youngest daughter along with Treeby himself, provided, of course, it would not interfere with your arrangements, or be personally distasteful in any way. Seems to me that Mrs. Treeby would be quite the kind of person to suit you; and her daughter, too, so fond as you are of what is true and beautiful, and really ladylike in a woman, and so taken as you have always been with girls of candid and ingenuous characters, who display genuine devotion and affection. And then, Beatrice, it might be the means of conferring great happiness on them both, for they would have change of scene, and also the enjoyment of your society, which, you know, I have often told you would be considered a privilege by any person of taste and refinement. I think I told you Treeby refused for his wife when I gave him the invitation last spring. He said Mrs. Treeby's health would scarcely bear the moving and excitement, which, since I have come to know something more of the man, and since I have received Austin's letter about him, seems to me certainly very suspicious-decidedly, unquestionably suspicious." "Indeed it does, dear; I quite agree with you," said her ladyship. "I can fancy such a bear as Mr. Treeby being a dreadful despot in his own house, and a terrible Bluebeard towards his wife. Poor lady, how in the world did she come to marry such a man? Well, but, Langham, I don't intend to do as you propose at all. I think your plan a very poor one; I don't approve of it in any respect; the one I have to propose is infinitely better. I shall write a line to Mr. Treeby, asking him to come here for a fortnight, and to bring all his family along with him, for although that silly thing Emily puts me out of all patience, her follies and nonsense are quite bearable, and I do not see why she and her other sister should not come with the mother and younger daughter. Poor things, I dare say they would feel very desolate at being left so long alone; besides, it will be ten times more interesting to me to have them all here together, because then I can judge of their different characters, and compare them with one another. Of course I shall particularly insist upon Mrs. Treeby coming. I may as well write at once by this post, and ask them for to-morrow week. What do you say, dear, to my plan?" "Is there any need to ask me, Beatrice?" replied the earl enthusiastically, and getting up from his chair to give an outlet to his excitement in the usual manner, as his wife began to pen her letter of invitation. "Do you need to ask me, Beatrice? Assure you your ready and affectionate compliance with every part of my wishes and desires in this matter is far more than I could have ventured to expect-very greatly more, because there are so many things which might naturally be inconvenient and disagreeable to you in them; assure you it affects me very deeply-affects me in the strongest manner." And at this stage the old gentleman, still pacing between the door and the window, did actually draw forth his pocket-handkerchief and blow his nose three times in a very loud and suspicious fashion. "And as regards your own plan, Beatrice," he went on, "which you justly say is so infinitely superior to mine-so superior in every respect, because it is so much more broad and liberal-I can only say it is another evidence, a very marked evidence, of your largeness of heart and benevolence of disposition-extreme benevolence of disposition, and of your strong common sense and clear judgment, which I always thought so highly of always considered them to be so remarkably correct and superior." Lady Boulder stopped her writing for a moment, and, looking up, smiled brightly on her husband as he delivered himself of this glowing eulogium. "You naughty old darling," she said, shaking her head at him, "don't you think at our age it is time to leave off paying one another grand compliments?" And I suppose down in the bottom of her heart she was thinking what a dear, loveable, quaint old being he was as he promenaded between the door and the window. In his next turn he stopped before the window and looked out. 66 Yes, it is undoubtedly it is!" he exclaimed, putting his eyeglass suddenly up to his eye. "Here he comes, my love; you didn't expect him so soon, did you? Thought he was not to arrive till the afternoon; pretty sure Knipp told me so-am certain he told me so. He must have changed his mind and taken the seven o'clock express. Ah, there is Knipp himself some distance in front of the carriage." Lady Boulder, who had finished her note, came to the window, and, resting her hand on her husband's shoulder, looked out. A carriage and pair coming along the drive had just overtaken three gentlemen, and as it swept past them, a head looked out and gave a nod, which one of the three returned, waving his hand at the same time. The three, on approaching nearer, discovered themselves to be the two viscounts, Knipp and Quaque, and Mr. Jonathan Rucklebed. Along an adjacent path trooped the young Duc à Ducs, attended by Miss Reade, who joined the gentlemen with various demonstrations of glee as soon as the respective roads had united. The carriage drew up before the door, and Knipp ran forward to welcome the traveller. "Who is that, Quaque?