The Baron Court of Little Brought -in 627 



and so little done, as in the case of these gaps and gashes in the earth. 

 And what d'ye think was the avowed purpose of all this? Why 

 that saucepans, and haystacks, and deal -boards, and bags of nails, 

 should be kept flying about all over the country, like swifts on 

 their migration, or, as some say, that smoking engines might 

 be driven through all the gardens and pleasure-grounds of the 

 country, to the utter destruction of caterpillars and American blight 

 Jthe last of which has fallen terribly upon some parts of the country 

 in this same year 1837. There has, as yet, been but little done in 

 the actual infliction of these gashes upon the earth, for the projectors, 

 or rather their dupes, have, in most cases, run themselves fairly to 

 the "cheek door," as they say in the north, by the paying of the 

 fees, which is always seen after by the Court itself, and so there can 

 be no mistake there. But the folks have got the Court's permission, 

 and so they may set about the work whenever they are able. Thus, in 

 time coming, somebody's grandchildren may live to see all the three 

 manors seamed over with scars and gashes, just as if the Baron Court 

 had ordered them all to be flogged with a cat o'nine tails. Then, in 

 some time after this, when it is found that making saucepans and hay- 

 stacks fly about the rate of a hundred miles an hour brings grist to 

 nobody's mill, and new hooks have been baited for the court-fees, 

 we shall have such sights of antiquarians all over the country, every 

 one of them a genuine A S S 9 all occupied with spades and spec- 

 tacles, proving to their own satisfaction, that the folks of our day 

 have been fighting all over the country like d Is, and delving 

 ditches and casting up ramparts from one end of it to the other. 

 And, there will be oceans of books written, with such beautiful and 

 appropriate illustrations; and an Irish labourer's galligaskins, which 

 in the course of nature, healed off, and a bricklayers old apron, lost 

 in the rubbish at the breaking down of a culvert, will be accurately 

 displayed and beautifully illuminated, as being respectively the 

 standards, under which the Muttons and the Porks carried on their 

 civil wars ten times more furiously and more uncivilly than the 

 Houses of York and Lancaster. It will thus be a delightful thing to 

 live hereafter ; and if a man could so negotiate matters as to effect 

 an exchange with even an old woman of the thousandth generation 

 of his own posterity, he would have a great chance of knowing some- 

 thing before he died a second time. 



The means to which the members of the court have recourse in 

 order to understand every matter better than anybody else are most 

 extraordinary, but most wise and most successful. Every one knows, 

 that when a man wishes to write a legible letter he always chooses 

 paper on which there is no former writing, and when a book or a 

 newspaper is printed, it is never done over the face of an old one, 

 though in the case of most newspapers the readers would be very 

 little balked in knowledge, though the same identical piece of paper 

 were printed weekly or daily all the year round, while the country 

 might be saved from the infection of continental diseases introduced 

 by the importation of continental rags, 



The members of the court are careful to follow exactly the same 

 plan as is followed in the case of the letter, they make a perfect tabula 



