The ordinary phrases of sorrow which are conventional on the death of every human being, become genuine and heartfelt at the passing away of the late Lord Chief Justice. No person could resist the attractive influence of Lord Russell. Of course, like the rest of us, he had his faults, and on not a few occasions have his rivals in the Law Courts winced under his tempestuous outbursts. But these ebullitions of temper were but superficial. They were partly expressions of anger at stupidity or carelessness, partly the outcome of feelings and convictions that were always vehement. As was said of Dr. Johnson, Lord Russell had nothing of the bear about him but the skin. In a certain sense he was an intense partisan; by which we do not mean that he was not perfectly fair and upright on the Bench, but that he could not espouse any cause without espousing it with unusual earnestness. No half-and-half measures satisfied him; he always attacked, always carried the war into the enemy's country, could never put up with tepid compromise, or the safe middle position. Had not his religion stood in the way, we think he might have made the best possible Liberal leader after the retirement of Mr. Gladstone. He had courage carried to the verge of audacity, fluency and dignity of speech, personal magnetism, and untiring industry, while he was undoubtedly devoted to what may be called advanced Liberal principles-the very combination of qualities needed by the Liberal party. Dis aliter visum, however, and it is as an advocate and a judge rather than as a statesman that Lord Russell's name will go down to posterity.

Lord Russell's strength and inde

He

pendence of character are seen both in his political and personal career. started in political life as an Irish Liberal, and an Irish Liberal he remained, There was little inducement to a man who had determined on a political career to take up this position amid the contending forces of extreme Ulster Toryism and extreme uncompromising Nationalism. An Irish judgeship was not a great prize for a man of Lord Russell's intellectual power, but this seemed at one time to be the probable goal of his life. Though he afterwards adopted Home Rule, or rather, perhaps, came to believe that the Home Rule creed which he had sentimentally held had been pushed by Mr. Gladstone into the region of practical politics, he never associated himself with the Irish party, but held, as we have said, to his Liberal creed. His personal career was also remarkable. He won his way without any influence, by sheer intellect and force of character. Nobody could have supposed that an obscure Irish Catholic attorney would become Attorney-General, Lord of Appeal, and Chief Justice of Eng. land. Yet this came to pass, and it came honestly, without intrigue, as the result of high talent and pow erful personality. Starting from the bottom of the legal ladder, Russell passed through both law and politics, never shrinking from the assertion of his striking personal qualities, and yet leaving no shadow of a scandal while attaching to himself the warmest regards even of his opponents and rivals. That is much to say, but it can be honestly said.

As a judge, Lord Russell's tenure of office will always be remembered for his passionate devotion alike to justice

and to the cause of commercial integrity. It is true that all our judges are supposed to be devoted to justice. But it is one thing to hold calmly the scales of equity perfectly even, and quite another to throw oneself passionately into the cause of right. It was this latter line that Russell took, not only as an advocate, when he was as intense, if not as eloquent, as Erskine, but on the Bench also, where one was apt to forget at times that a judge sat, and to see under the ermine the fiery and intrepid advocate. It may be that Lord Russell at times carried this spirit a little too far, but after all it is well to be reminded that under the judicial robe beats the heart of a man, and that a judge can be as indignant against wrong as any private citizen. The Bar tried none of its favorite tricks sometimes practised on a judge of weak character when Russell sat on the bench. If he had while at the Bar occasionally cowed judges, as it is said he did, on the Bench he always struck a respectful though not servile frame of mind into the members of the Bar. The time-honored methods of "humbugging a jury" were not tried when Lord Russell held court.

But it is especially for his devotion to the cause of commercial integrity that Russell of Killowen should be remembered. It is needless to dwell upon the numerous recent scandals in the commercial world. There is good reason to believe that in the main trade is still soundly and honestly conducted. But the mania for mere speculation has unhappily grown rapidly in the last decade through the sudden growth of new opportunities for wealth, and the result has, undoubtedly, been injurious to mercantile morality. Lord Russell lost no occasion for dealing severely with this evil. On the Bench, in the House of Lords, and elsewhere he denounced fraud in the most scathing and impressive way. His outspoken

address to a Lord Mayor on a public ceremony will not, and ought not, soon to pass from public memory, nor can we forget his eager work for the Companies Bill and the Commissions Bill, while his very last speech in the House of Lords opened up to a supine assembly the dishonest commissions by which officials over a large area of London were being corrupted. To no judge of our time are such sincere public thanks due for an energetic effort, in season and out of season, to raise the general level of commercial integrity. Lord Russell showed, indeed, what a powerful factor the judiciary may be in the cause of social reform, and that without descending into the political arena or losing sight of the principles and precedents which should guide the judicial office. We trust that the clear current which he set running may continue under his successor to exercise its purifying work.

