Page:The Yellow Book - 13.djvu/239

Rh rogue pretended to vomit pins and abstain from meat or drink for quite miraculous periods. The trial of the obscurer criminal has its own charm. Where else do you find such Dutch pictures of long-vanished interiors or exteriors? You touch the vie intime of a past age; you see how kitchen and hall lived and talked; what master and man, mistress and maid thought and felt; how they were dressed, what they ate, of what they gossiped. Again, how oft your page recalls the strange, mad, picturesque ways of old English law. Benefit of clergy meets you at every turn, the Peine Fort et Dure is explained with horrible minuteness, the lore of Ship Money as well as of Impressement of Seamen is all there. Also is an occasional touch of farce, but what phase of man's life goes unrecorded in those musty old tomes?

Howell's collection comes down only to 1820. Reform has since then purged our law, and the whole set is packed off to the Lumber Room. In a year's current reports you may find the volumes quoted once or twice, but that is "but a bravery," as Lord Bacon would say, for their law is "a creed outworn." Yet the human interest of a story remains, however antiquated the setting, incapable of hurt from Act of Parliament. So, partly for themselves, partly as samples of the bulk, I here present in altered form two of these tragedies, a pair of parricides; one Scots of the seventeenth, the other English of the eighteenth century.

The first is the trial of Philip Standsfield at Edinburgh, in 1688, for the murder of his father, Sir James Standsfield, of New Mills, in East Lothian. To-day New Mills is called Amisfield; it lies on the south bank of the Tyne, a mile east of Haddington. There is a fine mansion-house, about a century old, in the midst of a well-wooded park, and all round are the superbly tilled Lothian fields, as dulcia arva as ever the Mantuan sang. Amisfield got its Rh