THE LIBRARY 
 
 OF 
 
 THE UNIVERSITY 
 OF CALIFORNIA 
 
 LOS ANGELES
 
 DOMESTICITIES
 
 BY THE SAME AUTHOR 
 
 CHARLES LAMB AND THE LLOYDS. 
 BERNARD BARTON AND HIS FRIENDS. 
 THE OPEN ROAD. A Little Book for Wayfarers. 
 WILLOW AND LEATHER. A Book of Praise. 
 
 FOR CHILDREN 
 
 A BOOK OF VERSES FOR CHILDREN. 
 
 WHAT SHALL WE DO NOW? A Nursery 
 Baedeker. 
 
 THE FLAMP, AND OTHER STORIES.
 
 DOMESTICITIES 
 
 A Little Book of 
 Household Impressions 
 
 BY 
 
 E. V. LUCAS 
 
 LONDON 
 
 SMITH, ELDER, <^ CO. 
 15 WATERLOO PLACE, S.W. 
 
 MDCCCC
 
 All rights reset-red 
 
 Printed by BAI.LANTYNE, HANSON <Sr> Co. 
 At the Ballantyne Press
 
 To 
 M. C. G. J. 
 
 In gratitude ; yet with apology 
 
 For offering a book ivhich seems to me 
 
 So very far from ivhat it ought to be. 
 
 Because all books, I think, should manifest 
 
 Their author's self, complete, north, south, east, west, 
 
 And here so much of me seems unexpressed : 
 
 Not great (Heaven knows !) nor curiously fine, 
 Nor aught, may be, to help a single line, 
 Yet certain things more intimately mine. 
 
 Still, lacking these, I beg to give it you, 
 One of the kindest friends man ever knew. 
 Perchance, in reading, you'll deduce a few. 
 
 E. V. L. 
 
 September 15, 1900. 
 
 860181
 
 CONTENTS 
 
 PAGE 
 
 CONCERNING TOAST . . . . . i 
 
 CONCERNING BREAKFAST . . . . . 17 
 
 CONCERNING WALKS 31 
 
 CONCERNING TEA . . . . . . 45 
 
 CONCERNING SCHOOL-HAMPERS ... . 57 
 
 CONCERNING CATALOGUES .... 69 
 
 CONCERNING CLOTHES 87 
 
 CONCERNING FIRES 99 
 
 CONCERNING CORRESPONDENCE . . 113 
 
 CONCERNING ANIMALS 131 
 
 CONCERNING THE MISERIES OK LIFE . . 147 
 
 CONCERNING A GENTLE ADVISER . . . 173 
 
 vii
 
 Concerning Toast
 
 DOMESTICITIES 
 
 Concerning Toast 
 
 IF bread is the staff of life, toast is its clouded 
 cane. The cheapest of the luxuries, and 
 withal one of the most exquisite and endur- 
 ing, to set but a low value upon toast is to 
 expose one's deficiency in right appreciation. 
 
 " To make dry toast properly," says the ad- 
 mirable Mrs. Beeton, " a great deal of attention 
 is required; much more indeed than people 
 generally suppose. Never use new bread foi 
 making any kind of toast, as it renders it heavy, 
 and, besides, is very extravagant." A loaf one 
 day old is the best material. Mrs. Beeton 
 continues : " Dry toast should be more gradually 
 made than buttered toast, as its great beauty 
 consists in its crispness, and this cannot be 
 attained unless the process is slow, and the
 
 4 Domesticities 
 
 bread is allowed gradually to colour." Dry 
 toast, one might add, should be thin as well 
 as crisp. It should be eaten within, at the most, 
 ten minutes of leaving the fire. While await- 
 ing its turn on the table, each piece of toast 
 should stand alone, on no account being laid 
 flat or placed so close to another piece that 
 it touches. Stale toast, or toast from which 
 the crispness has, as it were, thawed away, 
 is abomination. It is limp, and tough, and 
 indigent. Moreover, the mastication of it 
 makes no sound. Now the noise from good 
 toast should reverberate in the head like the 
 thunder of July. 
 
 The Spectator, which has ever been an ex- 
 ponent of the art of living, laid down, more 
 than thirty years ago, rules concerning toast. 
 "True toast," it then said (or, to be exact, the 
 late Mr. R. H. Hutton then said), "is classical 
 severe. . . . Toast, we need not say, should 
 be thin, crisp, wafer-like, as well as embrowned, 
 fresh and hot. Thick toast with solid fleshy 
 bread between the embrowned surfaces is a 
 gross and plebeian solecism ; for the true inten- 
 tion of toast, its meaning or raison d'etre, is to 
 extinguish the foody, solid taste which belongs
 
 Concerning Toast 5 
 
 to bread, and to supply in its place crisp, light, 
 fragrant, evanescent, spiritualised chips of fare, 
 the mere scent and sound of which suggest the 
 crisp, pleasant, light chat of easy morning or 
 evening conversation." The Spectator's enthu- 
 siasm is noble, but one begs to differ slightly. 
 Dogmatist replying to dogmatist would contest 
 the point touching the thoroughness of the 
 toasting process. Toast should not be wafer- 
 like, nor crisp throughout. On the contrary, it 
 should be cut just thick enough to leave in its 
 very inward midst the merest tissue of soft 
 bread, if only by way of compliment to the 
 butter spread upon it, which thereby gains in 
 flavour. Toast, when it is a "chip," dry enough 
 to snap, is too dry. This central layer of soft 
 bread lends it unity and preserves enough 
 moisture to influence the whole. When the 
 original bread intervening between the toasted 
 surfaces is more than a mere hint, then indeed 
 has the toaster failed with ignominy. " That," 
 as the Spectator says, "is an anomaly, like 
 dancing in thin boots surmounted with heavy 
 gaiters." 
 
 Toast is one of the few delicacies that can be 
 made better by the amateur than the professional,
 
 6 Domesticities 
 
 and as well by a man as by a woman. Cooks 
 treat toast perfunctorily: it does not interest 
 them. Indeed, toast might well be kept strictly 
 to amateur ambition. For several reasons : one 
 being that its fragrance is pleasant in a sitting- 
 room ; another, that making it is an agreeable 
 diversion ; and a third, that whereas bad toast 
 produced in the kitchen leads to annoyance 
 and irritation, bad toast produced by a guest 
 or a member of the family makes for mock 
 abuse, sham penitence, and good humour. 
 
 Just as every man believes himself to be ex- 
 celled by no one in arousing a dying fire, so 
 does every man believe himself to be the finest 
 hand in the world at making toast. That the 
 first conspicuous failure as a maker of toast was 
 Alfred the Great is the one glowing historical 
 fact which is common to all grades of intellect. 
 It is as familiar to the night-school pupil in 
 Whitechapel as it was to the late Professor 
 Freeman. To burn toast is still a prevalent 
 delinquency : there are some absent-minded 
 creatures who are always to be caught resting 
 the bread against the bars. Blackened toast is 
 not nice ; but compared with the sin of smoking 
 it, blackening toast is a bagatelle. Burnt toast
 
 Concerning Toast 7 
 
 can be scraped and rendered passable, but by 
 no means can toast be cleansed of smoke. 
 
