judgment in Smith v. Baker he speaks thus bluntly of the argument that a man who had voluntarily accepted certain risks, and had been injured, should not

recover:

It is said that to hold the plaintiff is not to recover, is to hold that a master may carry on his work in a dangerous way and damage his servant. I do so hold, if the servant is foolish enough to agree to it. This seems very cruel. But do not people go to see dangerous sports? Acrobats daily incur fearful risks, lion tamers and the like. Let us hold to the law. If we want to be charitable, gratify ourselves out of our own pockets.

Lord Bramwell was not a law reformer in the sense in which was Lord Westbury or Lord Langdale. He was never in the House of Commons, and he had little time, when at the Bar or on the Bench, for constructing amendments of the law which he administered. But he was no superstitious admirer of the system under which he grew up. He had learned much from Bentham. The services of that reformer are acknowledged in a passage in the report of the Common Law Commissioners, no doubt from Mr. Bramwell's pen. He had as much to do as any one with the introduction of the principle of limited liability; the word "limited" after the name of every company under the Company Acts of 1862 and 1866 was a recommendation of Lord Bramwell. He also carried out several valuable, though unobtrusive, improvements in commercial law.

Music and political economy were his favorite recreations. He had read Adam Smith and Ricardo, and he stuck to the doctrines he had learned from them. He did not believe that political economy came to an end some time about 1873, when Mr. John Stuart Mill died. "Political economy has been called a dismal science. It has been called inhuman and unfeeling. same epithets might as well be applied to Euclid's Elements or to a treatise on brewing or baking." He would have no tampering with free trade. Bimetallism, he said, no person had ever been

The

able to explain to him or any one else. With the over-refinements of some of the later developments of political economy he had no patience. To him, as indeed to most thinking men of his generation, the question of questions in politics was the true province of the State. His answer was clear. "Please govern me as little as possible," was his daily petition. He was not in favor of municipalizing everything, and he looked forward with no delight to "Liberal lamplighters and Conservative turncocks." "Socialism will never do until we are honest as the bees." "Hands off; away with your meddlesome inspectors and grandmotherly statutes," was the refrain of most of his pamphlets. He did not argue the cause of Individualism with the precision of Humboldt, Spencer or Mill. The strength of the advocates of an extension of the functions of the State is that society is not a crowd of units, but a true organism; that the whole community is a unit; that the parts are interdependent; that strict adherence to laissez faire resembles a state of war among the organs of the body. Of arguments or analogies drawn from biology in favor of modern Socialism I can recall no trace in Bramwell's writings or talk. But no one pointed out more clearly than he did the perils from Socialism to things which he valued above all others: self-reliance, and freedom to think, act and speak, without interference by Parliaments or inspectors.

Against an unreasoning rush to State Socialism no one fought more sturdily than Lord Bramwell. But he, who was always ready to write a pamphlet for the "Property and Liberty Defence Association," was the author of the aphorism that every good man had at one time been a Socialist. He owned to "a sort of sneaking liking for Socialism," and could write, "I have no superstitious reverence for the institution of separate or private property. Show me that its abolition would be for the greater good, and I would vote for it, letting down the private possessor gently." No one in the discussion on the nationalization of land put

the case against it more tersely or candidly:

Oh, they say the land should be nationalized because it is God's gift... Are not the ploughs and the harrows and These things generally God's gifts? things are given to us, and the skill to fashion them; and if the land is to be nationalized for that reason, why not clothes, and why not labor? Why is not labor to be nationalized, and why should we not get straight into the thick of Socialism at once? This is what this argument points to, and to this alone. I confess I have for my part a sort of sneaking liking for the doctrine of Socialists. One can but I wish we could have it. sometimes feel how much better off one is than the man who gets a few shillings a week, and works hard for it. One would like to see something better; but the truth is we are not good enough for Socialism. If we were as honest as bees, and all worked our best for the general good, Socialism would be a possibility. It is not a possibility until we are. The best thing under the circumstances is to let each other alone. Let each man add to the general pile-I think that is the expression of the Americans-all he can; and then we shall have a larger pile to divide for the general good.

