he is entitled to £100. The fees on the registry, award, and notice, should be very small, not exceeding £1. Supposing the rate of interest be five per cent., an annuity of £5 6s. for sixtyone years, will be equal in value to £100. This annuity the tenant will be entitled to from the occupier of the land. As long as his interest continues, he pays himself, or rather he enjoys the whole benefit of the improvement in lieu of the annuity. If his interest

lasts for sixty-one years, his claim is then at an end; but if his interest expires at the end of, say twenty years, then he will be entitled to an annuity of £5 6s. a year, for the residue of the sixty-one years, that is for forty-one years, or to £91 12s., that being the value of an annuity of £5 6s. a year for forty-one years. But if, instead of twenty years, he remains in possession forty years, then on going out he will be entitled to an annuity of £5 6s. for twenty-one years, or to £67 18s., that being the value of an annuity of £5 6s. for twenty-one years. Thus, the outlay of the tenant will be returned to him, either by the actual enjoyment of his improvements, or by an annuity of equal value for sixty-one years. This annuity should take priority of all charges, incumbrances, and settlements, and should be redeemable by a sum in gross equal to its value, at the option of the landlord.

It may, probably, be objected, that this principle of giving compensation for permanent improvements, would be the occasion of much fraud by causing the tenant to demand, and sometimes to obtain, an excessive value for his improvements. We believe that some frauds would be practised, but not to an extent seriously injurious to the landlord. We are convinced that it would be for the interest of the landlords themselves, that the allowances to the tenants for improvements should rather err on the side of liberality. All the compensation likely to be demanded for improvements, would not amount to so much as at present they annually lose by fraudulent or insolvent tenants. The improving tenant would be found honest and punctual in his payments. Every improvement would be an investment of his capital, yielding him present happiness and future profit, with this advantage to the landlord and the country, that it could not be fraudulently carried away.

But that this proposed improvement

of the law should produce all the good results that might be reasonably expected from it, a change must be made in the custom of dealing between landlord and tenant in one important point, viz., the payment of rent. The engagement to pay rent at certain periods must be treated as a contract to be fulfilled. The landlord must set his land to such tenants, and on such terms, that payment of rent as it falls due, should be the rule not the excep tion. Nothing good can be expected from a tenant who is oppressed by a load of debt which he never expects to discharge. The debt from a tenant to a landlord is not based on any principle of commercial credit; it originates in a breach of engagement, and is equally ruinous to both parties. The general practice of the Irish landlord with regard to arrears of rent is equally senseless and illiberal. The rent is too high, or the tenant has suffered some loss which disables him from paying it, or by his negligent farming he has not obtained a fair produce from the soil, or he is fraudufent, and pretends inability. Policy and justice seem to require that in the two former cases, an abated sum should be accepted in full discharge of his rent; in the two latter cases proceedings should be taken to compel the dishonest to pay; but to follow either course requires some trouble and some decision, and the Irish practice is to take a middle course, neither to enforce the rent nor to remit it, but to give the tenant time, until, by the repetition of this process every half year, the honest tenant is crushed by a hopeless load of debt, and the dishonest escapes with a fortune to some other land. Experience shews that arrears once permitted to accumulate are never cleared off by payment, but the habit of giving time for payment is so inveterate, that the landlord who should set his land at a moderate rent,

and exact punctual payment, would be looked upon as a monster when contrasted with the man who required fifty per cent. more rent, but allowed his tenants a hanging gale. The difference is the same as that between the tradesman who sells his goods for ready money and moderate prices, and him whose system is to give long credit and charge high prices. The one system encourages prudence and economy, the other holds out a temptation to improvidence and dishonesty.

Unfortunately our legislation and the practice of the Court of Chancery encourage the vicious system. While the mortgagee or creditor, who permits arrears of interest to accumulate for more than six years, loses the excess, although he could not have recovered them without an expensive chancery suit; the landlord, whose remedy by distress is so simple, is permitted to recover twenty years' arrears of rent. When a receiver is appointed by the Court of Chancery to collect rents, the very rules of the court indicate that he is not expected to collect them until five months after they fall due, and it is notorious that arrears are permitted to accumulate to an excessive amount on the estates under the management of the court. This should not be. The Court of Chancery is the greatest landlord in Ireland, whether in respect of the extent of property, or its value, or the number of tenants under its jurisdiction. It is also the most powerful landlord, and has ample means of compelling tenants to perform their duty, of rewarding the honest, and punishing the dishonest. It should distinguish between the good and the bad tenant, permitting the one to hold his land at a moderate rent, and compelling the other to give up the land, or perform his engagements.