A third important service rendered by Lord Russell may properly be referred to here-the advancement of the cause of Arbitration. His excellent address delivered a few years ago before the American Bar Association made a strong impression on those who heard it and on the great public which read it. His services on the Venezuela Commission in Paris were heartily acknowledged by all the parties to that suit. His views as to the possible progress of the principle of Arbitration were derived, not so much from a prolonged study of international law, as from a common-sense political and ethical insight into the social needs of the future. This, it seems to us, describes his general views and attitude of mind as a lawyer. He was "learned in the law" as a Chief Justice should be, but it was his broad good sense and feeling of equity, his brushing aside of quibbles and formulas, which strike one even before his legal attainments. The conception of the

law as a real remedy for wrong, a shield for the oppressed, and a rod for the scoundrel's back, was to Lord Russell a living conception governing the

The Economist.

whole of his judicial career. He has left to England a memory which can be both respected and admired.

Segerstane, segsten, saxton, sacristan, sexton, his name should proclaim our friend the sacristarius or sacrist of the Canon Law. But, alas! the true sacristarius is the clerk to whom the archdeacon has granted the care and custody of the sacred vessels, the ecclesiastical vestments, the books and the like, which are the treasures of the Church. And he is so called from the sacred things of which he has the keeping, as the place where such things are kept is in Latin called the sacrarium, or with us the vestry. Now there is with us to-day a true sacristarius in the minor canon in certain of our Cathedral churches, on whom it lies to minister to the care of the fabric and ornaments of the edifice, to provide for the altar, and to order and direct the last rites of the departed. But in this sense our sexton is no sacrist. The care of the ornaments and fabric of the parish church is primarily for the wardens, of the graveyard for the parish priest, and he intermeddles with such but as the servant of one or other, or both of such parties. Nor is anything at all entrusted to him by the archdeacon, nor has he the care of the sacrarium.

The Church lawyer of more modern days again has vainly pictured him as the ostiarius, the lowest of the minor orders, whose duty it is to open and shut the inward and outward doors of the church, to admit the faithful, and ward off the schismatic and infidel. The more learned translator of our

1603 canons with greater truth applies this name to the parish clerk. In truth it is of the essence of the sacrist and ostiarius alike that they shall be in orders, and our parish sexton from the day that we first meet him in the fifteenth century seems always a layman or a laywoman, and 'tis clear that the latter may not hold a clerkly office.

The parish sexton in fact springs from the same causes that call into being the churchwarden. The Canon Law gives no office in the Church, not even the humblest, to any man not in orders, and in our cathedral churches, where the national custom comes not into play, the true sacrist has a proper place. But in the parish churches, where, by the national custom, the burden of repairing the nave and of furnishing the church ornaments lies on the shoulders of the lay folk, the wardens as the lay folk's representatives act upon the principle that calls the tune of the piper, and in the teeth of the canonists' rules themselves act as the sacrist, while they good-naturedly leave it to their and the priests' servant to usurp his name.

What manner of man though was he to whom the vestrymen, whose gray goose feathers sped the white shower of death on Towton or Tewkesbury field, paid the due number of pence "pro custodia campanarum" or "for ye sexteneship for ye halfe yere"? Perchance that sexton of thirty years' standing, who plies the spade over Ophelia's

coffin, may make answer.

The dark horror of the walking sprite hangs heavy on the merry England of the knightly years, and something of this dread links itself to the person of the sullen or jibing clown who in many a village wields the sexton's spade. Hence perchance it is that they mention him so little. A sexton, true, there must be in the parish and paid somehow or other he must be, generally from the vestry money, though here and there we find him taking certain fixed dues, as two pennies from each house in the parish. But how they chose him they say not, and the true character of his office has been a problem hard of solution for our latter day Courts of Justice. Was it for the priest or was it for the wardens to appoint to him his tasks? How comes it to pass, that the custom to appoint and remove him varies in different parishes? Why does the office sometimes seem to pass from father to son for four generations? We cannot say.

