If ever, where you hold the Seat of Doom, I stand, my Lord, before you at the Bar, And my forensic fame, a virgin bloom, Lies in your awful hands to make or mar, Let it not prejudice my case, I pray, If you should call to mind a previous meeting When on a champion course the other day I gave your Lordship four strokes and a beating. I own it savoured of contempt of court, Hinted of disrespect toward the Bench, That I should chuckle when your pitch was short Or smile to see you in the sanded trench; But Golf (so I extenuate my sin) Brings all men level, like the greens they putt on; One common bunker makes the whole world kin, And Bar may scrap with Beak, and I with SCR-TT-N. Nor did I give myself superior airs; I made allowance for defective sight; "The bandage which impartial Justice wears Leaves you," I said, "a stranger to the light; Habituated to the sword and scales, If you commit some pardonable blunder, If" (I remarked) "your nerve at moments fails With grosser ironmongery, where's the wonder?" So may the Law's High Majesty o'erlook My rash presumption; may the memory die Of how I won the match (and further took The liberty of mopping up the bye); Remember just a happy morning's round, Also the fact that this alleged old fogey Played at the last hole like a book and downed The barely human feat of Colonel Bogey. O.S. * * * * * IF WE ALL TOOK TO MARGOTRY. [Mrs. ASQUITH'S feuilleton, which for so many people has transformed Sunday into a day of unrest, sets up a new method of autobiography, in which the protagonist is, so to speak, both JOHNSON and BOSWELL too. Successful models being always imitated we may expect to see a general use of her lively methods; and as a matter of fact I have been able already, through the use of a patent futurist reading-glass (invented by Signer Margoni), to get glimpses of two forthcoming reminiscent works of the future which, but for the _chronique egoistique_ of the moment might never have been written, and certainly not in their present interlocutory shape.] I. FROM "FIRST AID TO LITERATURE." By _Edmund Gosse_.