Again we have Acts of 1275 and 1378 (3 Edward I., and 2 Richard II.), as our defences against those who are described as “devisors of false news and of horrible and false lies of prelates dukes earls barons” and, comprehensively, “other nobles and great men of the realm,” and also of various officials enumerated, with a like comprehensive “and of other great officers of the realm.” The Act of Richard II. reiterates and confirms that of Edward I., and under these Acts “all persons so hardy as to devise speak or tell any false news, lies, or such other false things” about great people, incur the penalty of imprisonment “until they have brought him into Court who was the first author of the tale.” What a check would the carrying out of these provisions put upon the impertinences of Own Correspondents, social reformers, gossips, novelists, caricaturists, and moralists! It will be a happy day for England when the many thoughtless or malignant persons who now permit themselves to retail stories inconvenient to members of the aristocracy or to the dignitaries of the country, suffer the punishment of their infraction of the law. To take but one instance of the great need there exists for the protection of our upper classes—an instance, as it chances, which enables me to show that I would not wish the private character of even a political enemy to be traduced—I may remind you that if the statutes of _Scandalum Magnatum_ were enforced there would not now be at large persons ascribing to the late Prime Minister himself the authorship of the Greenwich stanza on the Straits of Malacca. There are many other statutes on which I might enlarge. I might remind coroners of duties which they have forgotten, and the clergy of rights which they are allowing to lapse, but time will not permit me. It is true that when I read my Statute Book I meet with some provisions of which I do not comprehend the necessity. As a Protestant I do not see why I should be imprisoned for three years and fined besides, if I carry off a nun from a convent with her consent; and as a botanist I do not see why, since January, 1660, I have been prohibited from setting or planting so much as a single tobacco plant in my garden. Still, all are parts of one stupendous whole, parts of the sacred fabric built by our forefathers in “Auld Lang Syne.” Touch one stone and the British Constitution may crumble. And as a humble member of the Great Constitutional Party I desire to raise my protest against the canker of decay being left to eat insidiously into our ancient and revered legislative code, by our suffering any Acts of Parliament which appear on our Statute Book as parts of the living Law of the Land to drop into disuse, as if, contrary to the doctrine of the highest legal authorities, an Act of Parliament unrepealed _could_ become obsolete. AULD LANG SYNE, WHERE HOME WAS.