We frequently hear of landlords being praised for the indulgence which permits tenants to run largely in arrear. To us such arrears are a proof, either that an honest tenant is oppressed, or a dishonest one rewarded. The improvement which we aim at in the relation between landlord and tenant is, that the tenant should commence every year as a freeman, and that an arrear of rent should be like an unpaid bill of exchange, a mark of dishonesty or insolvency in the debtor. Let the landlord either remit his rent or enforce it (we know that an arrear of rent once allowed to accumulate is seldom paid off, or materially reduced). No law can prevent men from giving credit or running in debt, but it may be altered so as to give no unnecessary encouragement to such courses. think two alterations would contribute to the desirable result; a tenantry free from debt, and a body of landlords with well-paid incomes. Let a landlord possess the same means as any other creditor of recovering a debt due to him by his tenant, but let him not

We

be permitted to distrain for any rent that is more than one year due, and (making a total alteration in the principle of the ejectment law) let an ejectment by summary process be the remedy for a single gale of rent, but not for previous arrears. There is in reality no process for the recovery of rent, which is so just and moderate as an ejectment. It is merely depriving the tenant of the possession of property which he has hired, and for which he has neglected to pay, and it has this advantage, that the more moderate the rent, the greater the default of the tenant, the more efficacious will be that remedy. The process should be simply this. If the rent due 1st November be not paid on demand, the landlord should be entitled to an order, calling upon the tenant to shew cause within a short time why he should not be deprived of possession. The time given to show cause should, in ordinary cases, be very short, as in general there could be no defence, except asserting that the rent was paid, or denying the tenancy. If no cause be shewn and proved, let the tenant be put out of possession, and have one month to redeem on payment of one gale of rent, with very moderate costs in an undefended case.

There has been, undoubtedly, a great competition among comparative paupers for the possession of land on any terms; because the mere possession was to the pauper tenant worth about as much as the expense and loss which the landlord must incur in removing him. The landlord found it so expensive and tedious to procure justice from the law, that he was almost compelled to set the demoralising example of bribing the dishonest tenant to give up possession of land, which he had no lawful right to hold. The advantage of mere possession to the insolvent was so great, that a solvent farmer could never compete with the magnificence of his offers. The competition for land was therefore a competition among paupers, from which the solvent tenant was excluded. But, let the state of the law be altered-let the landlord, when his right is clear, be entitled to justice prompt and cheap, and the dishonest or insolvent tenant, who can no longer hope to make an unlawful gain by selling his power to do wrong, will permit the honest and solvent tenant to obtain the land on moderate terms. The rent will be, not that sum which

a tenant who expects almost unlimited credit may promise to pay, but that sum which a tenant can undertake to pay punctually as it falls due, with the certainty that punctuality will be required by the landlord, whose remedies grow weaker if he permits arrears of rent to accumulate. Some of our readers may be so much accustomed to consider a large arrear of rent as the normal condition of an Irish tenant, that they will probably feel shocked at the idea of a summary eviction of a tenant who owes a single gale of rent. They will conjure up every possible excuse which may disable the most honest and industrious tenant from fulfilling his engagements at the appointed time. But it is obvious that such imaginary cases ought not to influence the legislation which should be adopted to meet the general rule, rather than the rare exception; and the general rule must be, that a man will be able to fulfil the engagements into which he has deliberately entered. One half-year's rent cannot be a very serious sum for a tenant to pay; if it be, it is a still more serious debt for him to incur, in addition to his future liabilities. On an emergency he may probably borrow it from his neighbours, if they can afford to lend it; or, in a fair case, the landlord would rather give up half-a-year's rent than lose a tenant of whose future punctuality he saw no reason to doubt. Even in case of eviction the tenant would seldom find much difficulty in redeeming his farm within the month, as for that purpose only one half-year's rent, with very moderate costs, would be required. We have not space to develope all the changes in the habits of the people which would result from the above simple alterations in the law. Their obvious tendency must be to produce well-cultivated and improved farms; a substantial yeomanry, having valuable interests in the land produced by their own exertions, and secured to them by the just provisions of the law; landlords with well-secured rents, on the punctual payment of which they can depend with certainty, and free from those embarrassments into which the owner of an apparently large, but ill-paid income is so apt to fall.