 The best toast is made with a toasting-fork, 
 and the good, the complete, toaster is known 
 by the way in which he places the bread upon 
 the prongs. 1 An immature, illogical toaster 
 affixes it at a right angle and confronts the fire 
 squarely. This is unwise, since there follows 
 equatorial heat. The scientific toaster arranges 
 the bread so that he is enabled to sit out of 
 the line of heat and yet present the full surface 
 to the bars. When the toasting-fork is missing, 
 or already in use, a table fork is sometimes 
 employed. After toasting with a table fork for 
 
 1 Toasting-forks have other uses. One of these is illus- 
 trated in a letter of Charles Dickens to the late James T. 
 Fields, the American publisher. Dickens wrote : " I 
 dreamed that somebody was dead. It was a private 
 gentleman, and a particular friend ; and I was greatly 
 overcome when the news was broken to me (very deli- 
 cately) by a gentleman in a cocked hat, top boots, and a 
 sheet. Nothing else. ' Good God ! ' I said, ' is he 
 dead?' 'He is as dead, sir,' rejoined the gentleman, 
 ' as a door-nail. But we must all die, Mr. Dickens, 
 sooner or later, my dear sir.' ' Ah ! ' I said, ' yes, to 
 be sure. Very true. But what did he die of?' The 
 gentleman burst into a flood of tears, and said, in a 
 voice broken by emotion, ' He christened his youngest 
 child, sir, with a toasting-fork 1 ' "
 
 8 Domesticities 
 
 a minute or so, one's hand knows exactly how 
 Tom Brown must have felt when Bully Flash- 
 man held him to the fire. 1 
 
 In some houses a toasting apparatus is in 
 use, but toast thus prepared lacks individuality. 
 It may, perhaps, be embrowned more evenly, 
 but the human element is lacking. In restau- 
 rants and clubs toast is always prepared in a 
 rack, and in spite of the means employed, clubs 
 have always good toast. Some club-men leave 
 wife and child and home, and seek Pall Mall, 
 less for the company, the whist, or the cellar, 
 than for the toast to be obtained there, such 
 is its fascination. Hotels, too, have usually 
 good toast, but the supply is seldom sufficient : 
 hence the order of an experienced traveller 
 when breakfasting at an inn, "Waiter, be per- 
 petually bringing up fresh toast." The best 
 
 1 There is in English literature, by the way, a much 
 earlier reference to the same practice. The first eclogue 
 of another Browne William Browne, author of " The 
 Shepherd's Pipe " which is otherwise a simple, idyllic 
 poem, contains this cannibalistic passage : 
 
 " I will sing what I did heere 
 Long ago in Janiveere, 
 Of a skilful aged sire, 
 As we tested by the fire."
 
 Concerning Toast 9 
 
 accompaniment to toast is butter, which should 
 not be spread over the piece, but applied to 
 each mouthful in turn. Toast elicits the essen- 
 tial virtues of butter more successfully even 
 than bread ; so much so, that one might almost 
 say that violence is committed when marmalade 
 is allied to it, or meat paste. 
 
 To hot-buttered toast butter is absolutely 
 the only accompaniment ; the more butter the 
 better. And here the breach widens between the 
 Spectator and a writer who would fain quarrel 
 with no one. "It is impossible," thunders 
 the Wellington Street arbiter, "to conceive 
 a more horrible degradation of a great idea 
 than buttered toast is of toast. Every great 
 quality of toast is turned into its opposite and 
 contradictory in buttered toast lightness into 
 heaviness, crispness into swashy flabbiness, 
 fragrance into a sort of brooding butter-malaria, 
 a Pontine marsh of butter. . . . Buttered toast 
 is the Pickwick's fat-boy of victuals." True. 
 But, granting all this, does not a singularly 
 seductive food remain? Toast and buttered 
 toast are as distinct as the race-horse and the 
 cart-horse; and both alike are admirable, each 
 in its own way.
 
 io Domesticities 
 
 Different persons favour different shapes in 
 hot-buttered toast. Some cut triangular pieces, 
 others square ; some divide the slice into four, 
 others into two. This is a matter of personal 
 predilection, but positive sin is committed when 
 the crusts are not cut off. "Likeways, a few 
 rounds o' buttered toast," said Mrs. Gamp, 
 giving orders for tea to Jonas Chuzzlewit's 
 servant, "first cuttin' off the crusts, in con- 
 sequence of tender teeth, and not too many 
 of 'em ; which Gamp himself, Mrs. Chuzzlewit, 
 at one blow, being in liquor, struck out four, 
 two single and two double, as was took by 
 Mrs. Harris for a keepsake, and is carried in 
 her pocket at this present hour, along with two 
 cramp-bones, a bit o' ginger, and a grater like 
 a blessed infant's shoe in tin, with a little heel 
 to put the nutmeg in." It is, says Alexis 
 Soyer, wicked to cut through half-a-dozen 
 buttered slices at once, because when that is 
 done the butter is squeezed from the upper 
 pieces, while the bottom one is swimming in 
 it. Among the initiated (or, as the Spectator 
 would have it, the vulgar) there is, under 
 these circumstances, a struggle for the bottom 
 piece. Each slice should, on the contrary,
 
 Concerning Toast 1 1 
 
 be cut separately and laid lightly on the 
 dish. 
 
 Buttered toast should be thicker than cold 
 toast, and the butter should drench. It thus 
 becomes gloriously indigestible : as a dyspeptic 
 influence removed but one degree from the 
 muffin. It is the crumpet, however, that holds 
 the historical record. " ' One night,' said Mr. 
 Weller, " he wos took very ill ; sends for a 
 doctor ; doctor comes in a green fly, with a 
 kind o' Robinson Crusoe set o' steps, as he 
 could let down ven he got out, and pull up 
 arter him ven he got in, to perwent the neces- 
 sity o' the coachman's gettin' down, and thereby 
 undeceivin' the public by lettin' 'em see that it 
 vos only a livery coat he'd got on, and not 
 the trousers to match.' 'Wot's the matter?' 
 says the doctor. ' Wery ill,' says the patient. 
 'Wot have you been a eatin' on?' says the 
 doctor. ' Roast weal,' says the patient. ' Wot's 
 the last thing you dewoured ? ' says the doctor. 
 ' Crumpets,' says the patient. ' That's it,' says 
 the doctor. ' I'll send you a box of pills directly, 
 and don't you never take no more of 'em,' he 
 says. ' No more o' wot ? ' says the patient 
 ' Pills ? ' ' No ; crumpets,' says the doctor.
 
 1 2 Domesticities 
 
 ' Wy ? ' says the patient, starting up in bed ; 
 ' I've eat four crumpets ev'ry night for fifteen 
 year, on principle.' ' Well, then, you'd better 
 leave 'em off, on principle,' says the doctor. 
 ' Crumpets is wholesome, sir,' says the patient. 
 ' Crumpets is not wholesome, sir,' says the 
 doctor, wery fierce. ' But they're so cheap,' 
 says the patient, comin' down a little, ' and so 
 wery fillin' at the price.' 'They'd be dear to 
 you at any price ; dear if you wos paid to eat 
 'em,' says the doctor. ' Four crumpets a night,' 
 he says, ' vill do your business in six months ! ' 
 The patient looks him full in the face, and 
 turns it over in his mind for a long time, and 
 at last he says, ' Are you sure o' that 'ere, sir ? ' 
 ' I'll stake my professional reputation on it,' says 
 the doctor. ' How many crumpets, at a sittin', 
 do you think, 'ud kill me off at once ? ' says the 
 patient. ' I don't know,' says the doctor. ' Do 
 you think half a crown's vurth 'ud do it?' 
 says the patient. ' I think it might,' says the 
 doctor. ' Three shillings vurth 'ud be sure to do 
 it, I s'pose ? ' says the patient. ' Certainly,' says 
 the doctor. ' Wery good,' says the patient ; 
 1 good-night.' Next mornin' he gets up, has a 
 fire lit, orders in three shillin's vurth o' crum-
 
 Concerning Toast 13 
 
 pets, toasts 'em all, eats 'em all, and blows his 
 brains out.' 
 
 " < What did he do that for ? ' inquired Mr. 
 Pickwick abruptly; for he was considerably 
 startled by this tragical termination of the nar- 
 rative. 
 
