conference and read papers
full of quaint things and odd memories. What, for example, can be more
amusing than Mr. Cowell's reminiscences of forty years' library work
in Liverpool, of the primitive days when a youthful Dicky Sam (for so
do the inhabitants of that city call themselves) mistook the _Flora of
Liverpool_ for a book either about a ship or a heroine? He knows
better now. And what shall we say of the Liverpool brushmaker who, at
a meeting of the library committee, recited a poem in praise of woman,
containing the following really magnificent line?--

'The heart that beats fondest is found in the stays.'

There is nothing in Roscoe or Mrs. Hemans (local bards) one half so
fine. Long may librarians live and flourish! May their salaries
increase, if not by leaps and bounds, yet in steady proportions. Yet
will they do well to remember that books are not everything.

LAWYERS AT PLAY

That dreary morass, that Serbonian bog, the Bacon-Shakespeare
controversy, has been lately lit up as by the flickering light of a
will-o'-the-wisp, by the almost simultaneous publication of an
imaginary charge delivered to an equally imaginary jury by a judge of
no less eminence than the late Lord Penzance (that tough Erastian) and
of the still bolder _jeu d'esprit_, _A Report of the Trial of an Issue
in Westminster Hall_, June 20, 1627, which is the work of the
unbridled fancy of His Honour Judge Willis, late Treasurer of the
Inner Temple, and a man most intimately acquainted with the literature
of the seventeenth century.

Neither production of these playful lawyers, clothed though they be in
the garb of judicial procedure, is in the least likely to impress the
lay mind with that sense of 'impartiality' or 'indifference' which is
supposed to be an attribute of justice, or, indeed, with anything
save the unfitness of the machinery of an action at law for the
determination of any matter which invokes the canons of criticism and
demands the arbitrament of a well-informed and lively taste.

Lord Penzance, who favours the Baconians, made no pretence of
impartiality, and says outright in his preface that his readers 'must
not expect to find in these pages an equal and impartial leaning of
the judge alternately to the case of both parties, as would, I hope,
be found in any judicial summing-up of the evidence in a real judicial
inquiry.' And, he adds, 'the form of a summing-up is only adopted for
convenience, but it is i