Let those who will dwell on the hardship of evicting a tenant who, by

unavoidable misfortune, is prevented from paying his rent punctually, remember that as the law now stands the landlord may, by distress, sweep away all his property, or ruin him by an expensive action, if the rent be not punctually paid. This right is seldom vexatiously exercised, and we do not apprehend that an honest tenant will be ever evicted for non-payment of rent. The man who breaks his contract must be, in some respects, at the mercy of his creditor.

We should extend the same principle to the case of ejectment on termination of tenancy. The proceeding should be summary, cheap, and, above all, so certain, that a defendant, holding possession unjustly, should know that he has no chance of success in a law-suit. A grievous injury is done to the public whenever wrong obtains an unexpected triumph, by some technical objection to the proceedings. This is now so common, that nothing is more usual than for paupers to take defence to an ejectment, in the wellfounded hope of being able to retain possession for some considerable length of time by some point on the demises, or services, or affidavits, or statutes, which may invalidate, or, at all events, delay the proceedings. If our present system of landlord and tenant law prevents the landlord from doing justice to an honest, solvent, improving tenant, or from obtaining justice from an insolvent or fraudulent one, it can surprise nobody that the land should be frequently occupied by the latter class, or that men, feeling that there is something wrong in the law, should follow any agitators who propose a remedy, as men labouring under chronic diseases are attracted by the promises and pretensions of every ignorant and unprincipled quack. The best mode of extinguishing the tenant-right agitation is to redress the evils in which it originates. Is the competition for land too high? Remove the tempta tion to dishonest applicants, by which that competition is at present enhanced. Is the rent demanded generally too high? Remove all inducements to the tenant to offer, or to the landlord to exact, too much. Is the ordinary term of a lease too short? Let the law be altered, so that neither the public nor the tenant shall sustain an injury by the termination of a lease.

SOMEWHAT more than thirty years ago, when Sir Walter Scott was pouring forth his anonymous novels, when Jeffrey was the king of Whig critics, when Professor Wilson, with Lockhart and the Ettrick Shepherd for his companions, was holding his Noctes Ambrosiana, in connexion with Blackwood's Magazine, and when, made illustrious by the presence of such men, Edinburgh was all but the literary capital of the country, there might have been seen in Leith Walk, which is a long suburb stretching from Edinburgh to its port-town of Leith, two small bookshops kept by two brothers of the name of Chambers. It would have been found on inquiry that these two young men, of whom the elder was named William and the younger Robert, were natives of Peebles, a pretty town on Tweedside; that they were the sons of parents who had known better days; and that, fortune having thrown them upon their own resources at a time of life when most young men of the middle class are only leaving school, they had chosen a course, which, though humble, gave an incidental gratification to the superior tastes which their early education had led them to contract, and were pursuing it with a zeal, a tenacity of purpose, and a spirit of self-dependence, extraordinary at their age and in their circumstances.

Of the early struggles of the two brothers it is not in our power to say much. For several years, until they took the step of removing from Leith Walk into Edinburgh, they increased their business by slow degrees, gradually forming acquaintanceships among the book-buying and bookselling portions of the Edinburgh community. To eke out the profits of his small trade, William had taught himself the art of printing; and at this branch of business he continued to work for some years as his own compositor and pressman, being unable to pay for assistance. More than this, he ingeniously cut in wood the larger kind of types which he had not the means of purchasing; and he bound with his own hands the whole impression of a small volume, the publication of which his

enterprise had induced him to undertake. An aged gentleman is still in the habit of telling that, in going home late at night through Leith Walk, he never failed to observe that, while all the rest of the street was shrouded in silence and darkness, lights gleamed from the window of William Chambers's small printing-room, whence issued also the wheasy sounds of his evertoiling press. Industry like this could scarcely fail of its reward.

Occupied either in the mechanical preparation or in the sale of books, the two young men began, about or even before the time of their removal into Edinburgh to be known by their own efforts in literature. Whether it was native instinct, or their habit of handling books professionally that led them immediately into the temptation of authorship, it might be difficult to say; in the particular nature, however, of their early efforts in this line, one sees a clear proof that both of them possessed from the first something of that innate and intense amor patriæ, which has constituted for probably half of the whole number of literary Scotchmen, the primary impulse and determination towards the literary calling.

