MR. BOYD'S REMINISCENCES.*

WRITTEN wholly without system, and published without a table of contents, these anecdotes will afford some amusement to the reader who dips into them casually, but they hardly rise to the level of reminiscences. Mr. Boyd, no doubt, has heard a great deal, and has met with some adventures of his own, but the bulk of his book is taken up with other men's stories. We do not mean that the stories are old ; it would be laying claim to universal reading and an infallible memory to say that they are new. Yet at least the book contains much that we have not met with before, and of that much a very fair proportion may claim our attention. It is true that Mr. Boyd does not always tell a story well. He is much too fond of the trite cockneyism of mis- placing all the " h's," and the Scotch anecdotes which abound in his pages have very little point in them beyond their dialect. In one or two instances familiar tales are made almost unrecognisable. Thus, Sydney Smith's famous saying about the wooden pavement round St. Paul's, which only needed the Dean and one or two of the Canons to lay their heads together, appears in the following shape : —" The Bishop summoned the authorities of the Cathedral to meet him. Sydney Smith arrived early, but when some little impatience was expressed at the non-arrival of the prelate and other dignitaries, the witty Dean remarked that, as the question of blockheads had to be discussed, they had no other course left them than to wait." We presume Mr. Boyd wishes to make up for the mutilation of Sydney Smith's wit by conferring the dignity of Dean on the Canon of St. Paul's, just as in another place he gives ducal honours to Wellington during' part of the Penin- sular war. Again, we are told that ." although Mr. Pitt rarely lost his temper, it is said that on one occasion he was seriously angry with Sheridan, whom he told to his face that he would be much better occupied at home correcting his plays. Probably I should,' said Richard Brinsley, ' and the first I shall endeavour to correct will be " The Angry Schoolboy." ' " What Pitt said to Sheridan was that he was more fitted for the stage than the House of Commons, and that in the sphere which was suited to him he would have the best reason "suiplausu gaudere theatri." Sheridan replied that if he returned to dramatic composition, he might be tempted to improve on Ben Jonson's great creation of the Angry Boy.

We have now done enough in the way of fault-finding, though the same reason that exempts Mr. Boyd from serious criticism deprives his book of any distinctive value. If he is contented with the title of an anecdotist, he cannot wonder if his book is made the subject of a gossiping article and if his best stories are chosen for quotation. The only difficulty under such circumstances is to know where to begin. Mr. Boyd himself begins with Pitt and the Duke of Wellington, then he goes off to some naval heroes, then he comes back to Pitt, and after that wanders away to Irish Bishops,

• Reminiscences of YOU Years. By Mark Boyd. London: Longmaas. 1871. arctic navigators, poets, artiste, mayors, colonial ministers, and Scotch magistrates. One narrator follows another without any sort of order, and the pleasing variety of subjects becomes most conspicuous when the reader is brought back to the hero of an

earlier story after fifty pages have been taken up with a different class of people. An instance of this process may serve to plunge us into the current of stories from whence we propose to fill our bucket.

At page 115 we have an account of Mr. Boyd's father being intro- duced to a Lord Mayor by seeing him home to the Mansion House when he was not able to walk alone. Such an anecdote might natu- rally have led Mr. Boyd to relate his own adventure at the Mansion House, when he saved a magnificent pine-apple at the request of the Lord Mayor. But in the book before us rather more than a hundred pages intervene between the two stories. This is the more absurd, as both convey a similar moral. Mr. Boyd's father had always regarded Lord Mayors as beings of incredible grandeur, and had associated them with the historical or legendary memories of Whittington and Walworth. It was, therefore, a great sur- prise to him to meet with his ideal in the person of an old gentleman who could not walk straight. Mr. Boyd himself, with his notions of the princely hospitality of the Man- sion House, believed that he was saving a pine-apple from humbler guests to be an offering to Royalty. Still greater was his surprise to find that the pine-apple had been hired for two guineas, and was to be sold for seven, so that the only result of his zeal in keeping it from others was to save the Lord Mayor five guineas. As we have mentioned Mr. Boyd's father, we may as well add that some reminiscences which far exceed the limit of fifty years imposed by the title-page are due to his per- sonal experience. One of the most remarkable is that he saw a woman brought out to be burnt in front of Newgate for coining. "The pile having been prepared during the night, was ignited about half an hour before the wretched creature appeared, and, after going through the form of having first her right hand and then her left thrust into the flames, she was raised to the scaffold and hanged." Another tale con- nected with Mr. Boyd's father is a curious one of a Scotch marriage. A farm labourer had been keeping company with a girl, and had injured her reputation. Mr. Boyd's father exhorted the offending swain to make her an honest woman, and the cere- mony was performed in the simplest way, the man acknowledging the woman as his wife, and the woman acknowledging the man as her husband, before a magistrate. After this, the company sat down to a breakfast provided by Mr. Boyd's father, but at the moment of beginning the bridegroom rose as if he had forgotten something, and said he would return in two minutes. The others waited for him in vain, and it turned out afterwards that he had bolted to the woods, hidden himself there till nightfall, had then crossed to Liverpool in a coasting vessel, and made his way to America. Mr. Boyd pore had only half carried out his good intentions.

