ROYAL THEATRICALS AND POOR ACTORS.

WHEN any service is requited handsomely and munificently, we popularly say that the payment is " royal" ; but the phrase seems

nicely to go out of use. The first household in the land has for some time been gradually acquiring, we scarcely know with what truth, a repute for thrift, some give it a harsher expression. In these respects the household in question is contrasted with the

good old times—and is advantageously so contrasted, for the accounts under the present system as a matter of business. It is

not often that illustrative instances come before the public ; they creep out by degrees, and may very likely be much misrepresented in passing through narrow and devious channels. It has been said that artists do not give that preference to royal patronage which has been usual, since they find a larger remuneration from private patronage ; so that a very busy man may positively lose by a royal order. Casual visitors led by business, compliment, or *other calls, have found in modern times a remarkable change of custom in one particular. Formerly a party, even so small as to comprise only one or two persons, on visiting the palace in the earlier part of the day, would be invited to take a luncheon in a separate room, and would find there a repast equal to that which would be laid on the table of a private nobleman or gentleman. Under the new regime an improved system appears to be introduced in the matter of luncheons. A table is laid out for some hours in the day as at a table d'h6te or an American boardinghotel ; and we have been told that by this system—the substitution of a collective for an individual luncheon—some thousands • sterling are saved within the year. Saved to whom ? The grants by Parliament are no smaller. We do not learn whether the saving goes into the pockets of contractors, or whether it goes to Jericho or Germany. At a former period of Queen Victoria's life this particular economy in the household was not noticed, and no change had been made in the luncheon arrangements from the time of the last George. It is not only in one profession that the modern spirit is observed, but in more than one branch of "practical science and ext" there is the same tone of grumbling—whether reasonable or unreasonable we can scarcely tell. There may be explanations ; and certainly one little incident this week calls for explanation. We copy the paragraph as we find it in the Lambeth Police report.

"Mr. James Rogers, the well-known comedian at the Olympic Theatre, waited on Mr. Elliott, and handed to his worship the sum of 138. 4d., with the following note.

"

'Sir—Allow me to present to the poor-box the enclosed 13.s. 4d., being the amount I received for performing at Windsor Castle on Wednesday evening last.

" I am, Sir, your obedient servant, JAMES ROGERS. " — Elliott, Esq.'

"Mr. Rogers requested his Worship would, with his usual kindness, acknowledge his small donation in the usual way : upon which Mr. Elliott said he would give a receipt for it ; but Mr. Rogers replied that that was not necessary.'

That Mr. Rogers is not in affluent circumstances, is made obvious to the public this week by the appearance of his name in a list essentially composed of the names of persons in difficulties ; but at all events he was of sufficient status in his profession to have been invited to take part in the Royal theatricals. We have before heard complaints that the entertainment at the Castle is not in a lavish style of hospitality ; there are few chances of infringing temperance; and the loyalty that would indulge in flowing libations to the health of gracious personages does not find the purple stream on which to embark. So at least it is said. How far these peculiarities may be traceable to middle-men, we do not know ; but the fact is indisputable, that the very appearance of the Royal Household in the Police Court, almost in contrast with the liberality of a poor comedian who gives his 13s. 4d. to the poor-box, is a descent from the old English character.

"CONSOLIDATION" OF THE STATUTE LAW.—No. III.

IT being conceded, for this occasion, that Codification, Digestion, Revision, Expurgation of obsolete matter of the whole of our law, as systematic operations, are to be abandoned, or at least postponed, in order that we may secure at once such benefits as are promised to us by the operation described as the "Consolidation of the Statute Law," it becomes necossary to examine the nature of these promised benefits, according to the plain sense of the undertaking, which will constitute the popular justification for accepting the diminished offers of the Lord Chancellor and of his Commission ; and when we have done this, to ascertain the extent to which the eight Bills, proffered to us as part performance of the undertaking, really involve the execution of the promise, or

any other public benefit whatever. It is urgently necessary that this should be done at once, seeing that the Queen's Speech an nounces at the head of the measures of Government to which at tention is called, "Bills for the consolidation of important portions of the law" ; and the Lord Chancellor assures us that "the Commission has succeeded in consolidating the whole of the Cri minal Law, and that bills similar to those laid on the table in the last session will be introduced for the purpose of effecting that consolidation." It is not to be feared that bills which fall far short of their announced purposes will now pass more easily than similar bills have heretofore panned; but the evil of loss of time and opportunity in dealing with abortive measures is so great, and the discouragement consequent on failure operates during so long a subsequent period to prevent all other attempts, that an

exanunation that may dispose of such bills on their first appearance, is,, next to the actual production of better measures, the best service that can be rendered to the cause of legislative improvement.