Every Scotchman, of any culture or intelligence, has a taste for the antiquities of his native country. Whereever in the wide world a Scotchman ultimately fixes his abode-whatever amount of various training it may be his fortune to receive-to whatever mode of intellectual activity he may at last give himself up, whether to politics, to poetry, to metaphysics, to science, or to stockjobbing-there will still necessarily be found at his heart, by those that can succeed in reaching it, an undissolved knot of national feeling, of purely sentimental attachment to that jagged little bit of the general British area which lies north of the Tweed.

"The rough bur-thistle, spreading wide Amang the bearded bear,

I turned the weeding-heuk aside,
And spared the symbol dear:
No nation, no station,
My envy e'er could raise:
A Scot still, but blot still,
I knew nae higher praise."

All Scotchmen share this feeling of Burns. Indeed this sentiment of the Thistle, if we may so call it, seems to be the only piece of original moral capital with which Scotland furnishes all her children indiscriminately. All Scotchmen have not the same type of head; nor, whatever may be the common opinion on the subject, are all Scotchmen prudent and cautious; but this one quality all Scotchmen certainly do possess in common-affection for Scotland. Connecting this one element of Scotticism with whatever other kinds of mental stuff he chooses, a Scotchman may be anything possible in the world— a transcendentalist or a Joseph Hume; a saint or a debauchee; a poet or a maker of fish-hooks: nevertheless, as possessing this one quality upon which they can always fall back for agreement, Scotchmen are more homogeneous than Englishmen. And, as we have already said, much of the literary effort of Scottish authors has been determined by this strong feeling of nationality. The poetry of Burns, for example, and the writings of Sir Walter Scott, are pre-eminently Scottish in their character. No English compositions can be cited that exhibit such a surcharge of the peculiar element of Anglicism, whatever that is, as these compositions exhibit of the element of Scotticism. The greatness of Shakspeare and of Milton does not possess, or, as some might say, is not marred by, any feature of special nationality; but in reading Burns and Sir Walter, it is almost essential to remember that they were Scotchmen. And even of literary Scotchmen of a different class of such general thinkers and writers, for example, as Adam Smith, Reid, Hume, and Chalmers, in whose intellectual exhibitions there has been nothing deliberately or formally Scotch-even of such writers and thinkers it may be observed, that, privately, and for their own solace, they have always retained much of the specially Scottish sentiment and humour. There is a curious instance of this in the evident delight, we had almost said glee, with which Sir William Hamilton of Edinburgh, a man whose speculative intellect is, perhaps, more pure and less limited by local or national associations than that of any other living Briton, traces, in his recent edition of Reid's Works, the course of the tributary of Scottish

thought through the whole modern history of philosophy; pointing out, for example, for the credit of his native country such facts as these-that the grandfather of Sir Isaac Newton was a Scotchman from East Lothian; that Kant himself had Scottish blood in his veins; and that the celebrated French thinker, Destutt Tracy, was a scion of the uneuphonic Scottish clan of Stott.

Thirty years ago the Scottish sentimest was stronger in Scotchmen than it now is; and there were circumstances in the position of the two Chamberses to enhance even that portion of it which, in common with all Scotchmen, they had received from nature. Natives of a provincial Scottish town not without its claim to antiquarian notice, they had removed to Edinburgh, just at the time of life when they were most fit to receive new impressions. Now no one that has not gone through the experience can tell the effects of a first contact with Edinburgh and its society upon a young Scotchman that has removed thither from a provincial town.

"Edinburgh to a young provincial who sees it for the first time! O! the complex strangeness of the impression! The reekier atmosphere; the picturesque outline of the whole built mass against the sky; the heights and hollows; the free-stone houses; the different aspect of the shops; the dialect so new that one hears from the children in the streets-the impression of all this is indescribable. Everything is strange; the very dust seems to be blown by the wind in a new and mystic manner. And then, when the town is taken in detail. The Calton Hill; Arthur seat; the High-street, with its closes; the Castle, with Mons Meg and the Regalia; John Knox's house; Holyrood Palace; Princes'-street, along which Sir Walter Scott limped; the whole of the New Town, and the great black chasm, lampstudded at night, which separates it from the Old-all so poetic, so novel! And then, here to have so many historical facts and incidents visibly bodied forth! Rizzio's blood, the Martyrs' grave, the spot where Mitchell shot at Archbishop Sharpe; one can go and see it all. Surely, to be born in this city is a privilege; to have lived in it, and not to love it, is for a Scotchman impossible.' City of my choice,' one might say with Richter, 'to which I would belong on this side the grave!'"

So writes some enthusiastic Scot regarding Edinburgh as it now is, or as it was a little while ago; and thirty