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Then one further petty reason I have for raising the price. In all my dealings with the public, I wish them to understand that my first price is my lowest. They may have to pay more; but never a farthing less. And I am a little provoked at not having been helped in the least by the Working Men's College, after I taught there for five years, or by any of my old pupils there, whom I have lost sight of:-- and I think they will soon begin to want Fors, now,--and they shall not have it for sevenpence.

The following three stray newspaper cuttings may as well be printed now; they have lain some time by me. The first two relate to economy. The last is, I hope, an exaggerated report; and I give it as an example of the kind of news which my own journal will not give on hearsay. But I know that things did take place in India which were not capable of exaggeration in horror, and such are the results, remember, of our past missionary work, as a whole, in India and China.

I point to them to-day, in order that I may express my entire concurrence in all that I have seen reported of Professor Max M?ller's lecture in Westminster Abbey, though there are one or two things I should like to say in addition, if I can find time.

"Those who find fault with the present Government on account of its rigid economy, and accuse it of shabbiness, have little idea of the straits it is put to for money and the sacrifices it is obliged to make in order to make both ends meet. The following melancholy facts will serve to show how hardly pushed this great nation is to find sixpence even for a good purpose. The Hakluyt Society was, as some of our readers may know, formed in the year 1846 for the purpose of printing in English for distribution among its members rare and valuable voyages, travels, and geographical records, including the more important early narratives of British enterprise. For many years the Home Office, the Board of Trade, and the Admiralty have been in the habit of subscribing for the publications of this society; and considering that an annual subscription of one guinea entitles each subscriber to receive without further charge a copy of every work produced by the society within the year subscribed for, it can hardly be said that the outlay was ruinous to the Exchequer. But we live in an exceptional period; and accordingly last year the society received a communication from the Board of Trade to the effect that its publications were no longer required. Then the Home Office wrote to say that its subscription must be discontinued, and followed up the communication by another, asking whether it might have a copy of the society's publications supplied to it gratuitously. Lastly, the Admiralty felt itself constrained by the urgency of the times to reduce its subscription, and asked to have only one instead of two copies annually. It seems rather hard on the Hakluyt Society that the Home Office should beg to have its publications for nothing, and for the sake of appearance it seems advisable that the Admiralty should continue its subscription for two copies, and lend one set to its impoverished brother in Whitehall until the advent of better times."--Pall Mall Gazette.

"We make a present of a suggestion to Professor Beesly, Mr. Frederic Harrison, and the artisans who are calling upon the country to strike a blow for France. They must appoint a Select Committee to see what war really means. Special commissioners will find out for them how many pounds, on an average, have been lost by the families whose breadwinners have gone to Paris with the King, or to Le Mans with Chanzy. Those hunters of facts will also let the working men know how many fields are unsown round Metz and on the Loire. Next, the Select Committee will get an exact return of the killed and wounded from Count Bismarck and M. Gambetta. Some novelist or poet--a George Eliot or a Browning--will then be asked to lavish all the knowledge of human emotion in the painting of one family group out of the half-million which the returns of the stricken will show. That picture will be distributed broadcast among the working men and their wives. Then the Select Committee will call to its aid the statisticians and the political economists--the Leone Levis and the John Stuart Mills. Those authorities will calculate what sum the war has taken from the wages fund of France and Germany; what number of working men it will cast out of employment, or force to accept lower wages, or compel to emigrate." "Thus the facts will be brought before the toiling people, solidly, simply, truthfully. Finally, Professor Beesly and Mr. Harrison will call another meeting, will state the results of the investigation, will say, 'This is the meaning of war,' and will ask the workmen whether they are prepared to pay the inevitable price of helping Republican France. The answer, we imagine, would at once shock and surprise the scholarly gentlemen to whom the Democrats are indebted for their logic and their rhetoric. Meanwhile Mr. Ruskin and the Council of the Workmen's National Peace Society have been doing some small measure of the task which we have mapped out. The Council asks the bellicose section of the operative classes a number of questions about the cost and the effect of battles. Some, it is true, are not very cogent, and some are absurd; but, taken together, they press the inquiry whether war pays anybody, and in particular whether it pays the working man. Mr. Ruskin sets forth the truth much more vividly in the letter which appeared in our impression of Thursday. 'Half the money lost by the inundation of the Tiber,' etc., .

