symmetrical, and the whole facts embodied in
the two versions of the case, the huge whale
came labouring into court, towing behind it all
the subsidiary minnows. Equity Jove, sitting
aloft with a complete version of the case before
him, had only to thunder Presto! order for
sale, money paid—causa finita est!

Innocent anticipation! We are barely begun.
Counsel, astride on the back of his huge legal
monster, addresses a few observations to great
Jove aloft, who nods assent, and the labour of
months and years, the stalking of " parties," the
army of counsel for " parties," and the bales
of snowy briefs, all culminate in the driest and
purest of formalities. "Take the ordinary decree,"
chants Equity Jove, and the minor bewigged
divinities bob down into their seats again. It is
a happy thought, however, that every one is
before the court now, hitherto invisible to
Equity's naked eye.

Invigorated by this encouragement, and after
a decent interval, we start afresh, plunging
downwards into the Erebus of masters' offices. Into
that grateful arena, Irish Jarndyce takes his
whole apparatus of parties, notices, bulky paper
bales, and wigged spirits, and gets ready for a
protracted residence. The case has been
referred, and an "account" has to be taken; and
through many years, in those dim cells of equity,
still with no unseemly hurry, wigged spirits shall
square at each other over hostile figures and
discordant vouchers. When at last all things
are made square and taut, and Jarndyce emerges
to light and air, a long interval of many months
elapses, during which it is understood the
"master" is making up his "report."  After
say a nine months' incubation, it is discovered
that a monster white roll has been "laid." So
then, gathering up our parties and wigged spirits,
the great Jarndyce whale again comes blowing
and frothing into court. Every one is furnished
with clean new bales, exact copies of what had
been "laid" in the equity poultry-yard, shining,
dazzling bag furniture. Now we are in port,
and a sale is at hand. But here are shoals,
breakers, in the shape of "exceptions" to the
master's report—an obstructive system of fault-
finding; so we must needs back our monster
out of court as best we can. By-and-by we shall
come again with all our wiggery and fight the
battle of exeptions. Finally, we again appear,
and in a single sentence great Equity Jove
breathes his soft consent to a sale.

This was that fine old fruity full-bodied Equity,
of a rich nutty or knotty flavour, and fully one
hundred years in a bottle, which was drunk say thirty
years ago in Ireland. Nor yet let our English
broker hug himself for the purity of his own
Chancery liquor. The system was the same with
both, only through this load of Irish debt and
facile multiplicity of mortgage, the evil became
prominent and more conspicuous.

All this time a receiver was gorging on the
rents, costs were accumulating, tenants knowing
no certain master were decaying, and when the
hour of sale came, only the shells of the estate
remained.

With this complication of anthraxes spread
over the fair skin of the country, there was no
choice but to submit to the operation. The neat-
handed surgeons came. No grander
"demonstrator" could have been selected than Sir John
Romilly. The invention of this peculiar mode
of treatment has been claimed for Lord St.
Leonards and for Sir Robert Peel; but the idea
was too obvious not to have presented itself to
hundreds of unprofessional minds. It only
appeared too daring and even Quixotic for
practical purposes. However that might be,
in the month of April, eighteen hundred and
forty-nine, the Solicitor-General took his scalpel
in hand, and with one sharp sweeping cut
introduced his—bill. And by the twenty-eighth of
July of the same year, the operation was
successfully performed, and the lncumbered Estates
Act became law.

Not, however, without gloomy desponding
and loud and despairing protest. It was piteous
to hear the wail of the Irish peers, forecasting
their too certain fate from afar, and pleading
for territorial life—the very Girondins of the
senate. They had a horrid prescience that
they were marked for the earliest victims
of this new guillotine. There were some
whose estates, sunk beyond redemption in
incumbrances, pledged and pledged again for
half a million and more, lay helpless in the
nets of mortgage, judgments, costs, and
receivers. Yet to these noble persons, Chancery
had promised an agreeable and almost affluent
existence—for their lives at least; after them,
the deluge might set in when it pleased. Some
years after, when the executioners were weary
with their bloody work, one victim, smarting
under his wounds, came with frantic cries, and,
striking out wildly, told his griefs to his noble
friends. It was " the most disgraceful
system ever since courts had been invented!" It
was a nest of " the greatest robbery possible to
imagine." It was taken advantage of by " a set
of professional schemers" (euphuistic reference
to solicitors), who had "myrmidons"
up and down the length and breadth of the land.
It was not too much to say that the whole "was
a system of plunder unexampled." Alack, poor
peer!

But on this earlier consultation, when the
surgeons were waiting with their instruments,
the same victim was raving incoherently of
"robbery and confiscation." To him Lord
Langdale neatly rejoined, with an affected wonder
as to how such harsh terms could fit, what
was a payment of just debts? A novel and
unexpected, and yet at the same time disagreeable,
way of putting the thing. Complaint, too,
was made, that at the final stage an unhandsome
advantage was taken of the absence of
noble persons at their Irish estates, where they
were busy trampling out the embers of an
insurrection then overdue. The member for
Birmingham received it with positive rapture, "a
more beautiful explanation he had never heard."
But there were ravens abroad of those nights,
and raven notes. Mr. Newdegate prophesied