In polemics he met courtesy with courtesy, and, it must be added, blows with blows. Here is how he disposed of Mr. Henry George's theories (Nationalization of Land, p. 3):

It (Progress and Poverty) is a mischievous book, for it holds out expectations that cannot be realized, and proposes their realization by measures most injurious. It is a foolish book, for, though Mr. George is anything but a foolish man, his ingenuity is so perverse that his book is filled with foolishness. It is the most arrogant, self-sufficient performance ever seen. No one was right before Mr. George, and some of the best, greatest, and noblest men who ever lived are spoken of with contempt as blunderers and evil disposed. It is also a book which one would think was the work of an ill-conditioned man. According to Mr. George nobody is mistaken and honest. Robbers and robbery are his favorite words, and he seems to

ress:

Mr. George might just as well say that the sugar hogshead at the grocer's door has brought forth the flies and the ragged children that are about it. Did it never occur to Mr. George that the large cities and places where the locomotive has been, and where wealth is to be found, attract the idle, the weak, the dishonest and thriftless? Does he not know that the reason they are not found where the Anglo-Saxon is just beginning a race of progress is because the existence of Anglo-Saxon vigor is unpalatable to them? Mr. George makes the common mistake of those who boast the virtues of the rural districts. Why is there not a professional pickpocket in the small village? Because there is no scope for his trade; there are not pockets enough for his industry. Why is there no tramp, no beggar? Because there are not enough persons of whom to beg.

Lord Bramwell's tastes and pleasures were of the simplest kind. He was a good musician. The musical evenings at his house were pleasant, and he himself took delight in joining in a glee or part song. He loved to travel, and had seen no small part of the world. Of late years, when the sittings of the courts were over, or as soon as he had returned from circuit, he would go to his house at Four Elms, near Edenbridge. Always an early riser, he would, except in midwinter, be by seven o'clock at breakfast, with one or more of his dogs stretched on the hearthrug beside him. In an hour or so he would be strolling round his garden, looking at his hothouses, his chickens, and the ducklings of a tufted breed peculiar to the neighboring stream, a tributary of the Medway. A game or two of billiards, of which he was fond, or an hour spent at the piano or over a volume, would help to pass the morning. In the afternoon came perhaps a drive up Toy's Hill and a halt to take

a long look at the wide expanse of beautifully wooded landscape. Perhaps he walked through the lanes and fields with his favorite dogs. Few men knew not only his own county, but rural England better. On circuit he had always made it a point to take long walks, and to see everything worth seeing near an assize town. He was particularly fond of swimming. When he went the Northern Circuit for the first time in the summer of 1856, he and his brother judge, Mr. Justice Willes, spent a Sunday in climbing Helvellyn, and in the course of the day bathed four or five times. The local newspapers denounced the judges for not attending church in the usual way; and the baron was with difficulty persuaded not to have it out with the newspapers. All the cottagers about Four Elms knew him. He was their friend and counsellor, and to him they looked for assistance in difficulties. Neighbors would appeal to him to settle knotty questions as to fixtures or boundaries; and perhaps part of the day would be spent in a drive or walk to view the place in dispute. One who knew him well, speaking of his fondness for billiards, adds that he "would put down his cue in the middle of a break to listen to the sorrows of a poor neighbor." In the evening he would read the Times, and the hours would slip by as he played on the piano the greater part of a favorite opera, until, by half past nine or ten he retired for the night, a long night, for in his busiest days he took nine hours' sleep. Like most men of vigorous intellect, he read widely. He knew the Bible as few Englishmen did. At seventy-three he mastered Spanish, and read Cervantes in the original. Occasionally, though not often, he, who as a judge was, to use his own saying, "a magistrate in every county in England,” attended the local sessions when it was known that a particularly difficult point was to be raised before the justices.

