"I don't care for the town," said J. Mellows,
when I complimented him on the sanitary
advantages it may or may not possess;
"I wish I had never seen the town!"

"You don't belong to it, Mr. Mellows?"

"Belong to it!" repeated Mellows. "If I
didn't belong to a better style of town than this,
I'd take and drown myself in a pail." It then
occurred to me that Mellows, having so little to
do, was habitually thrown back on his internal
resources—by which I mean the Dolphin's
cellar.

"What we want," said Mellows, pulling off
his hat, and making as if he emptied it of the
last load of Disgust that had exuded from his
brain, before he put it on again for another load;
"what we want, is a Branch. The Petition for
the Branch Bill is in the coffee-room. Would
you put your name to it? Every little helps."

I found the document in question stretched
out flat on the coffee-room table by the aid of
certain weights from the kitchen, and I gave it
the additional weight of my uncommercial signature.
To the best of my belief, I bound myself
to the modest statement that universal traffic,
happiness, prosperity, and civilisation, together
with unbounded national triumph in competition
with the foreigner, would infallibly flow from
the Branch.

Having achieved this constitutional feat, I
asked Mr. Mellows if he could grace my dinner
with a pint of good wine? Mr. Mellows thus
replied:

"If I couldn't give you a pint of good wine,
I'd—there!— I'd take and drown myself in a
pail. But I was deceived when I bought this
business, and the stock was higgledy-piggledy,
and I haven't yet tasted my way quite through
it with a view to sorting it. Therefore, if
you order one kind and get another, change
till it comes right. For what," said Mellows,
unloading his hat as before, " what would you
or any gentleman do, if you ordered one kind of
wine and was required to drink another? Why,
you'd (and naturally and properly, having the
feelings of a gentleman), you'd take and drown
yourself in a pail!"

CONSOLIDATE THE STATUTES!

WE are accustomed to dilate upon our English
law a little boastfully; its magnificence, its
grandeur, its nobleness, its admirable adaptability
of means to end, which end it reaches,
in spite of a few overlying cobwebs, whose
existence is magnanimously conceded. We boast
how, of all systems in this world of systems, it
does the fullest and completest justice, though
sometimes (again handsomely conceded) working
a little cumbrously in the process; how
it is open to the poor man as well as to the
rich man, with perhaps, if anything, a greater
degree of openness for the poor man; without,
of course, taking any heed of the remark of
Home Tooke to the Chief Justice, reminding
him of that splendid platitude, "So is
the London Tavern, my lord!" We do admit
a certain old fashion in details, and a rather
halting gait in certain particulars; but it is the
old fashion of reverence, of majesty, of antiquity,
which we shall ever cherish and tolerate fondly.
This, in short, is the system which is held to be
as nearly perfect as anything here below can be
—which has, in short, been named complacently
the Perfection of Human Reason. Wretched
foreign countries have been furnished with
certain miserable pretences— narrow meagre
tyrannous laws, shaped exactly as might
be expected from foreigneering principles,
and expounded by officials dressed like the
notaries who sign contracts in operas, and wear
Caps of Maintenance. That clap-trap code
Napoleon we smile at, as a sort of true Frenchman's
theatrical device a flashy affectation
of simplicity, for all practical purposes worthless,
merely meant to impose on other countries.
As for Italy, Germany, and the general " ruck"
of nations, they have only a system of police,
varnished over into a sort of sham legislation.

For so absolute a perfection, however, it is a
little indistinct, and, in its geography, a good
deal uncertain. The intelligent foreign jurist,
imbued with some barbarous theories gathered in
his own district, will be apt to associate brevity,
simplicity, and a certain easy accessibility, with
his poor notion of perfection. But graver
difficulties will naturally arise as to how this
Perfection is to be brought before him. Her
dimensions are so tremendous, and, worse than
all, so straggling and irregular, that no tolerable
view can be obtained of her proportions
save under the conditions of a good series of
years' study. Perhaps the readiest course would
be to take the intelligent foreigner into one of
the huge law libraries, and bid him look round;
for that the Perfection hovers somewhere
indistinctly in all that immensity. It must be taken
all in all without subtraction; a portion would
be unfaithful, and give only an incomplete view.
But let his eyes range from shelf to shelf; let
him admire in secret wonder those huge rows of
folios, those regiments of the line drawn up in
regular order and discipline, and to be numbered
by thousands; and let us look on with a secret
complacency while he is thus overpowered by
the immensity and dignity of our Perfection of
Human Wisdom.

Still this majestic spectacle, of itself, will
scarcely help the foreign jurist to a comprehension
of the theory or interior structure
of our glorious system. Where is he to
begin? It is scarcely fair to point to any
special work, which is no more than a brick
of the universal Babel. We must offer him all,
and not a fragment: he must have the whole
library or none. Stay, a happy thought occurs.
There are the works of a certain ripe lawyer,
who wrote famous commentaries on the laws of
England, in four octavo volumes. Here is the
key to the whole. Here is the essence in com-
pact form, or compressed legal cake, exactly the
thing for the intelligent foreigner. We take
them down rejoicing, put them into his hands,