It so happened that I was obliged to leave town next day, to attend to certain matters connected with an estate of which I was a trustee, in another part of the country. I told him this, adding that the magistrate would certainly send the case for trial, and that I should be back in town in time for the next Old Bailey sessions, and that I would be responsible that the case should receive proper attention in the meantime. He merely said that he left the matter in my hands, and that if I said it would be all right, he was content, and so departed, engaging to attend to have his evidence taken down next morning. I went to the office of a brother practitioner on whom I knew I could rely, handed him my written instructions, requested him to take up the case and work it until my return, and then did what every business man should be able to do—wiped the subject altogether out of my mind for the present. LITERARY SELF-ESTIMATES. The question, Can an author rightly criticise his own work? has been variously answered. Gibbon emphatically says in his Autobiography that a writer himself is the best judge of his own performance, since no one has so deeply meditated on the subject, and no one is so sincerely interested in the event. Samuel Johnson did not go quite so far as this. In his Life of Dryden, he writes that, in the preface to one of his plays, Dryden ‘discusses a curious question, whether an author can judge well of his own productions; and determines, very justly, that of the plan and disposition, and all that can be reduced to principles of science, the author may depend upon his own opinion; but that in those parts where fancy predominates, self-love may easily deceive. He might have observed, that what is good only because it pleases, cannot be pronounced good till it has been found to please.’