and breadth, handy-dandy, one might say, with Butler,

There's but the twinkling of a star
Between a man of peace and war;
A thief and justice, fool and knave,
A huffing officer and a slave;

A crafty lawyer and pickpocket

Friar Tuck, in Mr. Peacock's version of his woodland reverence, broaches a studious comparison of his leader Robin, and Richard of EnglandRichard being by name indeed a hero, and Robin a thief. But what's in a name? Marry, your hero guts an exchequer, while your thief empties a purse; your hero sacks a city, while your thief sacks a cellar. "But two of a trade can't agree: therefore your hero makes laws to get rid of your thief, and gives him an ill name that he may hang him,"‡-and commonly succeeds; for, again to quote Samuel Butler-in one of his fragmentary remains—

The law, that makes more knaves than e'er it hung,

Little considers right or wrong;

But like authority's soon satisfied

When 'tis to judge on its own side.§

Perhaps, however, as compendious an affirmative expression of the question as any that could be offered, from latter-day writers, will be found in these lines from a poem by Owen Meredith:

The sleekest guest at the general feast,
That at every sip, as he sups, says grace,
Hath in him a touch of the untamed beast;

And change of nature is change of place.

The judge on the bench, and the scamp at the dock,
Have in each of them much that is common to both,

Each is part of the parent stock,

And their difference comes of their different cloth.
"Twixt the Seven Dials and Exeter Hall

The gulf that is fix'd is not so wide.{|

Change places-as in the old game called Handy-dandy, where they change hands and change sides-and then, which is which?

*The Chimes, Third Quarter.

Maid Marian, ch. xviii.
The Wanderer: Babylonia.

† Hudibras, part ii. canto iii. § Butler's Miscellaneous Thoughts.

That there has been an undue and one-sided exaggeration of this very popular teaching, is a belief to which reflective observers have occasionally, though rarely, given clear expression. One journal in particular the most influential, perhaps, of the day, in the guidance of educated opinion has again and again tendered its bill of exceptions to the ruling, in these vexed questions, of judges most in acceptance.

For instance, in discussing the career of a notorious forger and railway clerk, whom it called Curio, it ironically affirmed the proposition, practically implied by some teachers, that society is bound to remove all temptations to a man's being, or becoming, or continuing bad-and referred to Mr. Recorder Hill's assurance that Mr. Hollest, the clergyman at Frimley, would not have been murdered (1856), had society furnished his murderer with those external means, the dress and capital, which would have made him and Becky Sharp "good."* Mr. Hollest's murderer would have been as respectable as Mr. Hollest, had society given him the same income. Such is, according to a Saturday Reviewer, "the burthen of Mr. Douglas Jerrold's acrid view of human duty. His quarrel, and Curio's quarrel, with society, is that it does not provide everybody with such means as everybody requires to become, and to remain, good. Even Mr. Thackeray, after recording Becky Sharp's confession, goes on to say that probably an alderman would not step out of his carriage to steal a leg of mutton; but put him to starve, and see if he will not purloin a loaf.' Mr. Thackeray seems to hint that probably he would. Curio only carried this a little farther. He could not stand 1507. a year, and so he became Curio."†

It is an old sermon in the popular pulpit, we are reminded on another occasion, that social outcasts-including what by a queer grammatical license are now called social evils-are more sinned against than sinning, and that society is to blame. "Commenting on the Eighth Commandment, Oliver Twist explained to us how society had no right to be hard upon pickpockets and thieves, because society bred thieves." What is meant, our objector demands, by this wholesale and universal spitting and hissing against society? Is it that crime is not crime because it is of and in society? If so, criminal law is simple injustice and cruelty. If this is not concluded, nothing is concluded. Is thieving "right or wrong? If wrong, it is no abatement of it, nor does it help to prevent it, to say that society is culpable." No doubt it is a very pretty antithesis to say, that if St. James had been born in a rookery, perhaps he would have led the life of St. Giles; and there is a fine twang in the sarcastic question, "If all the circumstances and conditions of life had been reversed, would Madam, my Lady, have done better or been better than I, Another‡ Unfortunate?" Yet all this, contends the Reviewer, only means, when translated into less epigrammatic English, that if the Duchess of Silverspoon had been born and bred Sally Jones, she would

"I think I could be a good woman if I had five thousand a year," Miss Rebecca Sharp says.-Vanity Fair.

"Curio felt that if he continued a miserable clerk in Cumberland-market, he was shut out from a large sphere of social usefulness. In Chester-terrace he had ample scope for the exercise of every goodness. He chose the better part," etc. etc.-Saturday Review, vol. ii. p. 652.

In allusion to a letter in the Times, with the above signature.