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edges of their hammocks, dangerously gay-hearted with the drink they had drained, and with the dance and songs which, coming into their hard lives, were a sort of intoxication in themselves, talking of their jinks ashore, of their carousals, of their Polls and Susans, till one of them perhaps would speak of Miss Grant

I opened my door, crossed the narrow passage, and gently knocked upon the bulkhead of my companion's cabin. She instantly asked who it was that knocked. I answered. In a few moments she opened the door. The light from my own cabin-lamp was upon her, for the berths were exactly abreast. Her hair hung upon her shoulders, one hand grasped the neck of her dressing-gown against her white throat, giving her an aspect of sudden alarm, which the peculiar brilliance of her steadfast eyes could not have defeated but for the composure of her lips.

"What is it, Mr. Musgrave?" she asked.

I now regretted my action. Here was I grasping a brace of pistols, and it seemed a stupid and nervous bit of behaviour in me to disturb this girl, and thus confront her.

"You have told me you are not afraid of fire-arms," I exclaimed. "It has occurred to me that one of these

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She looked at the weapon I extended with a smile, then without a word entered her cabin and returned.

"There," she exclaimed, " you will see that I am as fully prepared as you.

Indeed I think I am better off, for yours, I fancy, are a little old-fashioned, whilst mine I am sure would prove the deadlier weapon."

She stepped aside that the light might shine upon the pistol she held. It was a very handsome piece, with a long glittering barrel, mounted in silver. "See!" she exclaimed, raising it. Her nostrils trembled, she drew herself erect with a slight backward leaning of her head, and levelled the pistol past me with a smile that was made almost scornful by the proud, sparkling determination of the gaze she fixed upon me. Oh! for a painter's brush to give you the queenly figure and pose of her as she thus stood ! Her arms sank to her side, and she said quietly, "Have no fear for me, Mr. Musgrave. Should I be called upon to defend myself, I shall know how to do it."

I again wished her good-night, and returned to my cabin, feeling somehow, as Jonathan says, a bit mean, though for what reason I do not know, unless it was that such a combination of beauty, coolness, and courage made one fancy that the best sort of manhood in comparison with it could not but be somewhat insignificant. Indeed it did me good to think of the tear she had let fall that day, and to remember that now and again a natural timidity and fear had broken out. After all, thought I, as I looked round for a convenient hiding place for my pistols, it is always the woman that forms the most admirable part of the heroine.

(To be continued.)

CITY AND BOROUGH.

A LITTLE time back an increase of dignity was granted by royal proclamation to two famous towns in Great Britain, one in England, the other in Scotland. Birmingham and Dundee, hitherto merely boroughs, were raised to the rank of cities. Several other English towns have, within some years past, been made cities in the same fashion. But there is something special about these two cases which distinguishes them from the others. In the other English towns that have been made cities the increase of rank has in every case followed on the town becoming the see of a bishop. With Birmingham this is not so; with Dundee, as a Scottish town, it hardly could be so. Two questions are at once suggested. First, What is the distinction between city and borough, which makes it promotion for a borough to become a city? Secondly, Is there any ground for the belief, certainly a very common one, that the rank of city is in some way, in England at least, connected with the presence of a bishop's see in the town so called? And a third and very delicate question has arisen at Dundee which does not seem to have been started at Birmingham. Nobody seems to have thought that, because Birmingham has become a city, therefore the chief magistrate of Birmingham has become a Lord Mayor.

It does seem to have been very seriously thought at Dundee that the chief magistrate of the new city has acquired a right to be called Lord Provost.

It will be well to keep the English and the Scottish cases distinct, because it does not at all follow that arguments and precedents which may be good in England will therefore be good in Scotland. The law of the two kingdoms is so different that it is wise to

keep on the safe side in every case : it is specially needful in this case, because of the supposed relation between city and bishopric. This may exist in England, where episcopacy is recognized by law; it cannot exist in Scotland, where the present law knows nothing about bishops' sees at all.

Let us begin then with England and the English borough which has lately been raised to the rank of a city. It is plain that, if the rank of city merely implies the size and importance of the town on which it is bestowed, no English town can have a better right to that rank than Birmingham. But I am quite sure that, a few years back, most people thought that every bishop's see was, as such, necessarily a city, and that no town that was not a bishop's see could be a city. And this belief seemed to be borne out by the fact that the title of city was universally given to every English town that was a bishop's see, and to two only that were not. The two exceptions were Coventry and Westminster, and they were exceptions which proved the rule. For Coventry and Westminster had been bishops' sees, and they might seem to keep their rank somewhat after the manner of dowager queens and peeresses. If this be a sound rule, the advancement of Birmingham to the rank of a city is certainly a breach of it. Birmingham, like Edinburgh or Glasgow in Scotland, is the seat of a bishopric, but not of a bishopric acknowledged by law. Yet the notion of the connexion between city and bishopric used to be so fixed in most minds that I remember how, when a Roman Catholic bishopric was first founded at Birmingham, some inhabitants of Birmingham asked, merrily perhaps, whether their borough had

thereby become a city. We have now the fact that Birmingham is not the seat of any bishopric known to the law, and yet that Birmingham has been made a city by royal proclamation. This at once raises our two questions, What (as far as England is concerned) is meant by a city and, Have city and bishopric (as far as England is concerned) anything to do

with one another?