"Before stating what might have been done with the force which has been spent in the work of mutual slaughter, Mr. Ruskin might have explained what good it has undone, and how. Take, first, the destruction of capital. Millions of pounds have been spent on gunpowder, bombs, round shot, cannon, needle guns, chassep?ts, and mitrailleuses. But for the war, a great part of the sum would have been expended in the growing of wheat, the spinning of cloth, the building of railway bridges, and the construction of ships. As the political economists say, the amount would have been spent productively, or, to use the plain words of common speech, would have been so used that, directly or indirectly, it would have added to the wealth of the country, and increased the fund to be distributed among the working people. But the wealth has been blown away from the muzzle of the cannon, or scattered among the woods and forts of Paris in the shape of broken shells and dismounted guns. Now, every shot which is fired is a direct loss to the labouring classes of France and Germany. King William on the one side, and General Trochu on the other, really load their guns with gold. They put the wages of the working people into every shell. The splinters of iron that strew the fields represent the pay which would have gone to the farm labourers of Alsace, the mechanics of Paris and Berlin, and the silk weavers of Lyons. If the political economist were some magician, he would command the supernatural agent to transform the broken gun-carriages, the fragments of bombs, and the round shot into loaves of bread, bottles of wine, fields of corn, clothes, houses, cattle, furniture, books, the virtue of women, the health of children, the years of the aged. The whole field would become alive with the forms, the wealth, the beauty, the bustle of great cities. If working men ever saw such a transformation, they would rise up from end to end of Europe, and execrate the King or Emperor who should let loose the dogs of war. And yet such a scene would represent only a small part of the real havoc. For every man whom Germany takes away from the field or the workshop to place in the barrack or the camp, she must sustain as certain a loss as if she were to cast money into the sea. The loss may be necessary as an insurance against still greater injury; but nevertheless the waste does take place, and on the working people does it mainly fall. The young recruit may have been earning thirty shillings a week or a day, and that sum is lost to himself or his friends. Hitherto he has supported himself; now he must be maintained by the State--that is, by his fellow-subjects. Hitherto he has added to the national wealth by ploughing the fields, building houses, constructing railways. A skilful statistician could state, with some approach to accuracy, the number of pounds by which the amount of his yearly productive contribution could be estimated. It might be thirty, or a hundred, or a thousand. Well, he ceases to produce the moment that he becomes a soldier. He is then a drone. He is as unproductive as a pauper. The millions of pounds spent in feeding and drilling the army as clearly represent a dead loss as the millions spent on workhouses. Nor are these the only ways in which war destroys wealth. Hundreds of railway bridges have been broken down; the communications between different parts of the country have been cut off; hundreds of thousands have lost their means of livelihood; and great tracts of country are wasted like a desert. Thus the total destruction of wealth has been appalling. A considerable time ago Professor Leone Levi calculated that Germany alone had lost more than ?300,000,000; France must have lost much more; and, even if we make a liberal discount from so tremendous a computation, we may safely say that the war has cost both nations at least half as much as the National Debt of England.

"A large part of that amount, it is true, would have been spent unproductively, even if the war had not taken place. A vast sum would have been lavished on the luxuries of dress and the table, on the beauties of art, and on the appliances of war. But it is safe to calculate that at least half of the amount would have been so expended as to bring a productive return. Two or three hundred millions would have been at the service of peace; and Mr. Ruskin's letter points the question, What could have been done with that enormous total? If it were at the disposal of an English statesman as farseeing in peace as Bismarck is in war, what might not be done for the England of the present and the future? The prospect is almost millennial. Harbours of refuge might be built all round the coast; the fever dens of London, Manchester, and Liverpool might give place to abodes of health; the poor children of the United Kingdom might be taught to read and write; great universities might be endowed; the waste lands might be cultivated, and the Bog of Allen drained; the National Debt could be swiftly reduced; and a hundred other great national enterprises would sooner or later be fulfilled. But all this store of human good has been blown away from the muzzles of the Krupps and the chassep?ts. It has literally been transformed into smoke. We do not deny that such a waste may be necessary in order to guard against still further destruction. Wars have often been imperative. It would frequently be the height of national wickedness to choose an ignoble peace. Nevertheless war is the most costly and most wasteful of human pursuits. When the working class followers of Professor Beesly ask themselves what is the price of battle, what it represents, and by whom the chief part is paid, they will be better able to respond to the appeal for armed intervention than they were on Tuesday night."--Daily Telegraph, January 14th, 1871.