-do you know?" asked Rucklebed, as a slight-looking youth of about middle height alighted. "Yes, that's Noel Manners." 572 PRESTWOOD PAPERS. BY FRANCIS JACOX. VIII.-MUCH TO BE SAID ON BOTH SIDES: A CONCLUSION WHEREIN NOTHING IS CONCLUDED. To Doctor Primrose, Vicar of Wakefield, is sometimes attributed what belongs to Sir Roger de Coverley, and next after him to his friend the Spectator, the famous sentence, namely, that there is much to be said on both sides. Will Wimble and Tom Touchy fall into a dispute as to the right of angling in a certain part of a certain river, and Sir Roger is appealed to, for his decision on the vexed question. The knight is on horseback at the time, and hears both parties "upon a round trot." He then, we read, "having paused some time, told them, with the air of a man who would not give his judgment rashly, that much might be said on both sides." And it seems that they were neither of them dissatisfied with Sir Roger's determination, because neither of them found himself in the wrong by it. Anon there came the grave inquiry whether it was possible for people to recognise Sir Roger as transformed by signpainter's art into the Saracen's Head. The Spectator, being desired to tell his friend truly if he thought this possible, at first kept his usual silence, rendered a little more difficult than usual by what Parson Evans would call a "great dispositions" to laugh; but upon the knight's conjuring him to say whether it was not still more like himself than a Saracen, Mr. Spectator settled his short-face, or, in his own words, "composed his countenance" in the best manner he could, and replied, "That much might be said on both sides."* Addison had commenced an essay not very long before with the remark that in some opinions a man should stand neuter, without engaging his assent to one side or the other. Such a hovering faith as this, which refuses to settle upon any determination, he declares to be necessary in a mind that is careful to avoid errors and prepossessions; the safest method being, when the arguments press equally on both sides in matters that are indifferent to us, to give up ourselves to neither. It is an amiable, if also too indolent, or too diffident, or not sufficiently earnest section of the family of Mr. Facingbothways, which seeks to abate controversy, and at once to reconcile and conciliate disputants, by affirming, when appealed to-for the judgment is seldom or never given unsolicited-that there is Much to be said on Both Sides. So rules Sir John, the jolly deer-stealing priest of Waltham, between the rival publicans, his comrades; "Neighbour Banks, of Waltham, and Goodman Smug, the honest smith of Edmonton, as I dwell betwixt you both, at Enfield, I know the taste of both your alehouses-they are good both, smart both." Chesterfield, coaching his son in the arts and tricks of diplomacy, instructs him to be as shy as possible of offering an opinion when appealed to-and if compelled to speak, to say something that, * The Spectator, No. cxxii. when analysed, will amount to nothing-il y a bien du pour et du contre.* How adjuges Flora between the rival claims of Rose and Lily? "Yours is," she said, “the nobler hue, And yours the statelier mien, And the next stanza declares them soothed and reconciled. Swift winds up a tractate on the vexed questions between Whig and Tory, by owning himself to "have the ambition common with other reasoners, to wish at least that both parties may think me right." Hopeless, however, of that, he declares his next wish is to have them both think him in the wrong as a sure ground to satisfy him of his impartiality. Something in the spirit of the arbiter in one of Gay's Fables: So goodman Sexton, since the case To neither I the cause determine, For different tastes please different vermin.