irresistibly comic when any one falls, morally or physically.  It is the basis of English Farce.  Jokes made about those who have never fallen, ‘too great to appease, too high to appal,’ are voted bad taste.  Caricaturists of the mildest order are considered irreligious and vulgar if they burlesque, say, the Archbishop of Canterbury for example; or unpatriotic if they hint that Lord Roberts did not really finish the Boer War when he professed to have done so.  After Parnell came to grief I remember the Drury Lane pantomime was full of fire-escapes, and every allusion to the cause celebre produced roars of laughter.  Mr. Justice Bigham was only a thorough Englishman when he gently rallied the jury for awarding, as he obviously thought, excessive damages.  So little is beauty esteemed in England.

The case of Miss Browne was also singular.  She left a trust fund ’for the erection of an ornamental structure of Gothic design, such as a market cross, tall clock, street lamp-stand, or all combined, in a central part of London, the plan whereof shall be offered for open competition, and ultimately decided upon by the Royal Institute of British Architects.’  The President of the Probate Division said he was satisfied that Miss Browne was not of sound mind, and pronounced against the will, with costs out of the estate.  I wonder what the Royal Institute thinks of this legal testimonial.  It seems almost a pity that some one did not dispute Sir Francis Chantrey’s will years ago on similar grounds.  I suggest to Mr. MacColl that it might still be upset.  That would settle once and for all the question whether the administration of the bequest has evinced evidence of insanity or not.  A recent Royal Commission left the matter undecided.  I do not, however, wish to criticise trustees, but to defend the memory of Miss Browne (who may have been eccentric in private life) from such a charge, because her testamentary dispositions were a trifle aesthetic.  The will was un-English in one respect:  ’no inscription of my name shall be placed on such erection.’  Was that the clause which proved her hopelessly mad?  The erection was to be Gothic.  I know Gothic is out of fashion just now.  Ruskin is quite over; the Seven Lamps exploded long ago; but Miss Browne seems to have attended before her death Mr. MacColl’s lectures, knew all about ‘masses’ and ‘tones’ in architecture, and wished particular stress to be laid on ‘the general outline as seen from a good distance.’  This is greeted by some of the papers as particularly side-splitting and eccentric.  Looking at the unlovely streets of London, never one of the more beautiful cities of Europe, where each new building seems contrived to go one better in sheer uglitude (especially since builders of Tube stations have ventured into the Vitruvian arena), you can easily suppose that poor Miss Browne, with her views about ’general outlines seen from a good distance,’ must have