"The story of the massacre of Tientsin, on the 21st June last, is told in a private letter dated Cheefoo, June 30th, published in Thursday's Standard, but the signature of which is not given. The horrors narrated are frightful, and remembering how frequently stories of similar horrors in the Mutiny melted away on close investigation,--though but too many were true,--we may hope that the writer, who does not seem to have been in Tientsin at the time, has heard somewhat exaggerated accounts. Yet making all allowances for this, there was evidently horror enough. The first attack was on the French Consul, who was murdered, the Chinese mandarins refusing aid. Then the Consulate was broken open, and two Catholic priests murdered, as well as M. and Madame Thomassin, an attach? to the Legation at Pekin and his bride. Then came the worst part. The mob, acting with regular Chinese soldiers, it is said, whom their officers did not attempt to restrain, attacked the hospital of the French Sisters of Charity, stripped them, exposed them to the mob, plucked out their eyes, mutilated them in other ways, and divided portions of their flesh among the infuriated people, and then set fire to the hospital, in which a hundred orphan children, who were the objects of the sisters' care, were burnt to death."--The Spectator, September 3, 1870.

FORS CLAVIGERA.

Herne Hill, December, 1873.

The laws of Florence in the fourteenth century, for us in the nineteenth!

Even so, good reader. You have, perhaps, long imagined that the judges of Israel, and heroes of Greece, the consuls of Rome, and the dukes of Venice, the powers of Florence, and the kings of England, were all merely the dim foreshadowings and obscure prophecyings of the advent of the Jones and Robinson of the future: demi-gods revealed in your own day, whose demi-divine votes, if luckily coincident upon any subject, become totally divine, and establish the ordinances thereof, for ever.

You will find it entirely otherwise, gentlemen, whether of the suburb, or centre. Laws small and great, for ever unchangeable;--irresistible by all the force of Robinson, and unimprovable by finest jurisprudence of Jones, have long since been known, and, by wise nations, obeyed. Out of the statute books of one of these I begin with an apparently unimportant order, but the sway of it cuts deep.

"No person whatsoever shall buy fish, to sell it again, either in the market of Florence, or in any markets in the state of Florence."

It is one of many such laws, entirely abolishing the profession of middleman, or costermonger of perishable articles of food, in the city of the Lily.

"Entirely abolishing!--nonsense!" thinks your modern commercial worship. "Who was to prevent private contract?"

Nobody, my good sir;--there is, as you very justly feel, no power in law whatever to prevent private contract. No quantity of laws, penalties, or constitutions, can be of the slightest use to a public inherently licentious and deceitful. There is no legislation for liars and traitors. They cannot be prevented from the pit; the earth finally swallows them. They find their level against all embankment--soak their way down, irrestrainably, to the gutter grating;--happiest the nation that most rapidly so gets rid of their stench. There is no law, I repeat, for these, but gravitation. Organic laws can only be serviceable to, and in general will only be written by, a public of honourable citizens, loyal to their state, and faithful to each other.

The profession of middleman was then, by civic consent, and formal law, rendered impossible in Florence with respect to fish. What advantage the modern blessed possibility of such mediatorial function brings to our hungry multitudes; and how the miraculous draught of fishes, which living St. Peter discerns, and often dextrously catches--"the shoals of them like shining continents," --are by such apostolic succession miraculously diminished, instead of multiplied; and, instead of baskets full of fragments taken up from the ground, baskets full of whole fish laid down on it, lest perchance any hungry person should cheaply eat of the same,--here is a pleasant little account for you, by my good and simple clergyman's wife. It would have been better still, if I had not been forced to warn her that I wanted it for Fors, which of course took the sparkle out of her directly. Here is one little naughty bit of private preface, which really must go with the rest. "I have written my little letter about the fish trade, and L. says it is all right. I am afraid you won't think there is anything in it worth putting in Fors, as I really know very little about it, and absolutely nothing that every one else does not know, except ladies, who generally never trouble about anything, but scold their cooks, and abuse the fishmongers--when they cannot pay the weekly bills easily."

"The poor fishermen who toil all through these bitter nights, and the retail dealer who carries heavy baskets, or drags a truck so many weary miles along the roads, get but a poor living out of their labour; but what are called 'fish salesmen,' who by reason of their command of capital keep entire command of the London markets are making enormous fortunes.

