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 The Romance of the Law.

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"Or with a proper descriptive book The menagerie's lessons crave, Or on Sunday take a pious look At your dear old grandfather's grave. "This court cannot have any sympathy With rude and boisterous sport. If we ever were boys, time long gone by, We did nothing of the sort. "Listen not to the siren-singing Of turn-tables, swings, or carts, For misery ever they 're bringing To those who yield to their arts. "And allow this instruction holy On your infant mem'ry to fall : ' Though the mills of the gods grind slowly, They grind exceedingly small.'"

THE ROMANCE OF THE LAW. By Robert T. Barton. From a Paper read before the Virginia State Bar Association. J HO that has ever wandered among the graveyards and ancient build ings of Europe has not experienced the pleasing sensation of making in imagination the dead who were once the living there live again? I do not mean merely the mighty dead, those who played their rdles of kings and queens, nor yet the mightier than they, the real kings of men who ruled armies and navies and made and unmade kings and kingdoms, nor yet even those monarchs of literature, thought, and philosophy, — a Carlyle with his gravestone carved Humilitas, nor a Scott who needed no stone to tell of his genuine modesty. I do not mean all these or the like of these. I mean a quiet

evening in an English graveyard far from the madding crowd, where the time-worn and moss-covered stones still faintly tell you the names, the ages, the deaths, the loves, — sometimes the hates, — and the virtues of those who have slept under the turf full three hundred years. One knows by heart the public history of those times, and how men fared, and what their common occupa tions were. Hence it needed no far flights of fancy to make those dead live once more; to gather their relations to each other from the brief narrative of their monuments, — their ages, and what they did, and when they died, and who they loved. There right before you is the same landscape that they