 " ' Wot did he do it for, sir ? ' reiterated Sam. 
 ' Vy, in support of his great principle that 
 crumpets wos wholesome, and to show that he 
 couldn't be put out of his way for nobody ! ' " 
 
 The most famous hot-buttered toast house in 
 the world was "Tyson's Restaurant" in Rook 
 Street, Manchester, which still flourishes but is 
 no longer animated by the crisp individuality 
 of its founder, old Tom Tyson, as he was 
 known. Tyson, a born autocrat, knew that in 
 their heart of hearts Britons, for all their Rule 
 Britannia sentiments, like to be slave-driven. So 
 he established a restaurant wherein he, an in- 
 flexible tyrant, might enforce laws of his own 
 making and win riches by this very enforcement. 
 He provided only chops, steaks, and Cumber- 
 land ham, and served with them, instead of vege- 
 tables, hot-buttered toast or bread. Most of 
 his customers took toast. People who asked 
 for potatoes were unceremoniously told that
 
 14 Domesticities 
 
 they should have brought their own. Every one 
 who ate at Tyson's was compelled also to drink. 
 Ale, stout, coffee, and tea were the only liquids. 
 A customer asking for water was referred to the 
 " teetotal shop next door." 
 
 A host of good stories are told of Tyson. 
 He dominated the place in his shirt-sleeves, 
 and nothing escaped his vigilant eye. His 
 duty to a customer, as he conceived it, was 
 done when good food had been laid promptly 
 before him ; after that the customer's duty to 
 the master of the restaurant began. Reading 
 was not permitted, at least in the middle of the 
 day, nor grumbling, nor a protracted sitting, nor 
 smoking. Tyson's strength was the excellence 
 of his wares, his cheapness, and his business- 
 like despatch, and knowing this he played 
 the Kaiser to the top of his bent. A young 
 man once calling, " Waiter, bring me a 
 steak at once," was amazed to find a raw steak 
 clapped on the table before him. To his ex- 
 pression of disgust came the reply, " You can't 
 expect meat to be cooked if you want it at 
 once." Another customer had the temerity to 
 complain that his steak was tough. A consider- 
 able space of time elapsed before he came
 
 Concerning Toast 15 
 
 again, but Tyson, who forgot nothing, was 
 waiting for him. The grumbler called for a 
 steak. "Steaks are tough," was the reply. 
 " Then I'll have a chop." " Chops are tough." 
 " Then what can I have ? " " Nothing. If you 
 can't be satisfied with food that pleases other 
 people you can go somewhere else." A 
 customer daring so much as to glance at a 
 letter from his pocket was curtly informed that 
 " this is not a library." A customer who had 
 exceeded his welcome was bidden to go. To 
 the few who complained of incivility, Tyson's 
 reply was that he served his civility with his 
 chops and steaks. A branch of Tyson's was 
 opened in London, near St. Paul's, but, possibly 
 through lack of its originator's truculent yet 
 attractive presence, it soon ceased to be. 
 
 Yet there is room for toast-houses. Who 
 knows but that the establishment of a good 
 toast-house might not restore the days of wit ? 
 In course of time, if the toast-house became 
 as notable as Will's Coffee-house of old, another 
 John Dryden or Dr. Johnson might be forth- 
 coming to dominate it ; and we need another 
 Dr. Johnson. The experiment, at any rate, 
 might be tried.
 
 1 6 Domesticities 
 
 Toast is more than a delicacy : it is a friend, 
 a sick-room ally. Toast-and-water is cooling as 
 the wind of the morning across fields of dew, and 
 it is toast, swimming in beef tea, that consti- 
 tutes the first solid food which a patient may 
 take. In the nursery and at school toast is a 
 recognised concomitant of an invalid's tea, and 
 many a boy has shammed illness to achieve it. 
 Otherwise schoolboys have few opportunities of 
 tasting this luxury, toast made over a gas-jet 
 being a very inferior article. A gas-jet, however, 
 has been known to embrown cheese very 
 pleasantly, and here one might put a question 
 that for too long has been a cause of vexation : 
 Why is "Toasted Cheese" a less honourable 
 nickname than "Candle Ends"? It will be 
 remembered by students of " The Hunting of 
 the Snark," that the baker, having no fixed 
 name, was called by his intimate friends Candle 
 Ends, and by his enemies Toasted Cheese. To 
 the ordinary non-Carrollian mind it would seem 
 that more of a compliment, more of affection, 
 was carried by the name chosen by the baker's 
 enemies.
 
 Concerning Breakfast
 
 Concerning Breakfast 
 
 HOUSES where every one is punctual 
 for breakfast are not good to stay in : 
 the virtues so flourish there. A little laxity 
 in the morning is humanising. For dinner, 
 punctuality by all means, punctuality severely 
 to the minute ; but for breakfast let there be 
 liberty to tarry on the way. To be late for 
 breakfast is so natural an act that instinctively 
 one feels it to be right. There is a kind of 
 half-wakeful sleep following the precarious 
 folding of the hands to which the Comfortable 
 resort when they are first called, that is more 
 precious than all the deep somnolence of the 
 night. The old poet knew. How runs his 
 wisdom ? 
 
 " When the Morning riselh red, 
 Rise not thou, but keep thy Bed ; 
 When the Dawn is dull and gray, 
 Sleep is still the better way. 
 Beasts are up betimes ? But then 
 They are Beasts, and we are men." 
 19
 
 2O Domesticities 
 
 And 
 
 " Morning Sleep avoideth Broil, 
 Wasteth not in greedy Toil, 
 Doth not suffer Care or Grief, 
 Giveth aching Bones relief. 
 Of all the Crimes beneath the Sun, 
 Say, Which in morning Sleep was done ? " 
 
 Yet breakfast in bed is not the joy some 
 persons would have us think it. There are 
 crumbs. 
 
 The breakfast appetite varies strangely. Some 
 persons are content with a cup of coffee and a 
 piece of toast ; others make it the most deter- 
 mined meal of the day. Once it was formidable 
 indeed. In Sir John Hawkins's " History of 
 Music" is quoted a sixteenth-century manu- 
 script belonging to the House of Northumber- 
 land, which gives the breakfast arrangements of 
 the Percy family both for Lent and for flesh 
 days ; and oh, how some of us have fallen 
 away in trencher work ! Here is the simple 
 Northumbrian scheme : " Breakfast for my 
 Lord and Lady during Lent First, a loaf of 
 bread in trenchers, 2 manchets [a manchet was 
 a small loaf of white bread], a quart of beer, a 
 quart of wine, 2 pieces of salt fish, 6 baconn'd
 
 Concerning Breakfast 21 
 
 herring, 4 white herring, or a dish of sprats. 
 Breakfast for my Lord Percy and Master Thomas 
 Percy Item, half a loaf of household bread, a 
 manchet, a bottle of beer, a dish of butter, and 
 a piece of salt fish, a dish of sprats, or three 
 white herring. Breakfast for the nursery, for 
 my Lady Margaret and Master Ingeram Percy 
 Item, a manchet, a quart of beer [this for the 
 nursery !], a dish of butter, a piece of salt fish, 
 a dish of sprats, or three white herring." At 
 ordinary times my Lord and Lady fared thus : 
 " First, a loaf of bread in trenchers, 2 manchets, 
 a quart of beer, a quart of wine, half a chine of 
 mutton, or else a chine of beef boiled ; " Lord 
 Percy and Master Thomas Percy disposed of 
 " half a loaf of household bread, a manchet, 
 i bottle of beer, a cheeking, or else 3 mutton 
 bones boiled ; " while to the thirsty nursery 
 went " a manchet, i quart of beer, and three 
 mutton bones boiled." 
 