"When you ask the fishermen why they do not manage better for themselves at the present demand for fish, they explain how helpless they are in the hands of what they call 'the big men.' Some fishermen at Aldborough, who have a boat of their own, told my brother that one season, when the sea seemed full of herrings, they saw in the newspapers how dear they were in London, and resolved to make a venture on their own account; so they spent all their available money in the purchase of a quantity of the right sort of baskets, and, going out to sea, filled them all,--putting the usual five hundred lovely fresh fish in each,--sent them straight up to London by train, to the charge of a salesman they knew of, begging him to send them into the market and do the best he could for them. But he was very angry with the fishermen; and wrote them word that the market was quite sufficiently stocked; that if more fish were sent in, the prices would go down; that he should not allow their fish to be sold at all; and, if they made a fuss about it, he would not send their baskets back, and would make them pay the carriage. As it was, he returned them, after a time; but the poor men never received one farthing for their thousands of nice fish, and only got a scolding for having dared to try and do without the agents, who buy the fish from the boats at whatever price they choose to settle amongst themselves.

"When we were at Yarmouth this autumn, the enormous abundance of herrings on the fish quay was perfectly wonderful; it must be, two hundred yards long, and is capable of accommodating the unloading of a perfect fleet of boats. The 'swills,' as they call the baskets, each containing five hundred fish, were side by side, touching each other, all over this immense space, and men were shovelling salt about, with spades, over heaps of fish, previous to packing at once in boxes. I said, 'How surprised our poor people would be to see such a sight, after constantly being obliged to pay three-halfpence for every herring they buy.' An old fisherman answered me, saying, 'No one need pay that, ma'am, if we could get the fish to them; we could have plenty more boats, and plenty more fish, if we could have them taken where the poor people could get them.' We brought home a hundred dried herrings, for which we paid ten shillings; when we asked if we might buy some lovely mackerel on the Fish Quay, they said, that they were not allowed to sell them there, except all at once. Since then, I have read an account of a Royal Commission having been investigating the subject of the fishery for some time past, and the result of its inquiries seems to prove that it is inexhaustible, and that in the North Sea it is always harvest-time.

"When I told our fishmonger all about it, he said I was quite right about the 'big men' in London, and added, 'They will not let us have the fish under their own prices; and if it is so plentiful that they cannot sell it all at that, they have it thrown away, or carted off for manure; sometimes sunk in the river. If we could only get it here, my trade would be twice what it is, for, except sprats, the poor can seldom buy fish now.'

"I asked him if the new Columbia Market was of no use in making things easier, but he said, 'No;' that these salesmen had got that into their hands also; and were so rich that they would keep any number of markets in their own hands. A few hundred pounds sacrificed any day to keep up the prices they think well worth their while."

What do you think of that, by way of Free-trade?--my British-never-never-never-will-be-slaves,--hey? Free-trade; and the Divine Law of Supply and Demand; and the Sacred Necessity of Competition, and what not;--and here's a meek little English housewife who can't get leave, on her bended knees, from Sultan Costermonger, to eat a fresh herring at Yarmouth! and must pay three-halfpence apiece, for his leave to eat them anywhere;--and you, you simpletons--Fishermen, indeed!--Cod's heads and shoulders, say rather,--meekly receiving back your empty baskets; your miracle of loaves and fishes executed for you by the Costermongering Father of the Faithful, in that thimblerig manner!

"But haven't you yourself been hard against competition, till now? and haven't you always wanted to regulate prices?"

Yes, my good SS. Peter and Andrew!--very certainly I want to regulate prices; and very certainly I will, as to such things as I sell, or have the selling of. I should like to hear of anybody's getting this letter for less than tenpence!--and if you will send me some fish to sell for you, perhaps I may even resolve that they shall be sold at twopence each, or else made manure of,--like these very costermongers; but the twopence shall go into your pockets--not mine; which you will find a very pleasant and complete difference in principle between his Grace the Costermonger and me; and, secondly, if I raise the price of a herring to twopence, it will be because I know that people have been in some way misusing them, or wasting them; and need to get fewer for a time; or will eat twopenny herrings at fashionable tables, and so give the servants no reason to turn up their noses at them. I may have twenty such good reasons for fixing the price of your fish; but not one of them will be his Grace the Costermonger's. All that I want you to see is, not only the possibility of regulating prices, but the fact that they are now regulated, and regulated by rascals, while all the world is bleating out its folly about Supply and Demand.

