follow the law. "With regard to the opinion
expressed by Lord St. Leonards," said my Lord
Campbell, in the case referred to, "his book is
a most valuable publication, and I pay respect
to it; if it were proposed to make it law, I might
be ready to support it, but it is only the opinion
of a Iearned judge, and it is contrary to a solemn
decision, and my own opinion."

To go back to the question of repair when
damage has resulted from tempest. If the
covenant be general, the repair, as we have already
said, will fall upon the tenant. Lord Kenyon
lays this down very distinctly, in an old case
where a person who had entered into a general
covenant to repair a bridge, and it was
completely destroyed by an unusually high flood,
was compelled at his own cost to rebuild the
whole structure. "Where a party, by his own
contract," said Lord Kenyon, on giving his
decision in the case, "creates a duty or charge
upon himself, he is bound to make it good if he
may, because he might have guarded against it by
his contract." So also, in another old case, the
same principle of law is extended to a house
burnt by lightning, or destroyed by enemies.

True, the law as found in a statute of George
the Third's reign, asserts that no action for
damages can be brought against any person in
whose house a fire shall accidentally begin; but
this statute especially exempts express
agreements between landlord and tenant, and the
general covenant to repair has been held to come
within this exception.

Most probably Mr. Blank would discover
in his lease that he was prohibited from carrying
on particular trades or businesses, or it
might be, "noxious trades" only. Let us see
how far a few reported cases would guide him as
to what trades or business he might or might not
indulge in.

In one instance we find when a tenant
covenanted not to carry on a trade or business, he
was prohibited from keeping a school, which if
not a trade was held to be a business, and one,
too, which might be productive of great annoyance.

"I own I have no doubt," said my Lord
Ellenborough, who delivered judgment in the
matter, "that this is a business within the
meaning of the covenant, and one which is likely
to create as much annoyance as can be predicated
of almost any business. It surely cannot be
contended," he continued, "that the noise and
tumult which sixty boys create, are not a
considerable annoyance, as well to the neighbourhood
as to the house, from which any landlord
may fairly be supposed to be desirous of
redeeming his premises; and the exhibition, too,
of the boys may be said somewhat to resemble
a show of business within the meaning of the
covenant."

Though prohibited from keeping a school,
however, Mr. Blank might safely either devote his
energies to the diminution of madness, or to the
safe-keeping of mad people. In other words, he
is at liberty, so far as the law has decided the
matter, to keep a public-house or a lunatic
asylum, although having covenanted not to
carry on an offensive trade. In this instance,
where the privilege was accorded to the tenant
of keeping a lunatic asylum, he had covenanted
not to use or exercise any trade or business
of butcher, slaughterman, melter of tallow,
tallow-chandler, tobacco-pipe-maker, soap-boiler,
or any other offensive trade, and the keeping of
a lunatic asylum was deemed not to be a trade.
"Every trade," said Lord Denman, "is a
business, but every business is not a trade. To
answer that description, it must be conducted
by buying and selling, which the business of
keeping a lunatic asylum is not."

Again: Mr. Blank's lease would, probably,
contain a covenant from him not to underlet
the premises of which he becomes tenant.
This will not prohibit him (let us console him
by stating) from taking lodgers, for my Lord
Ellenborough has said "that such a covenant
can only extend to such underletting as a
license might be expected to be applied for, and
who ever heard of a license for a landlord to
take in a lodger?"

Then, for the landlord's sake, would Mr.
Blank's lease contain a power for that gentleman
to distrain for rent, supposing Blank to be
behindhand in his payment of that inevitably
recurring nuisance. We know that the landlord may
seize Mr. Blank's household treasures for this
purpose, but how much further may he go than
that? "Whatever goods and chattels," says
no less an authority than Mr. Justice Blackstone,
"the landlord finds upon the premises,
whether they in fact belong to the tenant or a
stranger, are distrainable by him for rent. For
otherwise," proceeds the same learned judge,
"a door would be open to infinite frauds upon
the landlord; and the stranger has his remedy
over by action on this case against the tenant,
if by the tenant's default the chattels are
distrained, so that he cannot render them when
called upon."

So far the broad principle of this law; but
there are some few exceptions. Let us glance
at a few of the more noteworthy of them.
The goods of a stranger lying at an inn cannot
be seized, provided the inn be used as a
temporary lodging. If the stranger be a
permanent occupant, we are afraid that his chattels
would not be exempt. Again: such of the
goods of a stranger as are upon the premises
of a gentleman in difficulties and the hands
of the bailiff, for the purposes of trade, are
exempt from seizure. Cloth at a tailor's, for
example; a horse at a farrier's; and, so Mr. Justice
Williams has ruled it, books at a bookbinder's.
Brewers' casks, however, left at an inn until
the contents were consumed, have been held by
the Court of Exchequer to be distrainable, "If
they had been left," said Lord Abinger, "at a
cooper's for repair, the case would have been
different." Horses and carriages standing at
livery are not exempt, as witness what Lord
Truro has said upon the subject.

"The question in all these cases," said that
learned judge, "is, whether the goods are placed