When a body of law has, like the English Statute Law, been growing for centuries, for the most part by occasional additions and modifications, passed and amended without system, and generally with but little attention to the bulk of the old law into which the new was to be incorporated—when the changed purposes and policy of one age have been exhibited not by clearing away the antagonistical matter of a previous age, but by new additional enactments, purposely intended to be operative in counteraction of the old—and where so much legislation has resulted from merely temporary necessities, prejudices, policies, and passions, and so much more still from the accidental failures of the successive framers of the law to achieve their intended purposes, and from their success in producing unintentional effects—it is inevitable that a large proportion of the whole matter accumulated in this way simply requires to be extruded from the mass, and the remainder would, in the sense of being a more condensed and consistent body of law, become so far a "Consolidation ": and whether the excision of useless and conflicting matter take place as a preliminary to other operations intended to improve the connexion and effect of the remainder, or whether it is to result as a consequence of them, there can be no question that the abrogation and repeal of unnecessary and obsolete matter is a necessary and one of the most beneficial parts of any work that can in any sense of the word be called a consolidation. Granting to the Commissioners, who have rejected the course of clearing their ground of encumbrances at the commencement of their work, that it will be possible to make the neeewary clearance in a more complete and effective manner after the work of recasting the operative law has been performed, it still must bo understood that this clearance must be dila:tea at the one stage or the other, either as a preliminary or as a consequential operation. " Consolidation " cannot, by any stretch of language, mean the retention on the statute-book of all the old law superseded in effect by the new; and these bills, which follow in this respect the most mischievous precedents which have produced the existing incongruous aggregate of statutes, intended to add eight acts, containing 608 sections, printed in 203 folio pages, to the present mass, and repeat, with more or less of agreement and more or less of difference, matter dispersed in above one hundred and fifty nets of Parliament, without a single repeal of any of them, must be in this respect considered to have an effect the reverse of" consolidation." Still it is probable, although the bills are presented as a complete series and no intention to add to it is indicated, that it is intended to follow them up at some stage by a series of repeals ; which, if the bills be in other more essential respects really consolidations, would have the intended effect of diminishing the bulk of the statute law : at present they have only the effect of rather more than doubling the present bat of the body of law which they profess to consolidate.

The clearing away of effete and useless matter necessary as an antecedent or as a consequent to Consolidation, is clearly not understood by the 'Commissioners to be in itself the work of "Consolidation," or oven a part of it ; and without a doubt, that work is something greatly more positive and structural. In application to a mass of matter so dispersed and incoherent as our statute law, there is no difficulty in understanding what is really meant by the process of Consolidation. This can be nothing less than the approximation of the separate parts to each other according to their most characteristic analogies, so that each individual provision shall to the greatest possible extent agree in all its most important characters with those with which it is in nearest proximity ; that all analogous particulars shall be connected together by their similarity, and bound into groups by virtue of their chic resemblances to each other, and these groups again conno by considerations applying generally to the whale. of them. Such a combination of particular provisions makes each individual by its position to speak for itself, and to a great extent also to tell. the nature of its nearest neighbours coming before and after it in the series, as these in their turn reciprocally diffuse the same light : it involves in itself the discovering and the exhibition of all the properties which individuals have in common, and so makes one nxpression, one heading, made once for all, sufficient for every subject that will come under it: it necessarily excludes repetitions of this common matter, at the same time that it presents in one view the individual provisions that afford the matter for the largest possible logical inductions, and for the most accurate possible ex pression of specific differences avoids all the redundancy that results from the attempt to express in every individual ease all that it is necessary to include and to exclude. This connexion by identity or analogy of the most important characters—this induction and consequent distinction of particulars, this common expression and heading for a multitude of related particulars, by means of which the intelligence of the reader is more infallibly led to see the connexion and distinction of the matter than can ever be possible by the most elaborate combinations of mere Words, and all the resulting closeness, coherence, and conciseness of expression—this simplicity, lucidity, and brevity—this compactness and solidation of matters previously dispersed, incoherent, redundant, and dissolidated, is surely what is meant by the proposal to " consolidate " the law. On the other hand, it is not possible to understand as a consolidation a mere collection of extracts from the mass of the law, put together in any accidental order, as in an alphabetical or chronological order, or what is nearly as useless, put together in regard to some variable and arbitrary contingency, which may attach to each object, but does not necessarily extend to any one of them—which constitutes no part of its nature or of its definition—which dissevers things the most nearly allied, brings together those most different in their nature, renders all specific and general expressions, and all the resulting clearness, mutual illustration, and conciseness, impossible. Such extracts, so strung together, are to be found in even the worst compilations of private book-makers, who have no authority to give a better shape to the matter they have to deal with: such a mode of bringing together a multitude of particulars is done to our hands whenever the private demand is sufficient to repay a bookseller for the labour, and is exhibited in regard to the very matter of these "Consolidation" Bills in many books, done as well as such a process admits of: but no such compilation, until it was effected in these bills, had assumed the name of a "Consolidation of the Criminal Law," although every one of them has by the interpolation of explanatory matter, and of portions of the Common Law and of judicial decisions, given a connexion, continuity, and solidity to the matter, not attempted, as we shall proceed to show, in any of these bills.