"Still, even in your way, you would be breaking the laws of Florence, anyhow, and buying to sell again?" Pardon me: I should no more buy your fish than a butcher's boy buys his master's mutton. I should simply carry your fish for you where I knew it was wanted; being as utterly your servant in the matter as if I were one of your own lads sent dripping up to the town with basket on back. And I should be paid, as your servant, so much wages; making bargains far away for you, and many another Saunders Mucklebackit, just as your wife makes them, up the hill at Monkbarns; and no more buying the fish, to sell again, than she.

"Well, but where could we get anybody to do this?"

Have you no sons then?--or, among them, none whom you can take from the mercy of the sea, and teach to serve you mercifully on the land?

It is not that way, however, that the thing will be done. It must be done for you by gentlemen. They may stagger on perhaps a year or two more in their vain ways; but the day must come when your poor little honest puppy, whom his people have been wanting to dress up in a surplice, and call, "The to be Feared," that he might have pay enough, by tithe or tax, to marry a pretty girl, and live in a parsonage,--some poor little honest wretch of a puppy, I say, will eventually get it into his glossy head that he would be incomparably more reverend to mortals, and acceptable to St. Peter and all Saints, as a true monger of sweet fish, than a false fisher for rotten souls; and that his wife would be incomparably more 'lady-like'--not to say Madonna-like--marching beside him in purple stockings and sabots--or even frankly barefoot--with her creel full of caller herring on her back, than in administering any quantity of Ecclesiastical scholarship to her Sunday-schools.

"How dreadful--how atrocious!"--thinks the tender clerical lover. "My wife walk with a fish-basket on her back!"

Yes, you young scamp, your's. You were going to lie to the Holy Ghost, then, were you, only that she might wear satin slippers and be called a 'lady'? Suppose, instead of fish, I were to ask her and you to carry coals. Have you ever read your Bible carefully enough to wonder where Christ got them from, to make His fire, ? Or if I asked you to be hewers of wood, and drawers of water;--would that also seem intolerable to you? My poor clerical friends, God was never more in the burning bush of Sinai than He would be in every crackling faggot that you warmed a poor hearth with: nor did that woman of Samaria ever give Him to drink more surely than you may, from every stream and well in this your land, that you can keep pure.

You lawyers, also,--distributors, by your own account, of the quite supreme blessing of Justice,--you are not so busily eloquent in her cause but that some of your sweet voices might be spared to Billingsgate, though the river air might take the curl out of your wigs, and so diminish that aesthetic claim which, as aforesaid, you still hold on existence. But you will bring yourselves to an end soon,--wigs and all,--unless you think better of it.

I will dismiss at once, in this letter, the question of regulation of prices, and return to it no more, except in setting down detailed law.

Any rational group of persons, large or small, living in war or peace, will have its commissariat;--its officers for provision of food. Famine in a fleet, or an army, may sometimes be inevitable; but in the event of national famine, the officers of the commissariat should be starved the first. God has given to man corn, wine, cheese, and honey, all preservable for a number of years;--filled His seas with inexhaustible salt, and incalculable fish; filled the woods with beasts, the winds with birds, and the fields with fruit. Under these circumstances, the stupid human brute stands talking metaphysics, and expects to be fed by the law of Supply and Demand. I do not say that I shall always succeed in regulating prices, or quantities, absolutely to my mind; but in the event of any scarcity of provision, rich tables shall be served like the poorest, and--we will see.

The price of every other article will be founded on the price of food. The price of what it takes a day to produce, will be a day's maintenance; of what it takes a week to produce, a week's maintenance,--such maintenance being calculated according to the requirements of the occupation, and always with a proportional surplus for saving.

"How am I to know exactly what a day's maintenance is?" I don't want to know exactly. I don't know exactly how much dinner I ought to eat; but, on the whole, I eat enough, and not too much. And I shall not know 'exactly' how much a painter ought to have for a picture. It may be a pound or two under the mark--a pound or two over. On the average it will be right,--that is to say, his decent keep during the number of days' work that are properly accounted for in the production.

"How am I to hinder people from giving more if they like?"

People whom I catch doing as they like will generally have to leave the estate.

"But how is it to be decided to which of two purchasers, each willing to give its price, and more, anything is to belong?"

