Northern Weekly Gazette. — 1904-07-30 (Stockton-on-Tees, Cleveland, England)

QUEST LAW."  "Is she to be buried in Cbristian burial that wilfully seeks her own salvation?" "I tell thee that sh 3 is; . . . the creamer has salt on her, and finds it a Christian burial." "Bat is this law?" "Aye, marry in't ; °roamer's quest :aw." —.Shakespeare's "Hamlet," Act 5, Scene 1. The initial motive of this essay is revealed in the Shakespearian motto. With British essayists, so far as I hare acquaintance with them, the topic cannot be regarded as a hackneyed one. Some fanciful though exceedingly remote relatedness might be imagined between "Crowner's quests" and, say, Sidney Smith's scornful discourse on "The Judge that Smitcs Contrary to Law," Charles Lamb's essay on "The Decay of Beggars," or even De Quincey's essay on "Murder Considered as a Fine Art." I can assure you these are, one and all, as far apart from the subject of this essay as are Henry Fielding's trenchant "Life of Jonathan Wild," or Harrison Ainsworth's vezacions histories of rotoriuus highwaymen. As for our greater British essayists—Bacon and Hume, Addison and Steele, Johnson and Goldsmith, Jeffrey and Macaulay —it would amount to a literary "misdemeanour" to search their sparkling pages—all glowing with refinement, erudition, and grace—for references to this clownish confabulation, in far Elsinore, at the preparations for the funeral of the Princess Opholia.  I am bound to suppose that so eminent an actor and manager as Garrick must have had some good reason of his own for entirely omitting from his acting version of "Hamlet" this well-remembered, if oft misunderstood, ." Gravediggers' Scene." If so, it was some reason which did not prevail with Kemble, nor Kean, with Macready, or with Henry Irving. Did it arise from the timid consciousness (known, in moody moments, to all artists) of the close proximity which exists between the sense of the sublime and the sensation of the ludicrous—of the thin partition that at times divide apprehensions of the doepest pathos from the furtive humour that evokes unbidden rickcu'e? It may have been. Or may it not have been that Garrick great actor as he was, could not full trust the human material with which he had to deal? Off, as wedl as on, the stage, the most capable of men are not always free from such misgivings. On the solemn and impressive appeal of John Bright to the British House of Commons, to stop the direful ravages of the Crimean campaign, some of his hearers long after confessed that this painful equipoise of apprehension prevailed throughout an audienoe not easily lifted up to the highest elevation of moral feeling, as words Loll from the orator's lips that might rouse the conscience but might fail by appearing to approach too nearly to melodramatic bombast. The words were—" The angel of death has been abroad throughout this land: you may almost hear the beating of his wings-"  So on the stage of the theatre. There, before you, is the "heavy comedian" of the company, sunken to above the knees into an oblong aperture below the floor, with a. new spade in his hand (borrowed by the property man from a neighbouring ironmonger's shop). On the new spade appears a clean polished human skull