But probably the work of the poor mediæval clown varied but little from that of his modern representative. To help the wardens to keep order in service hours, to provide at their behest the bread and wine for the altar and the water for the font, to see that the lights are burning, that the bells chime, and the church floor is swept, to open the vaults and to break the sod in God's acre at the bidding of the parish priest, these have been for four hundred years and more the tasks of the parish sexton.

He owes much indeed to those Tudor changes in things ecclesiastical. From a clown and servant he blossoms forth into a grave public official. And this comes to pass in two ways. The parish church under a minister who frowns on church ales, and ever orates on the "wrath to come" is no more the blithesome religious club of yore. 'Tis all so gloomy, that the sexton and his

now

spade seem its proper adjuncts. And moreover the parish guilds are gone, the band of jovial ringers is scattered, for no more may they ring the bells on the loved (and superstitious) eves. There is but one of the old servants left to the church in the sexton, and as he nowadays ofttimes unites with his old functions those of the parish clerk, he rises into repute, until at last on one great day in the golden years of the Merry Monarch, the judges of the King's Bench discover that he holds his post by a tenure of the same nature as the dread steward of the Court Leet. No more an underling or a clown, he is judged in Banco Regis the dignified possessor of a freehold office, and though the spirituality may lecture him, as they will, 'tis (save where they can prove a contrary custom) beyond their power to turn him out.

And for the most part he wears the honors and the official garb in which he is now often clad with befitting dignity. May be that 'mid the Somerset meadows a kindly fairy arranged the fate of that one wicked sexton, just "pour encourager les autres." He was in truth a bad fellow, and undignified withal, that sexton. Round the village he went singing his doggerel

grasp, until he fled in fear and left them in the open coffin? The good wives round the blazing hearth differ in details; but on this they all agree, that in a few brief hours the wretch had buried forever in the village pond his own villainy and his order's shame.

There were after him none others such as he, or at least we hear not of them. Dignified seems the sexton's life and long the sexton's years in the days that glide away betwixt the tea-cups of good Queen Anne, and the country dances of gentle Jane Austen. Thus you read in the old register:

April 30th, 1759. Died Mary Hall, Sexton of Bishophill, aged 105. "She walked about and retained her senses till within three days of her death."

Or again you turn into an old Yorkshire churchyard and decipher on the tomb of a sexton who "departed this life August 3rd, 1769, in his 70th year.

And our Georgian sexton blent the stateliness and loyalty of old-world rank with the grace of humanity. If the days for the Church were dark, if the Methodist preacher was drawing away the flighty folk from their parents' ways, if there was a Jacobin of the London taverns expounding Tom Paine's blasphemies and treasons to the yokels over their ale at the village hostel, there still was the old man at the churchyard, belauding the Book of Common Prayer, smiling gently on those good young women

Who kept their church, all church days during Lent,

and cautioning all and sundry that 'twas wicked to tread o'er the graves in

sun or moon and bad luck in the dark. And where there was sorrow his heart was ever open:

For all the village came to him,
When they had need to call,
His counsel free to all was given,
For he was kind to all.

And then he had his hours of meditation. When the fog was rising, and he was alone in the churchyard with the dead, he would rest on his spade and his aged eyes would strangely hover about between that one mound, which his hand had not reared, for it covered the child of his old age, and those three lorn graves, wherein he had laid the poor victims in that one dark village story, that had so shattered the arcadian peace of his days and had made him put such strange questions to the vicar. And as he gazed it would seem as if those three graves gave up their dead, and the poor creatures all came forth again and played their parts once more. And then he looked up and saw the young poet standing before him, and the sorrows of the old heart broke into words:

Except that grave, you scarce see one
That was not dug by me,

I'd rather dance upon them all,
Than tread upon those three.

And the poet listed to the tale and made it immortal.

Alas! the dear old man is now passing away forever. Our revival upon selfish hygienic grounds of the pagan cemetery leaves him in many a parish an anachronism. And the church has so many new faces about it now, organist, surpliced choirman, acolyte, what not, that the old parish officer scarcely knows the place. And then our legislative destruction of the old parish system has sorely perplexed him and upset his mind.

And worst of all the parson is say. ing: "It is an unsatisfactory thing to have a sexton at all. You cannot re