Open-hearted and open-handed to the unpretending, ready to spend hours and write endless letters in helping to redress a poor neighbor's wrongs, he

could be frigidly dignified to pretenders. He had a strong aversion to promiscuous shaking of hands, and those who knew him were often amused by watching his efforts to avoid contact with a too effusive admirer. In later years honest, sincere, unpretending discussion was his greatest delight. Not even Dr. Johnson took more pleasure in full, unconstrained, well-informed talk. With the youngest barrister he would discuss a legal point in the same way as he would with a brother member of the Court of Appeal. He needed no robes or wig to protect his dignity. It was said of him that, even when a judge of the Court of Appeal, his sight was so good that he could perceive a County Court judge many yards off.

Legal distinction is sometimes bought at a great price. It may mean the shrivelling up of the best faculties, penury as to true knowledge, limited vision, narrow sympathies. Distinction so purchased was not Lord Bramwell's. Altogether a full, useful and real life was his-a life bringing in a rich harvest of friends, and accumulating as it went on the memory of things well done. Happy are the singleminded, they who have few doubts, and yet honestly have sought the truth, who have always found their duty to their hand and done it with diligence. Such happiness was his; few had more of it.

JOHN MACDonell.

From Macmillan's Magazine. THE MAN PEPYS.

The perennial attractiveness of fiction is due in no small degree to the gratification we all derive from being able to view the private actions of others, while ourselves unobserved. In the ordinary way of existence we see men and women only in part. We know they are not quite what they seem, and certainly not what they wish us to think them. Offer to the normal man the chance of seeing another in his most intimate privacy, and he will seize it with alacrity, experiencing

more genuine delight in the revelation than if he were unearthing an unsuspected treasure in his garden. Something of this pleasure we find in reading fiction; the amount of it is a measure of the writer's skill in his craft. For, so far as an author in describing what his personages do can convey simultaneously a clear idea of why they do it, to that extent they become real and engage our interest. Wherever the description of actions is not informed by their essential motive the characters may in a way be interesting, but they are not real; or if by supplementary disquisition it is sought to prove them real, they are not interesting. This imbuing of the deed with the motive is the true secret of story telling; it flatters the careful reader with a sense of his powers of apprehension, and pleasurably surprises the cursory reader by the absence of anything to skip.

And if this be the highest achievement of a writer of stories, what shall be said of a man who has attained to it in regard to himself, who has set down in a book the actions of his own life, without morbid reflection or analytic apology, clear, simple, essential? The thing would appear impossible if it were not here before us in the diary of Samuel Pepys, now that the document is printed for the first time in its entirety. That it is here there can be no manner of doubt, and it is perfectly certain that the thing is unique and convincing. The world is not poor in the matter of autobiographical writings. Montaigne, Cellini, Rousseau, and in a sense Goethe, are all notable men 'who have taken us into their privacy and discoursed to us of their deeds. But, however distinct their methods, they have this in common: to us who read, and upon whom their eye was while they wrote, they are constructing rather than revealing themselves. The essential truth of what they choose to tell us is adulterated by the consideration that they are producing a set of impressions; they select and adjust; their actions and motives are

set

placed in fanciful, or at least artistic, relations with other motives and actions. Further, they consciously carry along with them a set of moral problems; in greater or less degree the immensities cloud their narratives; and they are all the time performing, as by anticipation, the work of final judgment. If Samuel Pepys had not kept a diary, or, having kept it, if he had burned it before he died, as seems to have been his intention, it might have been contended that no man could write of himself save in this compound way. The complete diary comes with proof to the contrary. The historical matter remains valuable as before; the official records and personages are as curious as ever, but by virtue of the additional matter the centre of interest is changed, and for the first time Pepys himself stands forth as the principal topic, clear, unmistakable, true. As we read there is forced upon us the conviction of a man painted as never man was painted before, by a method the very simplicity of which conceals its almost miraculous success.