In various ways, according to the nature of the thing sold, and circumstances of sale. Sometimes by priority; sometimes by privilege; sometimes by lot; and sometimes by auction, at which whatever excess of price, above its recorded value, the article brings, shall go to the national treasury. So that nobody will ever buy anything to make a profit on it.

I find myself in the Umfraville Hotel, a quarter of a mile long by a furlong deep; in a ghastly room, five-and-twenty feet square, and eighteen high,--that is to say, just four times as big as I want, and which I can no more light with my candles in the evening than I could the Peak cavern. A gas apparatus in the middle of it serves me to knock my head against, but I take good care not to light it, or I should soon be stopped from my evening's work by a headache, and be unfit for my morning's business besides. The carpet is threadbare, and has the look of having been spat upon all over. There is only one window, of four huge panes of glass, through which one commands a view of a plaster balcony, some ornamental iron railings, an esplanade,--and,--well, I suppose,--in the distance, that is really the sea, where it used to be. I am ashamed to ask for shrimps,--not that I suppose I could get any if I did. There's no cream, "because, except in the season, we could only take so small a quanity, sir." The bread's stale, because it's Sunday; and the cheese, last night, was of the cheapest tallow sort. The bill will be at least three times my old bill;--I shall get no thanks from anybody for paying it;--and this is what the modern British public thinks is "living in style." But the most comic part of all the improved arrangements is that I can only have codlings for dinner, because all the cod goes to London, and none of the large fishing-boats dare sell a fish, here.

And now but a word or two more, final, as to the fixed price of this book.

A sensible and worthy tradesman writes to me in very earnest terms of expostulation, blaming me for putting the said book out of the reach of most of the persons it is meant for, and asking me how I can except, for instance, the working men round him ,--who have been in the habit of strictly ascertaining that they have value for their money,--to buy, for tenpence, what they know might be given them for twopence-halfpenny.

Answer first:

My book is meant for no one who cannot reach it. If a man with all the ingenuity of Lancashire in his brains, and breed of Lancashire in his body; with all the steam and coal power in Lancashire to back his ingenuity and muscle; all the press of literary England vomiting the most valuable information at his feet; with all the tenderness of charitable England aiding him in his efforts, and ministering to his needs; with all the liberality of republican Europe rejoicing in his dignities as a man and a brother; and with all the science of enlightened Europe directing his opinions on the subject of the materials of the Sun, and the origin of his species; if, I say, a man so circumstanced, assisted, and informed, living besides in the richest country of the globe, and, from his youth upwards, having been in the habit of 'seeing that he had value for his money,' cannot, as the upshot and net result of all, now afford to pay me tenpence a month--or an annual half-sovereign, for my literary labour,--in Heaven's name, let him buy the best reading he can for twopence-halfpenny. For that sum, I clearly perceive he can at once provide himself with two penny illustrated newspapers and one halfpenny one,--full of art, sentiment, and the Tichborne trial. He can buy a quarter of the dramatic works of Shakspeare, or a whole novel of Sir Walter Scott's. Good value for his money, he thinks!--reads one of them through, and in all probability loses some five years of the eyesight of his old age; which he does not, with all his Lancashire ingenuity, reckon as part of the price of his cheap book. But how has he read? There is an act of Midsummer Night's Dream printed in a page. Steadily and dutifully, as a student should, he reads his page. The lines slip past his eyes, and mind, like sand in an hour-glass; he has some dim idea at the end of the act that he has been reading about Fairies, and Flowers, and Asses. Does he know what a Fairy is? Certainly not. Does he know what a flower is? He has perhaps never seen one wild, or happy, in his life. Does he even know--quite distinctly, inside and out--what an Ass is?

But, answer second. Whether my Lancashire friends need any aid to their discernment of what is good or bad in literature, I do not know;--but I mean to give them the best help I can; and, therefore, not to allow them to have for twopence what I know to be worth tenpence. For here is another law of Florence, still concerning fish, which is transferable at once to literature.

"Eel of the lake shall be sold for three soldi a pound; and eel of the common sort for a soldo and a half."

And eel of a bad sort was not allowed to be sold at all.

You borrow the Times? Borrow this then; till the days come when English people cease to think they can live by lending, or learn by borrowing.

I finish with copy of a bit of a private letter to the editor of an honestly managed country newspaper, who asked me to send him Fors.

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