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1848]

Discussion as to salary of judge of western Virginia.—Wishing to increase it from $1800 to $2500.

Mr. Lincoln said he felt unwilling to be either unjust or ungenerous, and he wanted to understand the real case of this judicial officer. The gentleman from Virginia had stated that he had to hold eleven courts. Now everybody knew that it was not the habit of the district judges of the United States in other States to hold anything like that number of courts; and he therefore took it for granted that this must happen under a peculiar law which required that large number of courts to be holden every year; and these laws, he further supposed, were passed at the request of the people of that judicial district. It came, then, to this: that the people in the western district of Virginia had got eleven courts to be held among them in one year, for their own accommodation; and being thus better accommodated than their neighbors elsewhere, they wanted their judge to be a little better paid. In Illinois there had been, until the present season, but one district court held in the year. There were now to be two. Could it be that the western district of Virginia furnished more business for a judge than the whole State of Illinois?


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 Rh up a will by which some property was so disposed of, having been burnt in effigy on the next 5th of November!

These ideas, it will be observed, form the groundwork of most ghost stories. A pledge unredeemed, a covenant unfulfilled, a secret treasure unrevealed, an unjust will, or a just one disregarded, condemn the unhappy spirit to walk the earth until the wrong is righted. But what practical knowledge of the folk shows us is, that these are not mere arbitrary incidents of the folk-tales, but living principles of action.

Another strong characteristic of the country folk is the suspicion with which they regard strangers and people not of their own sort. This shows itself in a hundred ways: from the difficulty of persuading them to believe in the advantages of any plan proposed by a lady or gentleman, compared to the ease with which they accept the propositions of the merest acquaintance belonging to their own class, to the “Heave half a brick at him”, which was the proverbial reception accorded to strangers in the mining villages of Lancashire. Tribal enmity itself, indeed, may be said to survive in the contempt with which the uneducated English regard the Irish or Welsh (I have heard a woman indignantly deny any knowledge of the Welsh language, as if it would have been something to be ashamed of), the East Anglians and Kentishmen regard the dwellers in “the sheeres”, and, generally, the natives of every county regard the natives of every other county. Hundreds of little sayings testify to this feeling. The Shropshire folk say that the Cheshire men “live at the best end of the pig-trough”, in derision of the quantity of milk and whey they used to drink. The Staffordshire people call giving away something one has no further use for, “making a Shropshire present,” and so forth. The lower you go in the scale the narrower is the favoured circle. Contemptuous rhymes on the neighbouring villages are common, I fancy, in all counties; but I have even met with a case where the various townships of one parish had


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Delaware Code/Title 8

Title 8 Corporations

 * Chapter 1. General Corporation Law
 * Chapter 5. Corporation Franchise Tax
 * Chapter 6. Professional Service Corporations

title: Delaware Code/Title 8


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 326 each their rhyme, exalting themselves and depreciating their neighbours, and where, within the memory of man, any native of any of these rival townships who ventured to show himself within the limits of another township, was liable to have the local rhyme bawled in his ears.

Short of this, however, there is generally some one place in a neighbourhood which is the butt and the scorn of the whole district. Such a one is Gornall, a village of “nailers”, in South Staffordshire, the inhabitants of which are known as “Gornall donkeys” throughout the Black Country. It is a well-understood piece of rude wit (not unattended with danger!) to bray when a Gornall man is passing. I have seen a dialogue acted at a “penny reading” in which the comic character was an uncouth servantgirl, who, with intense self-satisfaction, replied to every remark: “They do so-and-so in Gornall; that’s wheer I coom from.” Even in Shropshire I have heard the place called “Gornall, where they sell things five a penny, and teach monkeys to squint!”

V.—Something let me say in conclusion about the actual work of collecting. The best collecting is that which is done by accident, by living among the people and garnering up the sayings and stories they let fall from time to time. But one can hardly make a complete collection, even within a limited area, in this way; and deliberate search is therefore necessary, which is often a very uphill task, though to the student of human nature, who “loves his fellow-men”, it must always be an entertaining and pleasant one, calculated to add to his enjoyment of a country holiday.

One needs first to know where to look. And the educated people of the neighbourhood cannot always help one. Nowadays, thanks to the labours of this Society, most people do, to a certain extent, know what folk-lore is; and there is surely not much chance now of a request for help being answered, “In your forthcoming work you should certainly include a description of our very curious


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 Rh old font” as happened to me some ten years ago. But too often the collector may be met with the dignified repulse, “Our people are not superstitious, I am glad to say”; and it is not given to everyone to be able to confute the assertion, as the Rev. Elias Owen, in a paper on “Montgomeryshire Superstitions”, relates that he once did. His errand in the parish where it was made was to inspect the schools; and at the close of his examination he asked the first class, “Now, children, can you tell me of any place where there is a buggan” (a ghost, or bogey) “to be seen, or of anyone who has ever seen one?” Instantly every hand in the class was stretched out, and every child had a story to tell. He then asked, “Which of you can tell me of a cure for warts?” with like results, greatly to the discomfiture of his friend the clergyman, who had fondly imagined that there was no superstition in his parish! The clergy are very liable to this illusion, because the people are apt to keep superstition out of their way, which in itself is a not uninstructive folk-loric item. I have even known an old woman tell a most excellent ghost-story, and then utterly deny all knowledge of it when the clergyman’s wife (who, however, was a member of the squire’s family, whom the tale concerned) called to ask for further particulars.