 In Hall's " Seventh Year of King Henry 
 VIII." we find what constituted the breakfast 
 of outlaws. " Then sayde Robyn Hood, Sir, 
 outlawes brekefaste is venyson, and therefore 
 you must be content with suche fare as we use. 
 Then the Kyng and Quene sate downe, and
 
 22 Domesticities 
 
 were served with venyson and wyne by Robyn 
 Hood and hys men, to theyre great contentacion." 
 " Contentacion " is a splendid word ; it might 
 be reserved for red-letter breakfasts. Izaak 
 Walton and his honest scholar made brave 
 breakfast of a piece of powdered beef and a 
 radish or two, as they sat beneath a sycamore. 
 Considering that this was at nine o'clock and 
 they began fishing soon after five, they de- 
 served it. " All excellent good," said the 
 honest scholar as he wiped his mouth, "and 
 my stomach excellent good too." Walton's 
 collaborator, Master Charles Cotton, was less 
 indulgent. " My diet," he said, " is always one 
 glass [of ale] so soon as I am dressed, and 
 no more till dinner," which, compared with the 
 excesses of the Percy children, is asceticism 
 itself. Viator, in the same work, took even 
 less. " I will light a pipe," he said, "for that 
 is commonly my breakfast too." Viator, how- 
 ever, was misguided. Had he eaten breakfast 
 first and lighted his pipe after, his lot would 
 have been more enviable. No pipe is so 
 gracious as that which follows breakfast. Cal- 
 verley sinned when he omitted this season from 
 his ode to tobacco. " Sweet when they've
 
 Concerning Breakfast 23 
 
 cleared away lunch," he sings. True ; but 
 sweeter, nay, sweetest, when they are clearing 
 away breakfast. 
 
 To the child breakfast means bread and milk, 
 or porridge, and the beginning of another day. 
 To me it meant this and nothing more until 
 at an early age a reading-book was embarked 
 upon, which consisted of a long dialogue between 
 father and children concerning the nature and 
 the source of the articles upon the breakfast 
 table. The conversation, which was continued 
 through several breakfasts, proceeded in the 
 manner of the catechism. One child asked 
 where coffee came from, and papa replied that 
 it came from Arabia. Another was struck by 
 the whiteness of the salt, and said so. Papa 
 at once explained the whiteness of the salt and 
 passed easily to a lecture on salt-mining. The 
 aim of the book was to show that the antipodal 
 peoples of the earth meet at the breakfast table; 
 that energy must be expended in both hemi- 
 spheres before Henry and Susan can enjoy their 
 bread and treacle. This reading- book was 
 epoch-making. Henceforward breakfast was 
 an educative meal ; and I have only quite 
 lately lost the feeling that at any moment a
 
 24 Domesticities 
 
 searching question might be asked concerning 
 the origin and manufacture of everything eaten. 
 From the children's books of to-day, it might 
 be noted, the well-informed parent is departing. 
 
 Oatmeal marks not only the child's breakfast, 
 it is the favourite food of Edinburgh Reviewers. 
 Thus do extremes meet. It is best with cream, 
 which indeed might be defined, after a well- 
 known model, as the stuff which makes porridge 
 insipid if you eat it without it. If the hoardings 
 are to be believed, the form of porridge now 
 most in vogue is of Quaker origin. Quaker 
 oats, one supposes, should be the very antithesis 
 of wild oats. Porridge homely, honest fare 
 though it be is the cause of more strife than 
 any other dish. The great salt versus sugar 
 battle is eternally waged above it ; for some 
 take salt and some sugar, and they that take 
 salt are the scorn of those that take sugar, and 
 they that take sugar are despised of those that 
 take salt. Quakers being a pacific folk, their 
 oats should have stopped this warfare. 
 
 The egg, as egg, belongs properly to the 
 breakfast table, in spite of the beautiful anthro- 
 pomorphic story (which too many parents claim 
 to have participated in) of the little girl who
 
 Concerning Breakfast 25 
 
 asked her mother what God has for dinner. 
 "God," said her mother, "has no dinner." 
 The little girl was for a moment silent, thought- 
 ful, sad. Then she brightened : " Oh, I suppose 
 He has an egg with His tea." In a poem in 
 praise of frugality his Holiness the Pope lays 
 down this rule (which reaches English readers 
 via Mr. Andrew Lang) 
 
 " Fresh be thine eggs, hard-boiled, or nearly raw, 
 Or deftly poached, or simply served au plat ; 
 1 There's wit in poaching eggs,' the proverb says, 
 And you may do them in a hundred ways." 
 
 Buttered they give, perhaps, most "contentacion." 
 Personally, I like to begin the day's eating 
 with watercress. It is so sharp and awakening. 
 Indeed, to show to fullest advantage, to scin- 
 tillate as Nature intended it to, it is at break- 
 fast that watercress must be eaten, newly 
 picked, with salt and bread-and-butter. The 
 bread must be white and new, and the butter 
 mild and fresh. The ecstasy of the surprise 
 of watercress to the palate and tongue ! The 
 lively pricking sensation of the mustard-like 
 sharpness, the fragrance of the sap, and, above 
 all, the cleanness, the good-humoured, bright 
 cleanness of the herb ! Watercress, if it tastes
 
 26 Domesticities 
 
 of anything, tastes of early morning in spring. 
 It is eloquent of the charm of its native 
 environment. Nothing else lettuce, radishes, 
 cucumber, land cress, or celery speaks or 
 sings to the eater, as watercress does, of 
 cool streams and overhanging banks and lush 
 herbage. The watercress has for neighbours the 
 water-lily, the marsh marigold, and the forget- 
 me-not. The spirit of the rivulet abides in its 
 heart. 
 
 No matter of what the breakfast consists, 
 marmalade is the coping-stone of the meal. 
 Without marmalade the finest breakfast is in- 
 complete, a broken arc. Only with marmalade 
 can it be a perfect round. Every one's home- 
 made marmalade is notoriously the best; but 
 where the commercially -manufactured article 
 is used opinions differ. Her Most Gracious 
 Majesty (it is stated so on the pot) prefers a 
 viscous variety which is impossible to Oxford 
 men bred on Cooper's. Tess of the D'Urber- 
 villes, it will be remembered, favoured Keel- 
 well's ; or, at any rate, it was this maker who 
 assisted in the embellishment of little Sorrow's 
 grave. The Universities are nobly loyal to 
 marmalade. At Cambridge there is a saying
 
 Concerning Breakfast 27 
 
 that no man can pass his Little-go until he has 
 consumed his own weight in it, while Oxford 
 first called it Squish. The attitude of women 
 to marmalade has never been quite sound. 
 True, they make it excellently, but afterwards 
 their association with it is one lamentable re- 
 trogression. They spread it over pastry ; they 
 do not particularly desire it at breakfast ; and 
 (worst) they decant it into glass dishes and fancy 
 jars. 
 
 Where there is no marmalade, shift may be 
 made with honey or jam ; and treacle is not 
 entirely out of favour, although the enterprise of 
 Bonnie Dundee has dealt it so hard a blow that 
 you may fare far in your quest of the golden 
 syrup. The great charm of treacle is in its transit 
 from the pot to the plate ; with no other liquid, 
 except the exquisite thin honey of Switzerland, 
 is it possible to trace one's autograph. Most of 
 us as children saw our names writ in treacle. 
 
 Breakfast is a meal at which one becomes 
 apiarian. Everything being on the table, or 
 on the sideboard, one can sip, bee-like, where 
 one will ; hence, perhaps, the absence of con- 
 versation at breakfast. At dinner, where for- 
 mality is preserved, where one progresses
 
 28 Domesticities 
 
 artistically and with dignity towards reple- 
 tion, conversation is fostered ; at breakfast 
 there is merely chatter, sporadic and trivial ; 
 scraps from letters, puns, dreams, and the de- 
 scription of strange noises heard in the night. 
 Dreams told at breakfast should be accepted 
 with reservations, for few persons are strong 
 enough to tell them faithfully. Yet, although 
 breakfast does little either for the conversa- 
 tionalist or the gourmet, it is often the merriest 
 and freshest of the day's meals. The joy of it 
 is new every morning. Breakfast is the begin- 
 ning of another day : lunch and dinner are but 
 continuations ; and to those glad natures which 
 are reinvigorated and heartened by every sun- 
 rise breakfast is a time for high spirits. High 
 spirits, however, must not be confounded with 
 brilliance. Only dull people, said a character 
 in a recent comedy, are brilliant at breakfast ; 
 which is a truth, in spite of the works of Dr. 
 Holmes and the records which have come 
 down to us of the scintillating breakfast-parties 
 given by Samuel Rogers and Lord Holland. 
 But the table which in those days was set in a 
 roar approximated more nearly to the luncheon- 
 table than the breakfast-table as we understand
 
 Concerning Breakfast 29 
 
 it. Breakfast-parties are indeed practically 
 obsolete. 1 At the ordinary breakfast-table there 
 is little wit. One reason is the early hour wit 
 is for the day's decline ; another is discontent 
 bed is not yet forgotten, nor the breakfast-gong 
 forgiven, and wit requires a mind at ease. 
 
