probably unpremeditated effect of stirring the souls of real bishops to polite blasphemy and ironical reviewing, in which the note of pained surprise that an outsider should meddle in trade secrets was quite plainly perceptible. The book contained many fine things; isolated passages, indeed, had a note of spiritual exaltation that could challenge comparison with almost anything in literature, and in places the prose leaps and soars with the ring of true inspiration, and approaches the almost lyrical perfection, the easy and lark-like ascent of the great translation of Isaiah. But these are exceptions, and with the best will in the world I cannot regard the book as a satisfactory or satisfying work.

The truth is, that Mr. Wells has a King Charles' head-and of all unlikely people in the world, it is Athanasius who stirs him to a very ecstasy of fury. What Mr. Lloyd George is to Lord Robert Cecil, what Sir Edward Carson is to the Sinn Feiner, what President Wilson was to Mr. Roosevelt, and what Lenin and Trotsky are to the Liberty and Property Defence League-all these hatreds are as water unto wine when compared with the feeling of Mr. Wells for the almost legendary figure who did not write the incomprehensible creed. Love, says the Maori poet, is stronger than life, and stronger even than death; it has remained for Mr. Wells to demonstrate that hatred is its equal.

Before so splendidly irrational a passion I, at least, can only take off my hat and marvel. These things escape one, and the only explanation that offers is that the doctrine of the Trinity affects Mr. Wells' mental digestion in the same way that crabs and strawberries and mushrooms affect the physical digestions of quite ordinary folk, and drive them to madness and despair. A large part of God the Invisible King' is occupied with denunciations of the Trinity, and in these passages in particular Mr. Wells appears like an extraordinarily pugnacious bull in a very fragile and excessively metaphysical china shop.

But the Trinity is really too abstract and elusive an antagonist for the purposes of full-blooded denunciation; Don Quixote's fight with windmills is nothing to Mr. Wells' assaults on this elusive subtlety, but in the end, it defeats its own purpose. Some of his readers, with that irritating instinct of fairplay which is traditional in our character, must have thought that there was something real in the Trinitarian doctrine after all when it could move Mr. Wells to the ardour of Savonarola or Torquemada.

But Torquemada, in the intervals when he was not burning heretics, probably sometimes said his prayers, and even Luther, in the rare moments when he was not denouncing the Pope, had a fleeting vision of the eternal solitudes. In the same way, it would be excessively unjust to regard' God the Invisible King' as a true summary of Mr. Wells' religion. He is not a theologian, but he has in him a good deal of the mystic. Prick him with Athanasius, and he is ready to burn the whole bench of bishops, to disembowel the archdeacons, to hack rural deans in pieces, and break wretched curates on the wheel; but leave him alone, and he will suddenly show his kinship with the saints and seers of all the ages.

None but a mystic could have written' The Door in the Wall,' that perfect little story of the invisible garden of delight. And The Sea Lady,' one of the earlier novels, has the true mystical note of unfathomable reality. Only very dimly he suspects,' says the Sea Lady, 'that other things may be conceivable, even ' if they are not possible. That this life of yours is not everything. 'That it is not to be taken too seriously. Because . . . . there are better dreams.'

Now when a man belongs, even unconsciously, to that great brotherhood of seers which reaches downwards from Plotinus and Philo and St. Paul, he will do many strange and even wonderful things by the way, he will laugh at himself and savagely attack others with whom he finds himself increasingly in sympathy, he will for a time pursue his own personal road as though there were no other road and no other person in the world—but in the long run he will obey the call of his spiritual ancestry, for some impelling force within him will drive him to think about God, to seek God, and to speak or to write about God. That is precisely what has happened, or is happening to Mr. Wells.

He has created cockneys, professors, parsons, charwomen and great ladies, with the careless abandon of a child picking buttercups in a meadow, but at bottom these things no longer move him, and Mr. Wells merely plucks them and throws them away. They are not what he is seeking for; creator and created alike, they are types of universal puzzledom, and what Mr. Wells really wants is light and certainty. That is one of the reasons why he both hates and envies Athanasius-it infuriates him that Athanasius should have had so much certainty with so little light. And, indeed, that is but one more example of the puzzle that is life.

To suggest that the author of fifty volumes is not naturally a prolific writer seems on the face of it as absurd as to advocate celibacy at a Mothers' Meeting. But there is a curious confession in one of the earlier works of Mr. Wells that there are times when the writer who thinks would prefer not to write at all for a year, but merely to think-to camp and rest the horses-which rather supports this view; and everybody must have noticed that his first books, which were written under considerable stress, have nothing like the same verbal fluency as the later.

During and since the war, Mr. Wells has obviously written much too much; some of it mere journalism, much of it betraying hasty thinking; and in The Secret Places of the Heart,' at least, it is the sheer repetition of one of his old and familiar songs—a little touched, perhaps, with the artificiality and the falsetto that comes from the excessive encores.

