Page:The Green Bag (1889–1914), Volume 10.pdf/122

 The Romance of the Old Reports. viction that those sublime creations eman ated from a lawyer's brain, and stronger testi mony than the arithmetical ravings of Igna tius Donnelly concedes their paternity to Bacon. To him who reads aright, the old reports are the realms of romance, and in them we see displayed human nature in its broadest and most characteristic phases. True his tory peoples the past, not with puppets, but with living, acting, breathing men, toiling, impassioned, intrenched in their customs, their faults and follies, their grandeur and their littleness. With a few meager letters and mutilated speeches of the rough old roundhead, Carlyle followed from the farm to the Protector's throne and discovered beneath the schemer quite another Crom well, a strange, incomprehensible anomaly, a great genius travailling with the troubled reveries of a melancholy imagination, a man who had been victor and vanquished, out cast and king, who had heard the applause and curses of the world, and upon whose heart had fallen " all the nights and moons of failure and success." In those strange shapes embossed on stone, the geologist beholds the fossil remains of a being which perished ages ago. He reads these records of the past, and peoples prime val epochs with unimaginable monstrosi ties. The old reports are our fossils, and in a similar manner we may recreate the existence of which these lifeless wrecks tell. Reverently let us approach the ponderous tomes white with the collected dust of yester days. What weighty learning is condensed, compressed and conserved in the musty manuscript. The shelves can scarce sus tain the weight. How rich in thoughts, how fertile in fancies, are these faithful records of the past! As they stand there in the waning light, the sages of long departed time rise silently as exhalations from their tombs. Dyer, Plowden, Hobart, Yelverton, Saun ders —

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"A mighty spirit host, they come From every age and clime. Above the buried wrecks of years They breast the tide of time; And in their presence chamber here They hold their regal state, And round them throng a noble train, Tha gifted and the great." Notes of sweetest sound assail the ear; 'tis Justice tinkling her golden scales, and at the sibyl's conjuration the shades come troop ing around us to play again their parts, to fret and strut their hour upon the stage, to enact again, "The little competitions, factions and debates of mankind." From the re motest realms of the real they come, to body forth upon this stage all the scenes that lie between the morn of laughter and the night of tears; to produce the false and true, the careless shallows and the tragic deeps of human life. With magic power the old re ports invoke the past, steel clad and barbed with iron, floating with plumes and knightly bannerets, streaming with gay baldrics, and flashing with helmet crests — the past of chivalry and romance. We see the Gothic castle, with itsbristlingbarbicans and mighty arches; we see the bold baron and the rude retainer, the pride of nobles and the pain of serfs, the glory and the grief of feudal life. The Forest laws call up the shade of Gurth, the swineherd, scarce elevated above his grunting charge; the bells of folly jingle in the breeze, and " motley's the only wear." Unconsciously we sigh for the days of the picturesque when the life of a man was of less account than the life of a deer; when a bishop could be slain for 8,000 thrymsae (or 150 pounds sterling), and even the privi lege of killing a king could be purchased for 500 pounds. Simple, sylvan days, when the red deer strayed along the dells of Merrie England, the outlaw bent his bow beneath the beech trees' dappled shade, or the king and nobles rode their careless chase. The old reports are " an abstract chronicle " of these times, and the wildest, opium-engendered ravings