angusta domi to blush unseen. There are few
respectable public places of assembly in London,
and private party giving is such an expensive
affair, that prudent people, even among the
higher of the middle classes, seldom venture to
indulge in it. Now, club balls need cost nothing
but the light and music, which, divided among
many members, would amount to scarcely five
shillings a year additional on the subscriptions
of each member. Full-dress must be rigidly
prohibited. I venture to predict that in a very
short time a marked improvement would be
visible in the morals, manners, and habits of our
young men, with no small advantage to the
happiness of many a house now too dull and
cheerless.

THE STATUTE-BOOK.

The forty quarto volumes of dry and solid
law which compose what is popularly called The
Statute-book, present at a first glance few points
of attraction to the general reader. However,
should we not be deterred by superficial impediments,
and should we be induced to dive beneath
a very unpromising surface, we shall, especially
among the earlier statutes, meet with many valuable
illustrations of history, and many choice
little pictures of the social life of our ancestors.

If we have been accustomed to derive our
ideas of the times of Henry the Fourth, from
Shakespeare's delineation, we may study as a
commentary on that well-known text a description
from a contemporary statute, which informs us
that many of the king's liege subjects were then
daily beaten, wounded, imprisoned, and maimed,
and then had their tongues cut out, or their eyes
put out, in order that by this barbarous means
difficulties might be put in the way of convicting
the perpetrators of the offence of felony. Again,
if we want a Clerk of Oxenford of the fourteenth
century, we shall do well not to rely implicitly
on the pleasing sketch of Chaucer, but to refer
to the rough-and-ready picture drawn some few
years later by a statute of Henry the Fifth.
This act tells us that " several scholars and clerks
of the University of Oxenford, unknown, armed
and arrayed to make war, have often ousted and
disseized persons of their lands and tenements
in the counties of Oxford, Berks, and Bucks,
and also have chased with dogs and greyhounds
in divers warrens, parks, and forests, and taken
deer, hares, and rabbits, menacing at the same
time those who are the keepers of the same of
their lives; and also, by the strong hand, have
taken clerks convicted of felony by due process
of law out of the custody of the ordinary, and
suffered them to go at large." These views of
society might be coloured to a very high tone
by extracts relative to the oppression of the
feudal era, the exactions and peculations of officials,
especially of the king's purveyors, and the
frauds and arbitrary dealings of the nobles.

Some curious little tricks are recorded in
relation to the passing of some of these early
statutes. Amongst these may be mentioned
King Edward the Third's unkingiy and inglorious
" Dissimulavimus." In the fifteenth year
of this reign, statutes were passed whose effect
seems to have been to increase the power of
parliament, and to abridge that of the king.
The king's consent having been obtained by the
influence of the ruling faction, against his
secret wishes, a few months afterwards he
thought it not beneath his dignity to repeal
the former enactments in these words. Dissimulavimus:
" We dissimuled in the premises by
protestation of revocation of the said statute,
if indeed it should proceed, to eschew the
danger which by the deriving of the same we
feared to come, forasmuch as the said parliament
otherwise had been without despatching
anything in discord dissolved (which God forbid),
and the said pretended ordinance we
permitted then to be sealed." In plain English:
" I dissembled, endeavoured to save my
conscience by a protest, made promises to avoid
unpleasant consequences, obtained my ends,
and now laugh at the credulity of those who
imagined a king's word was inviolable." King
Edward, in the preamble of this statute,
expressed great jealousy of the prerogatives of his
crown—he surely was very careless of one of its
highest.

The system of proceeding in parliament by
petition, the ancient representative of the modern
bill, left open the door for much chicanery
in the enactment of the statute laws. When
the commons were anxious to get a grievance
redressed, they presented a petition to the king,
setting forth their wants. This petition was
entered on the parliament-roll, together with
the king's answer: which, by the way, was not
given in plain English, but in a rigmarole of
Norman-French. If he assented to the prayer
of the petition, he said, the king wills it; if
he refused it, he said he would consider about
it. After the entry of the act on the parliament-roll,
another process had to be gone
through. It was then handed to the judges, to
put into the form of a law and enter on the
statute-roll; but as the commons were not
present when this last process was effected, we
can readily see how by a few strokes of the pen
the effect of the original petition might be greatly
changed, so that the promoters of the measure
would be quite astonished when they beheld
their metamorphosed offspring finally issue to
the world as a perfect law. The instances in
which this hocus-pocus was practised are said
to have been very numerous, the most salient
one being the case of the statute of the 36th of
Edward the Third, when the commons obtained
a great triumph, as they thought, over the
pedants and interested parties of the day, by
getting it enacted that all the pleadings in the
law courts should be practised in English
instead of in Norman-French, which the majority
of the suitors did not understand. This good
intention was defeated in great measure, by
the interpolation, by the judges, of the words,
"and that they be entered and inrolled in Latin."
It was not until the second year of Henry the
Fifth that the commons, upon a very strong