 1 The following remark of Macaulay to Mrs. Stowe 
 thus loses point, and this point is not restored by reading 
 lunch for breakfast, for the old breakfast does not quite 
 take the place of modern lunch : "You invite a man to 
 dinner because you rmist invite him ; because you are 
 acquainted with his grandfather, or it is proper you 
 should ; but you invite a man to breakfast because you 
 want to see him. You may be sure if you are invited to 
 breakfast, there is something agreeable about you."
 
 Concerning Walks
 
 Concerning Walks 
 
 A r TER all, choosing a walking-stick is a 
 serious business. A cane can be selected 
 lightly enough, for a cane is a mere town ac- 
 quaintance; but a walking-stick is a country 
 friend, a roadside companion, a support, a 
 solace, perhaps a defender. Therefore it be- 
 hoves one to be careful in deciding. Moreover, 
 a walking-stick should endure : one does not 
 want to change it before the necessary end ; 
 and a good walking-stick is one of the things of 
 which one never tires but grows ever more fond, 
 familiarity breeding no contempt, nothing but 
 increased satisfaction. Now a cane a cane 
 may be an affair of caprice : you may have a 
 dozen and alternate them like neck-ties; but 
 a walking-stick is unalterable. You stand by 
 him and he stands by you ; he is, as I have 
 said, your friend. 
 
 Personally, I incline to a cherry. I have 
 carried my present cherry for a good five years, 
 and his predecessor (broken at stump cricket) 
 was a cherry too. This is the best I have yet 
 
 33 C
 
 34 Domesticities 
 
 owned because it fulfils the requirements. 
 That is to say, it is strong and leanable upon, 
 it tapers, and its handle, which of course is 
 natural, is set at a slightly obtuse angle. I was 
 taught the last important qualification by the 
 finest foot-traveller in Sussex, a man (he is now 
 above eighty but still active) who knows every 
 inch of that inaccessible and alluring county, 
 and has known it since he was a boy. He 
 cuts his own sticks, preferring ground ash, and, 
 since he cannot find it in his heart to pass a 
 likely one by when it catches his eye as he 
 swings through a copse, his sumptuary stock is 
 immense. All have obtuse-angled handles. 
 The reason is that for down hill work (when 
 a stick is most useful) the support for the hand 
 is the fullest. All also have very large handles, 
 for the same reason. A little while ago I had 
 a valuable corroboration of this theory from 
 another old man, whom I found cutting the 
 grass on a grave in the churchyard. Beside 
 him lay a crutch and a walking-stick with a 
 handle obtuse-angled of enormous size. 
 " I've had that stick many a year," he said. 
 " The handle ? Oh yes, he is a big one ; but 
 if he hadn't been big he wouldn't have been
 
 Concerning Walks 35 
 
 any good to me, crippled as I am." Your old 
 countryman makes no mistakes in such matters. 
 
 In real walking a handle of this character 
 is imperative. Not that a right-angled handle 
 is an obstacle, but try the other for a while 
 and you will see its comfort and utility. A 
 crook is useless save as a hook for berries and 
 nuts, and a knob contracts the hand. One of 
 the sad things is that holly, that superb wood, 
 cannot grow a good handle, nor can you often 
 find a blackthorn that succeeds in doing so 
 Good cherry sticks are rare ; for the most part 
 they lack balance. Hazels are light and strong, 
 but their handles are cross-grained and are 
 therefore put out of court. The ground 
 ash, perhaps, comes oftenest to the point of 
 satisfaction. 
 
 Where, one wonders, are the old walking- 
 sticks ? Where are George Borrow's sticks ? 
 He must have had noble fellows. Time should 
 have no power over a stick lying at ease ; the 
 sticks of great men should last for ever in a 
 museum. I think I must begin to collect them. 
 Where is that wonderful stick of Coleridge's, 
 which, when a young man, walking in Wales, 
 he lost, and advertised for so piquantly ? This
 
 36 Domesticities 
 
 is how the notice, which was called through the 
 town by the crier, was couched 
 
 " Missing from the Bee Inn, Abergele, a curious 
 walking-stick. On one side it displays the head of an 
 eagle, the eyes of which represent rising suns, and 
 the ears Turkish crescent ; on the other side is the 
 portrait of the owner in woodwork. Beneath the 
 head of the eagle is a Welsh wig, and around the 
 neck of the stick is a Queen Elizabeth's ruff in tin. 
 All down it waves the line of beauty in very ugly 
 carving. If any gentleman (or lady) has fallen in 
 love with the above described stick, and secretly 
 carried off the same, he (or she) is hereby earnestly 
 admonished to conquer a passion the continuance 
 of which must prove fatal to his (or her) honesty. 
 And if the said stick has slipped into such gentle- 
 man's (or lady's) hand through inadventure, he (or 
 she) is required to rectify the mistake with all 
 convenient speed. God save the King." 
 
 Coleridge recovered the stick from the old 
 gentleman who had innocently taken it, and 
 who, grasping it firmly, returned to the inn in 
 confusion followed by half the town. The 
 stick, it seems, was, properly speaking, a staff, 
 such as patriarchs carry in old Bible prints, 
 for it measured five feet. For hill-work these 
 staffs are better than any walking-stick of 
 ordinary length ; they pull one upwards.
 
 Concerning Walks 37 
 
 Coleridge bought it from a countryman, and 
 his sudden affection for it, he says in a letter, 
 " mellowed into settled friendship." That is as 
 it should be with all good sticks; we should 
 feel for them (and they for us) settled friend- 
 ship. 
 
 To have one of these good sticks, nothing to 
 do, no cares, no thought for the morrow, a 
 good pair of boots, a sufficient purse, a light 
 knapsack, a weather-proof coat, and to be in 
 a heathery country with no more purpose in 
 life than to follow whatever footpaths one will 
 until come night and the inn that is no bad 
 state. Indeed, it is an ideal of happiness. For 
 the last couple of weeks in April or the first 
 in May one could be as happy thus employed 
 (or unemployed) as any way you could suggest. 
 Later, the skies are not so interesting, having 
 too much blue and too little cloud; the birds 
 have done with nesting and have therefore cut 
 off from the rover the additional pleasure of 
 looking for their eggs ; and later also, the heat 
 begins. Now for the desultory walker a blend 
 of hot or cold, or rather, warmth and freshness, 
 is important, and a showery day he will welcome. 
 To be rained upon and sunned upon in one walk
 
 38 Domesticities 
 
 is to be in Nature's good books. She extends 
 the privilege only rarely. That is why April 
 or May is the ideal time. 
 
 The catalogue of necessities which I have 
 just dogmatically given may be modified a little 
 without serious injury to the ideal. Thus, 
 thought for the morrow may be present now 
 and then, but fugitively ; the knapsack may go 
 altogether, its only value (and one that com- 
 pensates the owner for the irksomeness of 
 carrying it) being that it predicates a romantic 
 uncertainty about where the night is going to 
 be spent ; the heather is a mere matter of taste. 
 But the footpath clause is unassailable ; I can- 
 not let that go. It is because all my life I 
 have been baulked of accepting the invitation 
 of this footpath and that, that I included it in 
 the scheme at all, and it must not be expunged. 
 