§ La Bruyère says that when two persons have had a violent quarrelone of them clearly in the right, and the other in the wrong-what for the most part those people do who have "assisted" at the "row," is to condamner toutes les deux. Sometimes this sort of judgment may be the result of a sinister policy. In the middle ages, when Genoa and Pisa, quarrelling about the possession of Sardinia, referred their respective claims to the Pope, his Holiness decided for neither, but attached it to the crown of Aragon, to be held as a fief of the Papacy. He cut short the controversy in the spirit of another fabulist's umpire, who held that, Disputes, though short, are far too long, Where both alike are in the wrong. It is not even every gazetier who has the face to say in his gazette, "Les uns disent le Cardinal Mazarin mort, les autres vivant; moi, je ne crois ni l'un ni l'autre.** Extremes meet; and there is an obvious affinity between the man who declares there is much to be said on both sides, and him who tells you there is nothing to be said on either. Equally admirable with the bold gazetier, in his way, is the Cambridge sizar, in his, who, to the examiner's question, "Does the earth move round the sun, or the sun round the earth?" replied, "Sometimes one and sometimes the other." Byron trims neatly enough in deciding the relative merits of two world-wide rivals: But which to choose I really hardly know; * Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son, Oct. 17, 1757. † Cowper: The Lily and the Rose. Sentiments of a Church of England Man. The Ravens, Sexton, and Earthworm. Les Caractères, ch. v. Cowper: The Poet, the Oyster, and Sensitive Plant. **Chamfort: Caractères et Portraits. Soon after Dr. Chalmers's settlement in Glasgow, as we read in his biography, he was called upon to take part in a discussion at a meeting of the Town Hospital, at which some of the gravest of the city ministers, and some of the sagest of the city merchants, were present, when the "weighty and perplexing question was propounded, whether pork broth or ox-head broth should be served to the inmates of the hospital. Opinions differed, the debate waxed warm, and at last it was resolved to subject the matter to actual trial. A quantity of both kinds of broth was produced, each sitter tasting it as it made the circuit of the Board. The judgments were then collected and compared, when the sapient decree was given forth-that henceforth there should be served sometimes the one kind of broth and sometimes the other."* The decision is not unlike that pronounced in a recent Cookery Book, on the knotty question which side of turbot should be uppermost when served; the author advising a separate fish at each end of the table, one with the belly side uppermost, the other with the back. It is a great and subtle question, among doctors, says Molière's Sganarelle, when become un médecin malgré lui, whether women are easier to cure than men. "Je vous prie d'écouter ceci, s'il vous plait. Les uns disent que oui, les autres disent que non : et moi, je dis qu'oui et non." That is not Sganarelle's only achievement in trimming. When he is first laid hold of by the valets, and asked if his name is Sganarelle, in a manner and with a persistency that perturb him, he answers at length, "Oui et non, selon que vous lui voulez."+ Molière's Eraste is importuned to judge between Orante and Climène, on a question which he pronounces à vider difficile, and for which he would therefore have them chercher un juge plus habile. But as they will take no denial, he shapes his decision into a form that shall, if possible, please both : Puisqu'à moins d'un arrêt je ne puis m'en défaire, Mr. Midshipman Easy, discussing mathematics with the gunner, and being told by him that a very little attention to the science of navigation will enable him to find out "how your parallels of longitude and latitude meet,"―answers smartly, as his manner is, "Two parallel lines, if continued to infinity, will never meet." "I beg your pardon," said the gunner. "I beg yours," said Jack. Whereupon Mr. Tallboys brought up a small map of the world, and showed Jack that all the parallels of latitude met at a point at the top and the bottom. "Parallel lines never meet," replied Jack, producing Hamilton Moore. Whereupon Jack and the gunner argued the point until it was agreed to refer it to Mr. Jolliffe, who answered with a smile, that those lines were parallels and not parallels. And as both disputants were right, both were satisfied.|| Mr. Jenkison, in "Headlong Hall," is described by its whimsical and scholarly author, as deriving his name from alev eέ lowv, semper ex æqualibus-scilicet, mensuris, omnia metiens: one who from equal measures can always produce arguments on both sides of a question, with * Hanna's Life of Chalmers, ch. xxiii. Le Médecin malgré lui. Acte III. Sc. 6. § Les Facheux, Acte II. Sc. 4. Acte I. Sc. 6. || Mr. Midshipman Easy, ch. xviii. |