poare Exhausted Being was panting for a cool Sip of Ice water as the ox pant at the Water Brook. So did we hope there will be a change."
It would be interesting to know if the Wrong Boy was summarily deposed from the wrong place in answer to this prayer, but history is silent no less as to his fate than as to that of the "brit"-eyed girl of dark ginger cake Collor.
BOOK-TALK.
LORD CAMPBELL—was it not?—once wrote a book to prove that Shakespeare, from the internal evidence of his dramas, must have been an accomplished lawyer. The book is naturally highly prized by the advocates of the Baconian theory. It is true the anti-Baconians hold that Bacon never could have written the dramas, because they are full of legal mistakes which might call a blush to the cheek of even an attorney's clerk. But this only emphasizes the great truth that if Bacon did not write the dramas he ought to have done so, just as he ought to have survived to write the modern novels. Only a man who has taken all knowledge to be his province could be fully equipped as a dramatist in Shakespeare's time or a novelist in ours. Science, philosophy, theology, medicine, law, should be at the fingers' ends of writers whose plots are continually bringing them face to face with the minutiæ of those sciences. It cannot please the author of the last new novel to learn that his pet clergyman has betrayed signal ignorance of the religion he professes, that his judge has made rulings contrary to all law, that his heroine never could have died of the disease with which he has afflicted her, but is still existing somewhere in cloud-land as an interesting valetudinarian.
In "The Holy Rose," for example, which was reviewed last month, Mr. Besant makes his heroines—pious and devoted Catholics—sell a valuable heirloom which had once been blessed by a pope. A good Catholic would look upon such a sale as a sacrilege, a mortal sin. Even Walter Scott, who was usually careful of his accessories, makes the Fair Maid of Perth go to mass in the afternoon, whereas that service can only be performed in the morning. It has been urged against Wilkie Collins, who is fond of introducing the sick-room into his novels, that he does not always succeed in correctly diagnosing his patient's case, in spite of the fact that his proof-sheets, so the gossip runs, are submitted to professional criticism. But it is in law that the novelist's feet have strayed the furthest, for law has a natural fascination for the romancer in its close connection with crime, mystery, and tragedy, while it is a slippery subject even in the hands of an expert. Some of the famous trial scenes that live vividly in the memory of the old novel-reader—the trial scenes, for example, in "Very Hard Cash," in "Griffith Gaunt," and in "Orley Farm"—show all the layman's unfamiliarity with the laws of evidence, and to the legal mind have about equal verisimilitude with the still more famous trial scene in "The Merchant of Venice." The greatest blunderers, of course, are the lady novelists,—Miss Braddon, Mrs. Henry Wood, and our own dear Mrs. E. D. E. N. Southworth. In her "Missing Bride" the latter has given us a trial scene where the jury are drawn not by the sheriff,
