ornamental shrubs and fruit-trees he planted. The
fixtures will be sixty pounds, and no more.
The claim, though hard, is just, and it is
useless to submit it to arbitration. There is no
appeal against it; and in the midst of all this
distress and entanglement the time for leaving
the house comes.

Mrs. Fifold leaves the old house tearfully,
and sits down in the rooms she has taken at a
neighbouring village, to consider her position.
Mr. Fifold was not a provident man (it is
your snug wealthy man who is provident); he
had assured his life for three thousand pounds,
but out of that sum is to be taken the four
hundred and thirty-four pounds six shillings and
sevenpence-halfpenny for dilapidations, forty
pounds for moving. So much more for funeral
and testamentary charges. The inevitable
result is, lodgings in Rosemarine-row, South
Lambeth; the withdrawal of Johnny from
Eton; the suspension of the governess, and
extreme poverty; until Johnny, having
relinquished his taste for the sea, enters a mercantile
house as a clerk, and helps to maintain
the family, and get the girls out as
governesses.

Now there is something rotten in all this. In
every cathedral town, in every diocese, there
are plenty of sinecurists and ambiguous unpaid
officials. Why could not one be appointed to
see that unbusiness-like and generous men do
not incur gross injustice? A fixed fee could
be appointed for such services, and its
payment divided between the executor of a late
incumbent and his successor. The survey
should be one of the severest routine, extending
to the minutest thing connected with the
stability of the rectory and chancel. A small
sum might be deducted annually from the
proceeds of every living, and reserved for the
purpose of defraying this charge; the excess to be
handed to the widow; the deficiency, on the
other hand, to be supplied her.

At present, the law is too elastic and too
undefined. An artful executor may hoodwink
or deceive the in-comer, if he be careless, hasty,
easy, or generous. The just payment for
real wear and tear may be altogether frittered
away, to the injury, or even ruin, of the
incomer's widow and children. In the same
way a lax or interested surveyor may consent
to so low an estimate on the departure of the
executor or executrix, that the next demand
will be oppressively heavy. If a chancel were
ruinous, a diocesan official surveyor would
prevent its being fraudulently patched up, and
would exact full value for the dilapidation.
At present, it is a mere chance whether a chancel
that would cost sixty pounds to restore, is
not glossed over so as to bring in only ten
pounds to the in-comer. A few years more,
and the injury that could have been mended
for sixty pounds may require a hundred pounds.

Bishops, archdeacons, think of these things,
and remember that they are evils which can
be remedied. Dilapidations should not be left
to private arrangement. A small village living
is no greal prize after twenty or thirty years'
toil in humble drudgery to advance great objects,
after long years spent in reconciling enemies,
in chiding the bad, in encouraging the good,
in consoling the dying, in teaching the young,
in aiding the oppressed, in correcting the ignorant,
in guiding the rich, in succouring the
poor, in soothing the unhappy. Such a
prize should assuredly not lead, on the
death of its winner, to the mortification and
impoverishment of his widow, and perhaps
even to the degradation and beggary of his
children. It should be rendered impossible for
any executor to evade payment of a just claim
to the injury of the unoffending widow of his
successor. If there were no claims for
dilapidations, dishonest and mean people would never
repair rectories; but, as the law now stands,
there is a constant effort, on the one hand, to
avoid any payment, and, on the other, to make
the charge as ruinously high and unmerciful as
possible.

HAVANA CIGARITOS.

WHEREABOUTS, I wonder, did those
wonderful literary gentlemen of the seventeenth and
eighteenth centuries, who were in the habit of
writing epic poems, and, more amazing still, who
persuaded people into reading them, keep the
Muse whom they so frequently invoked? Did
she stand at livery, with Pegasus, and the bird
of Jove, and Juno's peacocks, and Phœbus's
fiery steeds, and other curiosities of natural
history, always ready to be trotted out when it
occurred to the literary gentlemen that a
Somethingiad in Twelve Cantos would be precisely
the kind of thing to take the town, make the
fortune of Mr. Osborn or Mr. Tonson, or
extract a score of gold pieces from the Peer of the
Realm and Patron of the Muses to whom the
Somethingiad was to be dedicated? I want to
know what that Muse did when she wasn't
under process of invocation. It is my opinion
that she was a lazy Muse; for we frequently
find the literary gentlemen bidding her, with
some sharpness, Arise, or Awake, or Tell, or
Say something which, according to their divination,
she had to communicate. She seems, also,
to have been a Muse who had something to give,
and was worth flattering; since that the literary
gentlemen often addressed her by such endearing
epithets as Gentle, Heavenly, Benign, and
Discreet. But they never told anybody where
the Muse lived, or how she was to be "got
at." I fear she was to be heard of most
frequently in the neighbourhood of Grub-street, at
the sign of the Satchel, where the Greek
translators lay three, in a bed, and the gentleman
who did Pindaric odes could only go out on
Sundays through terror of the bailiffs, and the
watchful landlady kept the ladder of the cockloft
occupied by the Scholar and Divine who
did High Church polemics for Mr. Lintot for
half-a-crown a sheet!. We have been told a vast
deal within these latter days about the Curiosities