These things, no doubt, prove his activity and his immense popularity; but one detects from time to time that note of stress or distress, the almost audible sigh of the man who knows that he is writing faster than he can think, who is beginning to sacrifice quality for quantity, who can never stop to prune the rosebush before he gathers the rose.

A certain impatience and irritation, too, in his manner, and a surely unfortunate acerbity in those occasional controversies which no man can avoid, rather confirm the suspicion that Mr. Wells has not only written beyond his strength, but that he knows it, and, in some moods, regrets it. For in the last resort, every man would wish to write one book that lives for ever rather than ten that die with him; to influence posterity rather than contemporaries; and finally, to discover truth for himself rather than hear the plaudits of the crowd. Success is good, and fame, and popularity. Butthere are better dreams. . . and the trouble is that Mr. Wells has dreamed them.

A. WYATT TILBY

I.

THE EARLY HISTORY OF THE ENGLISH

PRIZE COURT

Select Pleas in the Court of Admiralty. 2 vols. Printed for the Selden Society. Bernard Quaritch. 1894, 1897.

2. Law and Custom of the Sea. Society. 1915, 1916.

3. Thomas Rymer-Fœdera.

1704-1735.

4. A History of English Law.

2 vols. Printed for the Navy Records

Conventiones, etc., ab anno 1101.

20 Vols.

By W. S. HOLDSWORTH, K.C., D.C.L. 1922.

Vol. I. 3rd Edition. Methuen & Co.

5. Doctors' Commons and the Old Court of Admiralty. By WILLIAM SENIOR. Longmans, Green, 1922.

HE Admiralty Prize Court during the Great War dealt with

many millions of pounds' worth of property, either ships or cargoes. Its work was accepted as one of the natural accompaniments of maritime warfare, but the early history of the Court shows that its powers were gained by slow process.

The materials for that history are to be found in the Minute Books of the Court and the files of original documents at the Record Office. Much of this material is now available to students of the maritime history of England in the two volumes of records at the head of this article and in the newer books of Professor Holdsworth and Mr. Senior.

When we survey the medieval scene, we see small, but busy seaports around the English coasts; the seas animated by numerous but small craft; and a Royal Navy which varied from month to month in size and in strength. We see a standing fleet of vessels which were the personal property of the Sovereign, ships hired by him from private owners and others requisitioned, as required, from time to time. We see vessels which belonged to private persons sometimes engaged in commercial ventures, sometimes in warlike adventures. Under these primitive and unorganized conditions one can hardly expect to find anything like definite principles of prize law or a recognised and organized legal tribunal. In fact for five centuries after the

To the end of the financial year March 31st, 1921, the gross proceeds were £19,719,089 18s. 7d.

Norman Conquest, up to about 1520, a Prize Court in a modern sense, that is, one which admittedly had prize jurisdiction and possessed a definite system of law and procedure, did not exist. But during that period the foundations of a jurisdiction and a procedure were year by year being laid. We may be surprised that in a comparatively lawless age even this rudimentary justice existed, but it had become necessary to find some method of settling disputes as to prizes in consequence of the recognition of the constitutional right of the Crown to ships and goods captured at sea. At first it was to the Common Law Courts, for they were the only recognised Courts, that prize disputes were referred, if the aid of a legal tribunal was invoked at all. Cases can be found of proceedings in these Courts as early as 1276 and 1341. In that which occurred in 1341 the right of the Crown was challenged in the following terms :

'They (the defendants) say they ought not to answer for those goods and chattels to the King, or for the value of them, or to be charged therewith, because by the command of John de Ros, the Admiral of the King's Northern Fleet, a short time back they captured in war the aforesaid ship on her passage from Zealand to Scotland, together with the aforesaid goods and chattels in her and according to the law of the sea heretofore prevailing and recognised and by the direction and with the assent of the said Admiral they severally kept them for their own use and still keep them.'

The Court of Exchequer decided against this plea, although the Admiral of the Northern Fleet had been cited as a consenting party to the retention of the goods.

A not less important question which demanded impartial decision was whether a captured ship or cargo was the property of a friend or of an enemy. When commerce was carried on in a simple and primitive manner, this was not a difficult question to decide, and could be settled as well by an admiral as by a learned legal official. From time to time the admiral was given jurisdiction by the Sovereign to decide the right to captured property; in other words, he was invested with something in the nature of prize jurisdiction. An instance of the exercise of such jurisdiction occurred about the year 1357. A Portuguese ship and goods had been captured by a French vessel and were re-captured by an English vessel and brought to England. England and France were belligerent Powers; Portugal was a neutral State and therefore the capture by the Frenchman was illegal. The Portuguese owners made a claim before the admiral for the