Lawyers, doctors, and especially land-agents and gentlemen-farmers—people who, educated themselves, are yet brought by their professions into much contact with the uneducated—are often much better able to help than are the clergy, especially, of course, if they are natives of the district. The difficulty is to get at them; but a query on some definite point, inserted in a local newspaper, will seldom fail to produce a reply from some one who can help to get at other informants; and the newspaper staff themselves are generally local men, and often capital collectors.


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 358 who went into the calf and spoke (see Tanchuma to Exod. xxxii, 1, and the Targum of Jerusalem to the same verse. Riddle 16 reminds us very much of the 2nd Riddle in the version of the Second Targum, which has been translated and fully treated by P. Cassel in his Commentary on Esther, pp. 283 and 284. This fact may, perhaps, suggest that our version once contained all the Riddles of the Second Targum, as it has all the Riddles of the Midrash, which will prove that none of all these versions is complete in its present form. The MSS. contain here an Arabic gloss, the translations of which I owe to the kindness of Dr. Neubauer. It runs thus: “Men plait the wick and then light it, for if it had not been plaited it would not burn evenly. Therefore it is considered as if men had created it, i.e., made it.” Riddle 19 was probably suggested by I Kings, v, 33. (See the excellent remarks of Dr. Jellinek on this point, in his introduction to the fifth volume of his Beth Hammidrash, p. lv.)

We think that the foregoing remarks, as well as the few words which we have interpolated in round brackets here and there in the translation, will suffice to make the text intelligible to the reader. The parallels from non-Jewish sources we leave to others, and we have no doubt that they also will furnish the folk-lorist with interesting matter. See, for instance, the Dialogue of Solomon and Saturnus, by Kemble, p. 199, Riddle 5 and Riddle 6, in our version. There are also many points in the introduction to Kemble’s book which will have to be corrected. after the researches of Steinschneider and others on the subject. The story of a Man from Jerusalem, which is attributed to R. Abraham Maimun, must also not be neglected by the student. We can only hope that Mr. Jacobs, who has equal mastery both of Jewish and non-Jewish sources, will soon find the leisure to favour us with a new edition of the Dialogue.

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 324 error, if an error it be; but a false oath, that will bring a curse upon the swearer. “I hear Charlie B. has sailed for Australia”, said a respectable woman to me; “but he’ll never prosper, let him go where he will, if he’s taken a false oath, as they say he did.” “Folks say the Devil’s black”, said an old man; “but Jack R. says he’s red; and he knows, for he’s seen him a many times, him and his imps, since he took that false oath.”

When I hear of propositions to abolish the Queen’s Shilling or oaths in our courts of justice, I cannot help thinking that a little practical knowledge of folk-lore—or, rather, of folk—would help the authorities to judge of the probable effect of their measures.

Our people, further, believe implicitly in curses. In the Forty-five, so they say, the wife of a clergyman in North Staffordshire refused to give shelter to Prince Charles Edward, and roughly thrust him out of her house. Since then every clergyman’s wife who has lived in that vicarage house has been visited, they say, with insanity. A Wiltshire farmer wanted his men to work in the hay-harvest on Sunday, not to waste a fine day. So he hid his watch under the last cock of hay in the field, and promised a reward to the finder. The men, of course, turned over every haycock in the field before they came to the watch, and so his end was gained. But the hay from that field has never been made in fine weather since. Constantly, in our country villages, you will find some house of which it is darkly said, “There’ll never go no luck wi’ that house; it didna go to the right heir.”

For this is another point of the folk-morality—the absolute duty of leaving property in the direct line of succession. They recognise no individual rights in the matter, think no man free to do what he will with his own, and any man who presumes to leave his property to any but the next-of-kin, be the latter never so distantly related to him, is held to have offended against the eternal principles of right. I have even heard of a lawyer, who drew


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Delaware Code/Title 8/Chapter 1

Chapter 1-General Corporation Law

 * Subchapter I. Formation
 * Subchapter II. Powers
 * Subchapter III. Registered Office and Registered Agent
 * Subchapter IV. Directors and Officers
 * Subchapter V. Stock and Dividends
 * Subchapter VI. Stock Transfers
 * Subchapter VII. Meetings, Elections, Voting and Notice
 * Subchapter VIII. Amendment of Certificate of Incorporation; Changes in Capital and Capital Stock
 * Subchapter IX. Merger, Consolidation or Conversion
 * Subchapter X. Sale of Assets, Dissolution and Winding Up
 * Subchapter XI. Insolvency; Receivers and Trustees
 * Subchapter XII. Renewal, Revival, Extension and Restoration of Certificate of Incorporation or Charter
 * Subchapter XIII. Suits Against Corporations, Directors, Officers or Stockholders
 * Subchapter XIV. Close Corporations; Special Provisions
 * Subchapter XV. Foreign Corporations
 * Subchapter XVI. Domestication and Transfer
 * Subchapter XVII. Miscellaneous Provisions

title: Delaware Code/Title 8/Chapter 1