made by Mr. Perrins being untrue, he could not
inquire into the materiality of it. Other judges
extricated themselves from the difficulty by thinking
that the statement was not false, but insufficient,
which was quite a different matter. Mr.
Justice Hill apparently contented himself by
asking a few pertinent questions. "Is there any
statement," he said, "or allegation, contained in
the proposal or declaration, which is untrue?
The party is asked, amongst other things, his
name, residence, profession, or occupation. He
answers, 'Isaac Thomas Perrins, Esq., Saltley
Hall, Warwickshire.' Every word in the answer
is true, there is nothing on the face of it which is
shown to be false, but it is an imperfect statement,
inasmuch as it does not go fully into the occupation
of the party. Suppose a party who was a
wine-merchant and a banker described himself as
wine-merchant only, could it be said that it
contained an untrue statement, and did not fulfil the
requirements of the condition?"

There are other points touching the very common
law of life insurance which must be deferred.

           SLOW COACHES.

THE age we live in will not tolerate Slow
Coaches. The age insists upon rapidity in its
locomotion, and "Slow coach" has become a
term of derision.

I often endeavour—remembering many slow
coaches that have disappeared in my brief span,
and carrying the knowledge, obtained from
books, of many more—to ascertain how many
chariots, two-wheelers and four-wheelers, yet
linger and deserve the uncomplimentary epithets
of "slow coaches." On every succeeding Derby
Day some few slow coaches still make their appearance
among the tearing barouches, the skurrying
mail-phaetons, the easy-gliding broughams, and
the mountainous, yet mobile, four-in-hands, full
of irresistible impetus—the Life Guards, the
Milhaud cuirassiers of the coaching world.
There is never a stoppage at Kennington Common
or at Cheam Gate but the van of some incorrigibly
Conservative old slow coach appears—a
four-wheeler generally, with hardened horses,
bent on having their own way, and a perverse
driver who won't adapt himself to circumstances,
and who will look upon the Derby of 1860 as
the immediate successor to the Derby of 1830,
when he first drove to the pleasant Downs of
Epsom. Such obstinate men are, curiously
enough, often theoretically right in their
charioteering, and adhere inflexibly to the rule of
the road. What is the rule of the road? It has
explicit existence and cannot be termed Lex non
scripta, for it has been codified in a stanza; and
a late celebrated barrister owed, it is said, much
of his success in getting verdicts in running-down
cases, to his dexterity in discovering the
exact moment when the jury's ears might be
tickled with a poetical quotation, and the
promptitude with which, he gave them the vehicular
dictum:

  The Rule of the Road is as plain as one's hand—
     T' explain it I need not be long:
  If you keep to the left you are sure to be right;
      If you keep to the right you are wrong.

Shrewd attorneys' and barristers' clerks in
court could always tell, at a certain stage of the
running-down case, and from a peculiar twitching
about the facial muscles of the advocate,
when the famous rule was coming. The jury always
liked it, and grinned in their box. The bench
liked it. Baron Owlet, though he had heard the
wise saw a hundred times before, used to murmur
the doggrel, with a pleased chuckle, after the
speaker. Wheeler, the puisne judge, invariably
entered the Rule of the Road in his notes, as
a modern instance. It is said that Mr. Jehu,
K.C., would never have been Chief Justice of the
Common Pleas, but for the Rule of the Road.

When, the Derby week is over, the slow
coaches disappear, to turn up, sometimes it may
be, at small provincial race-courses; but the
most extensive resuscitation of slow coaches
within my remembrance was on an occasion
within the last ten years, when the London,
cabmen struck for fares, and when the recesses
of the remotest livery-stables, and the penetralia
of the most antediluvian coach-houses were rummaged
for vehicles to replace the recalcitrant
Hansoms and four-wheelers. It is believed that
the celebrated "one-horse shay," concerning
whose trip to Brighton the popular comic song
was written, made its appearance on the eventful
morning of the strike. Flies, glass-coaches,
sociables, yellow post-chaises, dennets, stanhopes,
désobligeantes, pill-boxes, landaus, and curricles
of weird and ghostly look, of sad and old-world
form, and driven by ancient men of sour mien and
costume out of date, fretted through the wondering
streets. Men whispered that Queen Anne was
not dead, after all; that Frederick Barbarossa
had awakened from his century sleep among
the Hartz mountains, and, finding his beard
grown through the table, had cried, " It is
time!" and that Rip van Winkle had come
down from his game of ninepins with the Dutch
slow coaches of the Schuylkills. There were
rumours afloat, that Cinderella's pumpkin carriage
had been seen in Regent-street; that the
wild Prince of Wales had driven Perdita
Robinson on a high perch round the Ring in
Hyde Park; that Peagreen Haines and Romeo
Coates had reappeared, conducting curricles
in the shape of cockle-shells; that the Exeter
flying coach, and the York Icarus, which
took six days to perform their journeys, were
plying between Sloane-street and the Bank;
and that, from the Coach and Horses tavern
in Conduit-street, was seen to start a phantom
GIG, the immortal emblem of human respectability,
drawn by a spectral horse, and containing
some ghostly pork-chops and the top-booted
apparition of Thurtell, on his way to
Gill's Hill-lane, to murder that Mr. William
Weare of the ballad, who dwelt in Lyon's Inn.
The cabmen's strike was soon over, however,
and the slow coaches disappeared as suddenly
and as strangely as they had come.