Several anecdotes of military men are given by Mr. Boyd. One tells of Lord Clyde gaining his first step to promotion through the kindness of a West India merchant. Another relates how Sir James Outram coiled himself up in a tiger skin after a long journey and went to sleep on the floor. The owner of the room came in early, and, finding what he thought a sleeping tiger, was on the point of applying the muzzle of a rifle, when out rolled the future hero. From soldiers we pass to an old official at the War Office, Mr. Edward Marshall, two of whose adventures with Lord Palmerston are worth quoting :—

" Lord Palmerston and Mr. Marshall did not always ride their horses together. The former, one day, directed Mr. Marshall to prepare for transmission abroad an important document, which instruction the latter had most carefully carried out, sending the paper by a clerk or messenger to his lordship, then in his own room. In its perusal, Lord Palmerston oame to the word ' waggon,' which his amanuensis had spelt with one ' g.' Not taking the same view of orthography, his lordship said to the messenger, ' Take that back to Mr. Marshall' (of course unsigned by his lordship). In a few minutes the messenger returned with two dictionaries, one or both of which authorized the word being spelt either with one g' or two. ' Carry back these books to Mr. Marshall, and assure him I do not require to be told how to spell waggon ;' and he dashed the books on the floor. On another occasion Lord Palmer- ston came into his room, and said, 'Here, Marshall, is a very long affair, and I know you will give it your immediate and undivided attention, as I wish to have it back either to-night or early to-morrow forenoon.' Mr. Marshall, seeing his lordship's anxiety for despatch, assured him it should be forthwith attended to. ' Bat what-,' said our friend, 'do you think of Lord Palmerston, on leaving my room, quietly looking my door, putting the key in his pocket, and all this without my knowing it? When lunch-time arrived, I found myself locked in. I rang the bell, and only obtained my freedom by having the lock picked.' Of course we agreed that the noble Secretary at War took this precaution to pro- ven the future Chief Examiner of Accounts from being interrupted ; but that view of the case we never could persuade the latter to admit." If Mr. Boyd's inaccuracy about Sydney Smith did not make us distrust him in ecclesiastical matters, there would be genuine humour in this story about Bishop Blomfield. Inspecting a new church one day, the Bishop found fault with four wooden figures

round the pulpit, which the architect described as the four Evan- gelists. " They look to me asleep," said the Bishop. " Do they indeed, my lord !" said the architect ; " Smith, bring your chisel and

open the eyes of the Evangelists." From London to Lincoln is a.

reversal of the order of preferment, but we must make room here for a reply sent by a clergyman of the latter diocese to his Bishop. The complaint against the clergyman was that, being authorizedi by the Bishop to close his church every alternate Sunday during the winter, because of the parish being situated in an extremely fenny district, he had done no duty in the church for six weeks.

running. The clergyman's answer to the Bishop's rebuke was, " My lord, I have had the honour to receive your lordship's letter, and all I have to say in explanation is that the Devil himself can- not get at my parishioners during the winter, and I promise your lordship to be before him in the spring." While we are on the subject of retorts, we may fairly say that nothing can be neater than the following :—

" I recollect a humorous M.P. pointing out to me a retired West India judge not very remarkable for sagacity on the bench. There was a ball at Government House, and the judge began to criticize the waltzing of a witty member of the West India Bar.—' Ah, my friend, you aro a bull

waltzer Ah, but you are a bad judge.' "

Mr. Boyd has some other legal stories, and we presume that for the honour of Scotland he would prefer us to select those relating to Patrick Robertson. We think, however, that the account of the sheep-stealer who was astonished at his own acquittal bears away the palm. This man was being tried at Oxford, and had the rare, though not always enviable, honour of being defended

by a Member of Parliament. Throughout the case for the prose- cution the prisoner kept up an audible whisper to his counsel of "There they goes, Sir, I knowed they would catch me;" and during the speech for the defence there was an expres-

sive pantomime from the dock, consisting of shakes of the head, shrugs of the shoulders, and grimaces, showing that in the prisoner's opinion nothing could prevail against. the facts established. However, the counsel did his best, the judge summed up, and the jury, after a short consultation, returned verdict of "Not guilty." The prisoner, says Mr. Boyd, " did not. hear this distinctly, and asked one of the officers of the court what.

the verdict was. He was told that he was acquitted. ' Not guilty, does you mean to say?'—' Yes, not guilty.'—' Well, hif ever I' " We conclude with a story which carries its own moral, although we must enter a protest against the narrator being described as "eminent," or as being "professionally employed in an act that was illegal :—

" The late Mr. —, the eminent solicitor, contended, speaking of Parliamentary corruption, that nothing was easier to carry outs if common prudence were only observed. He described a case where he was professionally employed to administer a solatium of £2,000 to an important election agent. He was desired to be looking in at a print- shop window in the Strand precisely at twelve o'clock, when a party behind would tap him on the shoulder, and repeat a line of Shakespeare ; that at five minutes past twelve he would receive another tap, and have a second line from the same illustrious author repeated in his ear ; that a far- ther interval of five minutes would ensue—his watch to be consulted— when the immortal Shakespeare, already made a particeps criminis, was- again to be a subsidiary—' to what vile uses do we come at last '—and a third line from his divine page administered with the indispensable tap on the shoulder. ' Then to some foul corrupting hand, their craving lusts- with fatal bounty fed, they fall a willing, undefended prize.' Alter this, the learned gentleman handed from his pocket to his poetical but mythical friend behind a packet containing the bank-notes. When tit& disputed election came to be investigated before a Parliamentary com- mittee, he was able to swear that the person produced was one whom he had never seen in his life."