 To be able to follow whatever footpath one 
 will is the very heart of the game. The other 
 morning I walked into the town to meet a visitor. 
 Having only just enough time I stepped out 
 briskly ; but the sense of duty in my punctual 
 head never reached my feet at all. No sooner 
 did a little footpath cross my track than I found 
 them wavering that way : it was all I could do
 
 Concerning Walks 39 
 
 to make them reasonable ; rebellion inhabited 
 every nail, rank anarchy was enthroned upon 
 both uppers. I got them to the town at last, 
 but I was exhausted. The worst of it is that my 
 sympathies were with them all the while, and 
 nothing but necessity saved me from giving way. 
 My head was adamant, but, as the saying is, my 
 heart was in my boots. Is it not in Hans 
 Andersen that a bewitched pair of shoes carry 
 their wearer into peril ? The idea is one for a 
 writer like Mr. Anstey. I can see the synopsis 
 as I write : A diabolical cobbler settles in the 
 village and soles-and-heels the villagers with 
 magic leather ; everything goes askew ; the 
 Vicar is irresistibly borne into the public-house 
 and held fast against the bar ; the publican is 
 propelled to the most conspicuous pew ; the 
 profoundest of the old maids is found steering a 
 bee-line course of terrible velocity for the front 
 door of the roost inveterate of the bachelors, 
 and nothing can stop her ; while a poor country 
 recluse, who ought to be doing his daily work, 
 is brought to penury and unfruitfulness by an 
 inability to resist the seductive call of footpaths. 
 That's me, as grammarians try not to say. I 
 really must speak to our cobbler.
 
 4O Domesticities 
 
 But how seductive this call of the footpath 
 is ! However delightful the path you are at the 
 moment treading may be, the next one always 
 seems to promise a shade more of beauty or 
 mystery. You see it fading away over the ridge, 
 and the temptation to learn what happens after 
 is intense. The fact that a footpath always goes 
 somewhere is one of its charms, and to conjec- 
 ture where a footpath goes is not the least plea- 
 sure of a country walk. " I expect it leads to 
 that farm," says one. " No, I think it hits the 
 road over there, and just cuts off this corner," 
 says another. " Why shouldn't it be the path to 
 
 ? " asks the third ; and in the end there is 
 
 nothing to do but try it. So are good rambles 
 compassed. 
 
 Not that the open road is to be slighted. 
 There it is, broad and white and hard ; but the 
 open road has no subtleties. Now a footpath 
 is of a shy, retiring character, with unexpected 
 turns and twists, dips and elevations, with 
 unlocked for shade and sun. Its voice is low 
 beside the clarion call of the open road ; but it 
 is very sweet. The footpath is, in a way, more 
 human than the road. To a certain extent a 
 footpath is also a protest against the road,
 
 Concerning Walks 41 
 
 Being wayward itself, vagrom, capricious, its 
 appeal is to the traveller whose sympathies are 
 with those characteristics. The open road cries 
 to a blunter, a more direct mind. 
 
 It is a fine thing to begin a footpath. Any 
 one may have this honour by accident ; but few 
 of us can knowingly lay claim to it. I have 
 assisted, however, to maintain a right-of-way by 
 stamping up and down it to emphasise the 
 apparent importance of the track ; and my old 
 Sussex friend with the good taste in walking- 
 sticks once spent a whole night in the same 
 noble occupation. That is true zeal. 
 
 In a hilly country the most satisfying rests 
 that come are those taken leaning on a gate. 
 To see a view properly one must be still, 
 and one can be very still leaning on a gate. 
 The body reposes while the eyes work. Last 
 summer I walked along a hill in Kent, over a 
 common. This common was on the top of the 
 hill, and the roadway ran over the turf parallel 
 with the line of the range and about a hundred 
 yards from the summit, all along say for half a 
 mile. On the lower side of this roadway a 
 footpath enclosed by old ruts would be the 
 more exact description was a hedge, also run-
 
 42 Domesticities 
 
 ning all the way along ; and this hedge served as 
 so complete a barrier to the view that a wayfarer 
 plumped suddenly down on this path could be 
 quite unaware that he was five hundred feet 
 above the sea level. On the one hand he would 
 see the common, just then a blaze of gold gorse 
 bushes backed by sombre heather, with a plover 
 wheeling and tumbling in the sky above it ; and 
 on the other, nothing but the tender green of 
 the beech trees, which, twisted and gnarled 
 under the restraining influence of the hand-bill, 
 made as impenetrable a screen as the most 
 sensitive recluse or misanthrope could need. 
 As I have said, the wayfarer would have been 
 quite unaware that he was five hundred feet 
 above the sea level. 
 
 Except at the gates ! For in this hedge 
 were three gates, and those gates opened on to 
 three counties Kent and Surrey and Sussex. 
 To come unexpectedly on one of them was 
 the suddenest thing ! One stood still and the 
 world was merely sky and hedge and a strip of 
 common ; a single step and two hundred square 
 miles lay beneath me. And such square miles ! 
 soft and peaceful, made domestic and kindly 
 by comfortably-rounded oaks and red roofs and
 
 Concerning Walks 43 
 
 the gentle whiteness of oast vanes. That for 
 the foreground ; farther were the hills, a faint 
 misty purple, like the bloom on a plum. And 
 all this spread out for the quiet eye by a five- 
 barred gate ! 
 
 I remember meeting with the same effect 
 the same unlocking of a view by a gate on a 
 piece of the Pilgrim's Way, just out of Guild- 
 ford, before Newland's Corner is reached. The 
 view there is not so ample : Martha's Chapel 
 takes up so much of it ; but the suddenness is 
 the same, and a gate plays the same part. But 
 the suddenest experience in views that was 
 ever mine was gathered in Italy. Some fifteen 
 miles south of Genoa, on the Ligurian coast, 
 is a little seaport named Santa Margherita. 
 High on a ridge of the Apennines, above 
 Santa Margherita, is the village of Ruta. The 
 road from Santa Margherita to Ruta climbs the 
 hills inland : there is nothing to see in the 
 distance but peak on peak, valley after valley, 
 and, near at hand, villas, vineyards, white bell- 
 towers, olive groves. And then, at Ruta, the 
 road runs through a tunnel cut through the 
 rock, and you pass from this grey-green world 
 hrough a momentary blackness into full view
 
 44 Domesticities 
 
 of the blue gulf of Genoa, the distant Alpes 
 Maritimes, snow-clad and dazzling, the seething 
 city of Genoa, and, nearer to your feet, Camogli 
 and Nervi. It is so sudden as to make one 
 wince, almost as though a white bird flew in 
 one's face. But only for an instant. Thereafter 
 are supreme content and rest the satisfied sense 
 that can come only when one reclines on a high 
 hill, gazing at a murmuring plain.
 
 Concerning Tea
 
 Concerning Tea 
 
 THE origin of tea, according to tradition, 
 is as simple as it is credible. Prince 
 Darma, in the remote ages, was a holy Asiatic 
 who spent day and night in meditations upon 
 the Infinite. One night his ecstasy was inter- 
 rupted by sleep. On awaking he was so dis- 
 mayed at his infirmity that he tore off his 
 eyelids and flung them on the ground. The 
 spectacle of a holy Asiatic flinging his eyelids 
 on the ground deserves the notice of an histori- 
 cal painter. On visiting the spot later, Prince 
 Darma found that his eyelids had grown into 
 a shrub. He had the wit to take some of the 
 leaves and pour boiling water upon them. Ever 
 after, by simply drinking a little of the precious 
 liquor, he was able to keep sleep at bay and 
 pursue his thoughts with added zest and profit. 
 The English history of the plant is com- 
 paratively brief. According to the popular 
 statement, tea was introduced into this country 
 from Holland in 1666. D'Israeli, however, 
 thinks the date earlier, because he once heard
 
 48 Domesticities 
 
 of a collector whose treasures included Oliver 
 Cromwell's teapot. This, perhaps, would be 
 better evidence had we not all heard of the 
 museum which possessed a small skull certified 
 to be the head of Oliver Cromwell when a boy. 
 None the less, one Thomas Garway, a tobacconist 
 and coffee-dealer in Exchange Alley, is known 
 to have sold tea at the rate of three pounds 
 sterling per pound weight about 1660. Not, 
 however, for a score or more of years later 
 was tea at all common, although Charles the 
 Second's queen, Henrietta, who had sipped it 
 with gusto in Portugal, stamped the beverage 
 with her approval in the Court. Mr. Waller 
 wrote a poem on the new fashion, in which he 
 praised together the " best of queens " and the 
 "best of herbs." Mr. Waller, by the way, 
 learned from a Jesuit who came from China 
 in 1664 that tea and beaten-up eggs made 
 a worthy substitute for a "competent meal." 
 Concerning the popularisation of tea in this 
 country, there is a story told by Southey of the 
 great-grandmother of a friend of his, who made 
 one of the party that sat down to the first pound 
 of tea that ever came to Penrith. They boiled 
 it in a kettle, and ate the leaves with butter
 
 Concerning Tea 49 
 
 and salt, wondering wherein the attraction 
 lay. 
 
