law in those disturbed times, to impose on innkeep ers the character of insurers of the guests' property against everything but the act of God and of the public enemies. Exactly why the innkeeper should even then have been subjected to liability for inevit able accident without his fault, as for example, a fire which consumed the goods of the guests with out any possible advantage to his coffers or the pockets of confederates, it is difficult to understand. But this ancient dogma of the law, although the reason for it has long since disappeared, is still prev alent, except where statutes have come to the inn keepers' relief. The opinion of the New York Court of Appeals, by Porter, J., in Hulett v. Swift, 33 N.Y. 571, did much to fasten the old doctrine of acciden tal fires on the modern conditions, and was a sad contradiction of the boasted elasticity of the common law and its adaptability to the changed conditions of society; and it led to the enactment of statutes of relief in that state. It is delightful to read of the warmth, sociability and cheer of the old rural inns of England. On the continent those in the large cities and towns are uni formly excellent. In this country such hotels gener ally furnish good fare and lodging, and frequently, as in the case of the great and new hotels in New York, put the traveler up in a style of palatial magnificence, but the price of it suggests that the landlord is in a hurry to pay off a mortgage or retire from business. Then there is usually to be encountered and survived the stony stare of the clerk when the guest wants something at a daily rate less than the compensation of a congressman or a judge. Leighton would not have desired to die in one of these, but rather before he got into one. As for the country inns in this land, they are much as they were in 1789, when Washington recorded in his Diary of his tour in NewEngland, that going through Connecticut, he "stayed at Perkins' tavern, which by the bye is not a good one." The lawyer, even in these days, who goes upon the rural circuits, recalls with horror the stuffy chambers, the whitewashed walls, the horsey bar room, and the table reeking with fried things and fur nished with thick and chipped earthenware and forks with the silver almost worn off. And then the beds! There is a classic saying that when a man is indignant he writes poetry, and once on such an oc casion the present writer was so angry that he burst into verse — had a fytte of anger, so to speak — as follows :— A BED IN A COUNTRY INN. Conce1ve the pangs that the Procrustean guest, Or Damiens on his dreadful bed of steel, Or cramped Ginevra in her oaken chest, Or Lawrence on his hot gridiron might feel!
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Couches like theirs could hardly give less ease Than those which furnish many a country inn, Buzzed round by flies and gnats, lively with fleas, Restless as consciences not seared by sin. Contrived with lofty ridge adown the middle, Like fell sea-serpents' vertebra: serrated, Contracted as the highest string of fiddle, Lumpy like life-preservers full inflated. Dreaming of falling from the Pyramid Into the crocodile-infested Nile; Or from some sharp-topped peak the Alps amid, Into an icy, deadly, dark defile; Sore toiling up the treacherous steep again, Like Sisyphus, with his moss-shunning stone, Or bumpkin clinging to greased pole in pain, The weary sufferer may wake and groan. Dire engine of a parsimonious host, To murder sleep! I rise betimes soreheaded; With aching limbs and looking like a ghost, Depart with hatred in my soul imbedded.
NOTES OF CASES. Contract1ng, for Fraud. — The law has always sternly set its face against the doers of iniquity and fraud. This lofty moral idea has so worked upon the sensibility of judges that it has caused them to break forth into Latin. Thus chief justice Wilmot, in the famous old case ofCollins v. Blantern, 2 Wils. 34 1, ex claimed as to such, " Procul,Ol procul este profant!" and in Gibson v. Minet, 210 Bl. 586, we find: "Nec lex est justior ulla Quam necis artifices arte perire sua." This being so, it seems a little strange that modern courts should doubt for a moment about the impolicy of recognizing a contract by which the parties agree to take no advantage of and ask for no relief from one another's fraud. The question first arose, so far as we know, in Universal Fashion Co. v. Skinner, 64 Hun. 294. The plaintiff sued on a written con tract embracing a glause stating that its stipulations contained the whole contract, and that no other terms should bind either party. The answer admitted the contract, but set up fraud and false representa tions by plaintiffs agent in the procuring of it. On demurrer, the answer was held good, O'Brien, J., dissenting, observing, "Where the parties themselves stipulate that the writing contains the whole contract, it is difficult to see upon what theory contemporaneous oral agreements or representations are admissible to vary a written contract..' But Andrews, J., said, "An agreement that the plaintiff shall not be liable for the fraud of its own agent . . . cannot be en forced. Van Brunt, J., said the provision added