Pepys's official position was that of clerk of the acts on the Navy Board; when he commenced this diary he made himself clerk of quite another set of acts,-his own. The qualities of precision, orderliness, and perspicacity which made him a successful administrator also made him a more than successful diarist; but what is chiefly remarkable is that the method which served him so well for his office is made by him to suffice for his own deeds. So far as the accuracy of the record is concerned he, speaking of himself, might have been an official abstraction, an impersonal item of humanity represented as I. For the first and only time in a printed book the genuine I may be looked upon as merely a cognomen, carrying with it no apologetic or judicial function. It simply equals Samuel Pepys, whom you may have heard of as of anybody else. He speaks of himself, what he does, and sometimes what he thinks, as if he were a disinterested

observer, without distortion or complication; there you have him, the whole of him, nothing omitted—the entire gamut of a living man from his stomach to what he imagined to be his conscience. By this diary Pepys has recommended himself variously as vivacious, artless, a delightful gossip, and so forth; but these terms are altogether misapplied, for they assume the relations of an author and his readers, between Pepys and those who now peruse his diary. They take for granted the self-consciousness of a writer with his eye on a public, the selection of phrases, the adjustment of incidents. But there is in fact nothing such. It is abundantly evident that Pepys wrote this daily record for himself only. He had a purpose, though what it was must remain doubtful; and he was impelled by a motive, which is to be found in the nature of the man himself, if we could but correlate it therewith, and realize it clearly. To do so fully would be to accomplish the most difficult thing in heaven or earth; but Pepys has supplied us more amply and more intelligently with the means of doing so than any other man who has written of himself. The diary is the work of one who evidently conceived that just as he was accustomed to record in succinct memoranda the day's transactions at the Navy Board, so he could set down in a brief essential abstract the act and spirit of his particular life. Here in short you have a précis of existence as it was to one human being, a précis of such surpassing clearness and simplicity that it seems strange its wonderful success should not earlier have brought about the publication of the entire diary. But now if there be any readers, as there must be many, to whom the unfeigned disclosure of one authentic human being is of more interest than the dubious operations of masses of men called history, here indeed they have spread for them a regal feast. Doubtless such readers will have to bring with them both sympathy and imagination. Read currently a page of the diary seems the barest recital

of facts; but it is far more; it is a revelation of self that makes the sympathetic reader shrink as from his own ghost. The shorthand in which he wrote his journal is as nothing to the rapid condensed stenography of his self-exposition. Let any one who thinks the method easy attempt to do the like by himself. He will take four pages to Pepys's one, and cumber the narrative with such explanations and apologies, allowing that he has the courage to deal with himself as Pepys did, which is allowing much, that the result will be mere mental fog. It is nothing to the point to say that Pepys was not a complex man. He was a man like the rest of us; he did the things we do, thought many of the things we think, and in dealing with what to him was real he conveys with inevitable force the measure of truth which that represents. Many lives are not so complex as they are confused; there was no confusion in Mr. Pepys's vision, and none in his ideas.

He owed his official position to Sir Edward Montagu, afterwards Earl of Sandwich. In time he proved eminently fitted for it; but observe how he sets forth his own qualifications: "This place I got by chance, and my Lord did give it me by chance, neither he nor I thinking it to be of the worth that he and I find it to be. Never since I was a man in the world was I ever so great a stranger to public affairs as I now am, having not read a new book or anything like it, or enquiring after any news, or what the Parliament do, or in any wise how things go." If any one had written this of Mr. Pepys it would be held to be a severe indictment; that he should write it of himself, voluntarily, for nothing, is a thing as remarkable as it is rare. Humanity does not care to sum itself up in this way. This is the kind of consideration it puts out of sight and willingly forgets. Samuel Pepys sets it down with quite unfeeling precision. He has no weakness on his own account; it is a fact, that is all. Had he proceeded by way of cheap moralizing, we might have