 The wise tea-maker is suspicious of elaborate 
 paraphernalia. The best tea is made with a 
 black kettle on the fire, and an earthenware 
 or china teapot. Copper kettles on tripods 
 (heated by tiny spirit stoves that hold too little 
 spirit), silver teapots, and kindred refinements, 
 do not help the leaf. Nor should strainers be 
 desired. Tea requires no "patents," least of 
 all a spoon resembling a perforated walnut, 
 alleged to be unrivalled for the preparation of 
 a single cup. A single cup ! Who, if the 
 tea were worth drinking, ever wanted but a 
 single cup? Tea should be brewed of the 
 right strength at the beginning, poured out 
 at once into cups and reserved cups (or de- 
 canted into another teapot), and then remade. 
 To burden the water with more leaves than 
 it can attend to is thoughtless, and every drop 
 that is afterwards added impairs the flavour 
 of the liquor; notwithstanding the old Scotch 
 lady who recommended a certain brand of leaf 
 because it had " such a grip of the thir-r-d 
 water." Using too little tea is a fault never 
 
 committed by the unwise and imprudent. The 
 
 D
 
 50 Domesticities 
 
 ordinary rule is one spoonful for each guest 
 and one for the pot, but some brands go farther 
 than others. A large pot is imperative. Few 
 things in life are more saddening than the 
 smallness of some people's teapots. The tea- 
 pot should be warmed for the reception of the 
 leaves. Wetting the tea, as it is called, is a 
 horrid habit. All the water that is required 
 for each brew should be poured in at once on 
 the instant that it boils. Water that has long 
 been boiling is unprofitable and stale and in- 
 capable of extracting from the opening leaf its 
 richest essences. When there has been delay 
 and it is impracticable to boil a full kettle 
 again, it is well to pour into it from a high 
 altitude a little fresh cold water. The more 
 forcible the impact of this new water, the 
 more is the old supply invigorated and fitted 
 to cope worthily with the leaf. " At your 
 ease," sang the Emperor Kien Long in the 
 poem that is painted on every teapot in 
 China "at your ease drink this precious 
 liquor, which chases away the five causes of 
 trouble." 
 
 Men's tea, I think, excels women's. Taking 
 them as a whole one may say that no class of
 
 Concerning Tea 51 
 
 men make such good tea as undergraduates. 
 Time is theirs ; conveniences are to hand ; and 
 though they are young and ardent, haste and 
 enthusiasm are bad form. Hence the brew has 
 a dignity, a gravity, a composure worthy of it. 
 There is something Asiatic about the reserved 
 undergraduate and to-day the conscious ones 
 are all reserved that stimulates tea to do its 
 best for him. Later in life, when he has left 
 the university and met a woman, the under- 
 graduate becomes again an Occidental. These 
 undergraduate tea connoisseurs are a develop- 
 ment of the last few years : the invitation, 
 " Look in this afternoon and try my new Orange 
 Pekoe," to which grey walls, stained by the 
 stress of centuries, now re-echo, would strike 
 dismay to the heart of Cuthbert Bede. The 
 thoughtful undergraduate as soon misses his 
 tobacco as his tea. He presides over the 
 teapot with the air of Roger Bacon in his 
 laboratory. Men always bring to a culinary 
 feat this interested manner a little touched by 
 mystery. To the woman cooking is natural; 
 to the man it is ex-orbitant, and, partially, a 
 lark. 
 
 Just as men are more intimately interested
 
 52 Domesticities 
 
 than women in the making of tea, so are they 
 often more subtly conscious of its merits. 
 Women do not discriminate so calmly. Tea 
 to them is tea ; tea to a man is China, or 
 Indian, or Ceylon, "golden-tipped," "overland 
 borne," and the like. It is not for men but 
 for families that polysyllabic brands are put 
 upon the market. For families, for families, 
 does Arabi Pasha beguile the tedium of exile 
 by overlooking plantations in Ceylon; for 
 families are artists employed to delineate aged 
 grandmothers in the act of being reminded 
 of the delicious teas of thirty years ago. That 
 is why men who understand offer you better 
 tea than women. 
 
 But it must not be supposed that the art of 
 appreciating tea is unknown to women. No- 
 thing could be farther from the truth. I knew 
 a venerable lady with whom tea-making was 
 almost a religious rite. To her high-backed chair 
 was first brought the caddy an inlaid casket 
 which was deposited on a table beside her. 
 Then from the depths of a china vase the key 
 was extracted. My hostess assumed her spec- 
 tacles, and, taking the key, turned it gravely, 
 scooped out spoonfuls heaped high of the
 
 Concerning Tea 53 
 
 fragrant leaves and they were very fragrant 
 and tipped them into the silver teapot proffered 
 to her as by a royal cupbearer. Then she 
 closed the lid, locked it, and handed the key 
 to the attendant maid, who first bore it to its 
 abode, and then, returning, carried the caddy 
 reverently before her to its accustomed niche ; 
 while her mistress removed her spectacles 
 and relaxed the tension of her features until 
 they once more shone with their natural 
 benignancy. 
 
 The happiest tea-drinkers are they who have 
 generous friends in China. No tea is like 
 theirs. That inscrutable humourist, Li Hung 
 Chang, left presents of priceless tea in his 
 wake as he passed smiling through the West 
 tea with a distinction until then unsuspected by 
 the few persons whose glory it was to taste it. 
 Among these was Mr. Gladstone, great among 
 tea-drinkers, whose pleasant humour it was 
 to speak of a cup as a dish. Dean Stanley 
 was among the tea-giants, and Dr. Johnson's 
 prowess is a by-word. Hartley Coleridge was 
 another colossus of the caddy. One who 
 knew him tells that once on being asked how 
 many cups he was in the habit of drinking,
 
 54 Domesticities 
 
 the poet replied with scorn, " Cups ! I don't 
 count by cups. I count by pots." l 
 
 The commonest tea is black, and it is almost 
 always a blend, even when the terms Congou 
 and Souchong are employed. China, India, and 
 Ceylon all three are levied upon for these 
 mixtures. Their description in the catalogues 
 is worth study ; indeed, all merchants' adjectives 
 are worth study. A table of ten graduated 
 qualities of black teas lies before me. The 
 lowest priced variety is " pure and useful " ; 
 then " strong and liquoring " ; then " strong and 
 rich flavoured." While the same kind, but 
 twopence dearer, is "finer grade and very 
 economical " ; then " splendid liquor " ; then 
 " extra choice and strongly recommended "; then 
 " beautiful quality " ; then " soft and rich " ; 
 then " small young leaf, magnificent liquor " ; 
 and, finally, at three shillings and fourpence, 
 " very choice, small leaf, a connoisseur's tea." 
 
 1 Hartley's father, in answer to a tea-question, made 
 a reply touched by no such arrogance. Carlyle tells, 
 in the " Life of John Sterling," how one afternoon at 
 Highgate, Mrs. Gillman handed Coleridge a belated 
 cup of tea with the remark that she hoped it was all 
 right. " Better than I deserve, madam, better than 
 I deserve," was the reply.
 
