st be impervious to
dulness; they must crush the artist within them to a powder. The new
people who have come bounding into politics and are now claiming their
share of the national inheritance are not orators by nature, and will
never become so by culture; but they mean business, and that is well.
Caleb Garth and not George Canning should be the model of the virtuous
politician of the future.

CONTEMPT OF COURT

The late Mr. Carlyle has somewhere in his voluminous but well-indexed
writings a highly humorous and characteristic passage in which he,
with all his delightful gusto, dilates upon the oddity of the scene
where a withered old sinner perched on a bench, quaintly attired in
red turned up with ermine, addresses another sinner in a wooden pew,
and bids him be taken away and hung by the neck until he is dead; and
how the sinner in the pew, instead of indignantly remonstrating with
the sinner on the bench, 'Why, you cantankerous old absurdity, what
are you about taking my life like that?' usually exhibits signs of
great depression, and meekly allows himself to be conducted to his
cell, from whence in due course he is taken and throttled according to
law.

This situation described by Carlyle is doubtless mighty full of
humour; but, none the less, were any prisoner at the bar to adopt
Craigenputtock's suggestion, he would only add to the peccadillo of
murder the grave offence of contempt of court, which has been defined
'as a disobedience to the court, an opposing or despising the
authority, justice, and dignity thereof.'

The whole subject of Contempt is an interesting and picturesque one,
and has been treated after an interesting and picturesque yet accurate
and learned fashion by a well-known lawyer, in a treatise[A] which
well deserves to be read not merely by the legal practitioner, but by
the student of constitutional law and the nice observer of our manners
and customs.

[Footnote A: _Contempt of Court, etc._ By J.F. Oswald, Q.C. London:
William Clowes and Sons, Limited.]

An ill-disposed person may exhibit contempt of court in divers
ways--for example, he may scandalize the the court itself, which may
be done not merely by the extreme measure of hurling missiles at the
presiding judge, or loudly contemning his learning or authority, but
by ostentatiously reading a newspaper in his presence, or laughing
uproariously at a joke made by somebody else. Such contempts,
committed as they are _in fac