but by "idle curiosity." They "arrive unprejudiced," however, in which frame of mind they offer a noble contrast to the judge, whose shameful partiality is painted in glaring colors. That laymen and lay women should blunder is natural enough, however; it is natural enough even when the laymen, Charles Reade and Anthony Trollope, for example, had eaten dinners at Lincoln's Inn. But that Samuel Warren, a trained lawyer, in active practice, a Q. C, should make an error in the very turning-point of a novel written with the utmost care and elaborated with great effect, is really remarkable. Yet this is only the fact. In "Ten Thousand a Year," when the crisis of interest has been reached in the trial scene, a deed which would have decided the case is set aside by the judge because an erasure is discovered in a material point. The clerk who had engrossed the deed had made the erasure through carelessness. It is true that Blackstone lays the rule down without qualification that an erasure vitiates a deed. But the weight of authority, from Coke down to Greenleaf, has decided that the jury must determine whether the erasure was made before or after signing, and unless they find it was made after signing the deed will stand.
Here is "Ivan Ilyitch and other Stories," by Count Lyof N. Tolstoï (Thomas Y. Crowell & Co.), which Nathan Haskell Dole has translated from the Russian. Ivan Ilyitch is the story of a sick-room. Is the pathology all right? one cannot help asking. Whatever the doctors may say, the preachers at least can have no fault to find with the story, except that it usurps their function. It is one of the most forcible sermons ever penned,—as forcible as that ghastly and terrible chapter in which Carlyle has pictured Louis XV. on his death-bed. The incidents are of the simplest. Ivan Ilyitch is a Russian official. An average man mentally and morally, who takes the world as he finds it, who aims only to live comfortably and respectably in the eyes of his neighbors, who is absorbed in the minutiæ of daily life and in vulgar thoughts and ambitions, he has no leisure to cultivate the higher emotions or the kindly affections. At the period of his greatest worldly success he injures himself by a fall while arranging his new residence in obedience to the whims of his querulous wife and his own aspirations for elegance. It is nothing, apparently,—only a slight bruise, which passes off in a day or two. But for some weeks Ivan complains of a strange taste in his mouth and an uneasiness in the left side of his abdomen. The uneasiness increases. Ivan consults the doctors. First one celebrity gives his opinion, then another. Ivan only learns that he is in a bad way. He is exasperated at the cold-blooded scientific manner in which the doctors dwell upon the symptoms that strike him with anguish and terror. He is exasperated still more by the coldness and indifference of his wife and daughter. The former even seems to look upon his illness as an added indignity put upon herself. He grows worse, and takes to his bed. The doctors cheerily consult and disagree; the family continue their wonted occupations and amusements; on the poor stricken wretch, face to face with the awful horror of death, the lesson of the vanity and emptiness of life—above all, the vanity and emptiness of the life which he has been leading—presses with hideous force. He hates his wife, he hate his daughter, he hates himself; he dies at last in mental and bodily torture. The widow assumes becoming mourning, weeps in public, and in private inquires about the insurance policy; mass is celebrated over the remains; a number of friends gather at the funeral. That is the whole story. No words can do justice to its ghastly impressiveness.