Now I must freely confess that I do not know what difference, except difference in rank, there is in England between a city and a borough. In tables of precedence we see, very near the end, "Citizens", and after them "Burgesses". I conceive therefore that there is an acknowledged difference of rank; that the Mayor of Birmingham will now undoubtedly take precedence of the Mayor of Warwick, that a citizen of Birmingham who is so unhappy as to be without any claim to rank as esquire, doctor, gentleman by coat-armour, or gentleman by profession, will also take precedence of a burgess of Warwick no less badly off. Further than this it is hard to see what Birmingham or any other borough gains by becoming a city. A city does not seem to have any rights or powers as a city which are not equally shared by every other corporate town. The only corporate towns which have any special powers above others are those which are counties of themselves; and all cities are not counties of themselves, while some towns which are not cities are. The city in England is not so easily defined as the city in the United States. There every corporate town is a city. This makes a great many cities, and it leads to an use of the word " city" in common talk which seems a little strange in British ears. In England, even in speaking of a real city, the word "city" is seldom used, except in language a little formal or rhetorical; in America it is used whenever a city is mentioned. But the American rule has the advantage of being perfectly clear and avoiding all doubt. And it agrees very well with

the origin of the word: a corporate town is a civitas, a commonwealth; any lesser collection of men hardly is a commonwealth, or is such only in a much less perfect degree.

This brings us to the historical use of the word. It is clear at starting that the word is not English. It has no Old-English equivalent; burh, burgh, borough, in its various spellings and various shades of meaning, is our native word for urbes of every kind from Rome downward. It is curious that this word should in ordinary speech have been so largely displaced by the vaguer word tún, town, which means an enclosure of any kind, and in some English dialects is still applied to a single house and its surroundings. In no other Teutonic language has this particular usage come in; though the way in which the still vaguer Stadt is used in High-German is analogous to it. In common talk we use the word borough hardly oftener than the word city; when the word is used, it has commonly some direct reference to the parliamentary or municipal character of the town. Many people, I suspect, would define a borough as a town which sends members to Parliament, and such a definition, though still not accurate, has, by late changes, been brought nearer to accuracy than it used to be. City and borough then are both rather formal words; town is the word which comes most naturally to the lips when there is no special reason for using one of the others. Of the two formal words, borough is English, city is Latin; it comes to us from Gaul and Italy by some road or other. It is in Domesday that we find, by no means its first use in England, but its first clearly formal use, its first use of it to distinguish a certain class of towns, to mark those towns which are civitates as well as burgi from those which are burgi only. Now in Gaul the civitas in formal Roman language was the tribe and its territory, the whole land of the Arverni, Parisii, or any other tribe. In a secondary sense it meant the head town of the tribe, which in

Northern Gaul now commonly bears the name of the tribe, having lost its own local name. Thus Lutetia Parisiorum, Civitas Parisiorum, is known as Paris; if the Civitas Arvernorum is not known by some form of the name Auvergne, it is because local accidents caused it early to take the name of Clermont. When Christianity was established, the civitas in the wider sense marked the extent of the bishop's diocese; the civitas in the narrower sense became the immediate seat of his bishopstool. Thus we cannot say that in Gaul a town became a city because it was a bishop's see; but we may say that a certain class of towns became bishops' sees because they were already cities. But in modern French use no distinction is made between these ancient capitals which became bishoprics and other towns of less temporal and spiritual honour. The seat of the bishopric, the head of the ancient province, the head of the modern department, the smaller town which has never risen to any of those dignities, are all alike ville. Lyons, Rheims, Paris, are in no way distinguished from meaner places. The word cité is common enough, but it has a purely local meaning. It often distinguishes the old part of a town, the ancient civitas, from later additions. In Italy, on the other hand, città is both the familiar and the formal name for towns great and small. It is used just like ville in French; no distinction is made any more than in French between towns which are temporal or spiritual heads of districts and towns which are not.

I am writing away from books, and I must trust my memory for everything; so I cannot give the exact reference to a passage in Gregory of Tours which throws some light on the use of the word civitas. He gives a description and panegyric of Dijon, and adds his wonder that a place which had so many merits was not called a civitas. might have used exactly the same form of words of Birmingham the other day, of Liverpool a few years earlier, of

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Manchester a few years earlier again. Now Dijon never was a bishopric till quite modern times. Gregory's language therefore shows that in Gaul in the sixth century, though most civitates were bishops' sees and most bishops' sees were civitates, yet to be a bishop's see in no way entered into the definition of a civitas. Comparing his way of speaking with modern French practice, one is pretty safe in saying that at no time has it been the custom in Gaul to draw the distinction which has certainly for some centuries been popular in England.

Let us now look at the first document in English history in which cities (civitates) are in a marked and designed way distinguished from other towns which were not cities. We must remember that English usage in the matter of bishoprics was altogether different from that of Gaul. Towns of any kind did not hold the same place in England, or anywhere in Britain, which they held in Gaul. In England, as in Gaul, the bishop was bishop of the tribe, and the territory of the tribe marked the extent of his diocese. But the bishopstool was not necessarily placed in the chief town of the tribe or in any town at all; indeed the tribe had not necessarily any chief town to place it in. One of the changes which began just before the Norman Conquest and which went on after it was the removal of bishops' sees from villages and small towns to the great cities. the documents about the translation of the see of Devonshire from Crediton to Exeter, the Pope, Leo the Ninth, expresses his wonder that in England the bishopstool was not always placed in a city. Here, it will be seen, the "city" is taken for granted: the argument is not that the place where the bishopstool is shall be called a city; the city already exists, and the bishopstool ought to be in it. Exeter does not become a city because it is made a bishopric; it is chosen to be a bishopric because it is already a city. With this language of Pope Leo the language of

In

Domesday exactly agrees. Places are there spoken of as cities which were not bishoprics, though some of them became bishoprics in after times. Such are Oxford and Gloucester, both Domesday cities, from which the title passed away and afterwards came back again. The name is applied also in Domesday to some towns which have never become bishoprics. I am not sure that without book I can make an exact list, but I am pretty sure that Shrewsbury and Colchester are among them. Exeter, Lincoln, Chester, places to which bishoprics had lately been moved, naturally rank as cities. The whole evidence of Domesday goes against the notion of there being any connexion between bishopric and city, except that a city was a proper place to plant a bishopric in. The places to which the name of city is given are clearly the great and important towns, some of them Roman chesters, some of them English settlements which had greatly outstripped their fellows, towns which were local centres and something more, towns which had more or less of an independent municipal constitution, which had magistrates, laws, and customs of their own, sometimes even a certain measure of authority over the surrounding country. To such towns the name of civitates, borrowed from Gaulish usage, was very naturally given, whether they were bishoprics or not. Sometimes they had bishops, sometimes not; but the age of the Norman Conquest tended to connect the notions of city and bishopric by the systematic translation of bishoprics from smaller places to cities.

Exactly opposite to the Domesday notion of a city is that which has certainly been prevalent for several centuries. This is the doctrine that a city is a town which is or has been a bishopric, and that, when a bishopric is placed in a town, that town, if it does not become a city without more ado, has at any rate a right to be formally created a city. This doctrine is certainly as old as the time of Henry the Eighth; I think I can see signs of

of

it as early as the time of Richard the First. Let us first look to the later time. All the towns in which Henry the Eighth founded bishoprics have ever since been called cities, even though one of them, Westminster, lost its bishopric almost as soon as it was founded. Now Henry's charter of foundation of the bishopric Gloucester contains a clause providing that henceforth the town (villa) of Gloucester shall be called the city (civitas) of Gloucester. I presume that there is something to the same effect in the other charters: if there is not, so much the better; in that case, the other new cities must have acquired the rank by usage. That is to say, it must have been taken for granted that the seat of a bishopric became a city ipso facto, a belief which would prove yet more than a formal creation. Now it is to be noticed that in this case of Gloucester the charter did but restore the town to the rank which it held in Domesday, and the like is the case with Oxford. The fact that Gloucester ranks as a city in the Great Survey must have been forgotten when Henry the Eighth thought it necessary to raise it to the rank of a city. It is plain that by that time the notions of bishopric and city had become so closely tied together that, as Gloucester was not a bishopric, its ancient dignity had altogether passed out of mind.

If I were writing in the midst of books, I dare say I could find some passages or documents which might illustrate the steps by which the doctrine of Domesday changed into the opposite doctrine which is implied in Henry the Eighth's Gloucester charter. Writing from memory, I can only mention on one side that, what one would hardly have expected, Wareham appears as a city in the Gesta Stephani, and also call attention to a most remarkable passage in Richard of the Devizes, which looks the other way. The Jew who describes the several English towns to the French boy-one of the cleverest bits of

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