 Concerning Tea 55 
 
 But this is not a list for the true connoisseur : 
 to him three-and-fourpenny tea would mean 
 little. In another list I find the description 
 "very pungent and flavoury." "Syrupy" is 
 also a hard-worked epithet. It would puzzle 
 a conscientious merchant to fit any of these 
 terms, even the humblest, to some of the tea 
 that one now and then is forced to drink. But 
 the British tourist is attracted not by tea as tea, 
 but by tea with accessories. The late Mr. 
 Arthur Cecil, the comedian, used to tell with 
 great glee of the cannibal tea at Kew : thus 
 " Tea, plain, 6d. ; " " Tea, with shrimps, gd. ; " 
 "Tea, with children, is." Of all the public 
 varieties the tea obtained at a railway station 
 is perhaps the worst. The liquor served at 
 those carnivals which are known to school- 
 boys as tea-fights (or bun-struggles) is a close 
 competitor, but being free, or inexpensive, it has 
 an advantage over the station tea, which is 
 costly. A question in an examination paper 
 circulated among the students at a London 
 hospital, asked the reader to " give some idea of 
 the grief felt by the refreshment-room tea at 
 never having seen Asia." This sorrow might be 
 shared by the station blend. Ship's tea, that is
 
 56 Domesticities 
 
 to say, tea in the cabin of the ocean tramp 
 would be worse, only that at sea one is too 
 hungry to care for refinements of flavour. The 
 officers of a vessel on which I once was super- 
 cargo discriminated between tea and coffee by 
 taking the temperature of the milk jug. If 
 hot, the beverage was coffee ; if cold, tea.
 
 Concerning School-Hampers
 
 Concerning School-Hampers 
 
 THE other day, while aimlessly turning over 
 the pages of a list of one of the great 
 London Stores, I came upon a description of the 
 school-hampers and Christmas-hampers which 
 the firm is prepared to despatch more than 
 prepared, one supposes, even pleased : for if 
 there is one employment above another that 
 should carry good humour with it, it is the pre- 
 paration and despatch of a hamper. As I had 
 always conceived hampers to be a home-designed 
 product of the kitchen and store-room, their 
 supply was an additional proof of the thorough- 
 ness of the Stores system. I knew that conjurers 
 were to be obtained there, and Ethiopian min- 
 strels, and the kinematoscope, and paper plates 
 for picnics, and I knew also that the transfer 
 of a non-transferable Stores ticket is one of the 
 sins which the Recording Angel blots ; but the 
 hamper- page was a true surprise. Forthwith, I 
 determined, if ever a change of employment is 
 necessary, to apply to Messrs. Blank & Co. for 
 engagement as their hamper editor, or even to 
 
 59
 
 60 Domesticities 
 
 establish a hamper bureau of my own. In a 
 world which is mostly disappointment and 
 frustration, the life of a hamper editor must be 
 radiant. 
 
 Half the hamper-page was devoted to school- 
 hampers and half to Christmas-hampers, and 
 really it was very good reading. Few novelists 
 write so much to the point. Here is the first 
 entry 
 
 SCHOOL-HAMPERS AT 55. CONTAIN 
 
 2 Ibs. currant cake. i Jar marmalade. 
 
 i Ham and chicken sausage. I Bottle sweets. 
 
 I Jar potted meat. 12 Oranges, 
 i jam. 2 Ibs. mixed nuts. 
 
 What expression of satisfaction is now most 
 in favour at school I cannot say "ripping," 
 perhaps, or perhaps " jolly decent " : I heard 
 both terms lately, although they may have been 
 survivals but even a five-shilling hamper should 
 elicit it. The " i Bottle sweets " is, perhaps, a 
 questionable inclusion. Butter-scotch, toffee, 
 and chocolate (the cream dug out and eaten 
 first) are sound boyish tastes ; but " i Bottle 
 sweets" has a feminine ring. The purist also 
 would object to the phrases " i Jar jam " and
 
 Concerning School-Hampers 61 
 
 " i Jar marmalade " pot is the word. And 
 the oranges would, one hopes, at another season 
 be replaced by apples. Yet, carp as we may, 
 the five-shilling hamper is desirable. 
 
 Now see what another crown will bring 
 enough for any one boy : 
 
 SCHOOL-HAMPERS AT IDS. CONTAIN 
 
 4 Ibs, currant cake. I Bottle sweets. 
 
 1 Ham and chicken sausage. 2 Ibs. mixed confectionery. 
 
 2 Jars potted meat. 6 Mince pies, 
 i Jar marmalade. 24 Oranges. 
 
 i ,, 'jam. 2 Ibs. mixed nuts. 
 
 The " i Bottle sweets " still persists, but " 2 Ibs. 
 mixed confectionery " come in to rectify it. 
 Come in also " 6 Mince pies " the list clearly 
 belongs to the winter and there is a lavish 
 duplication of other matters. One of the " 2 
 Jars potted meat " might well be anchovy or 
 bloater paste anchovy for choice, because it 
 lasts longer ; and I do not greatly esteem the 
 " Ham and chicken sausage." Boys infinitely 
 prefer sardines ; indeed, the omission of 
 sardines from all these hampers is a serious 
 fault. 
 
 Add ten shillings :
 
 62 Domesticities 
 
 SCHOOL-HAMPERS AT 203. CONTAIN 
 
 4 Ibs. currant cake. 6 Mince pies. 
 
 2 Ham and chicken saus- 2 Ib. box mixed crystallised 
 
 ages. fruit, 
 
 i German sausage. 4 Jars assorted potted 
 
 1 Box braised beef, 2 Ibs. meats. 
 
 2 Jars jam. 24 Oranges. 
 
 2 ,, marmalade. 3 Ibs. mixed nuts. 
 
 2 Bottles sweets. 
 
 With a shining pound it is manifest that one 
 may make a young friend very ill. Probably 
 this class of hamper is intended rather for 
 brothers or for boys of conspicuous generosity. 
 From one or two items, such as the " i Box 
 braised beef, 2 Ibs.," it would seem that the 
 gentleman who now acts as hamper editor has 
 an eye to bedroom feasts, because the theory of 
 the hamper is not to take the place of school 
 meals, but to amend them, to add a silver lining 
 to them ; and braised beef is a viand in itself 
 rather than a concomitant. Hence, possibly, 
 the nuts, whose shells are notoriously good to 
 place on the stairs, where they crack beneath 
 the feet of the approaching master and so give 
 warning of danger. In default of nuts a small 
 boy must endure the draughty duties of sentinel 
 To return to our criticism, the " i Bottle sweets "
 
 Concerning School-Hampers 63 
 
 has now become two, and the "mixed con- 
 fectionery " has given way to "mixed crystallised 
 fruits." The principal lack in each variety of 
 hamper is drink, unless the oranges are calcu- 
 lated to fill that office. Why not a dozen of 
 stone ginger beer in the stead of sweets ? 
 
 To learn the news that a hamper is awaiting 
 one in the hall is a supreme school joy : for 
 one moment it can render the heaviest im- 
 position null and void. Of the behaviour of 
 boys on receiving hampers much has been 
 written. Ann and Jane Taylor's "Plum- 
 cake" and "Another Plum-cake" are among 
 favourite nursery apologues, and Mrs. Elizabeth 
 Turner has worked the same theme with 
 admirable thoroughness. In a moving trilogy 
 she vividly presents the three methods in which 
 a large plum-cake may be dealt with. First 
 comes Harry, Harry was greedy and stingy. 
 
 " When it arrived, the little boy 
 Laugh'd, sung, and jumped about for joy ; 
 But, ah, how griev'd I am to say 
 He did not give a bit away 1 
 
 He ate, and ate, and ate his fill ; 
 No wonder that it made him ill. 
 Pain in his stomach and his head 
 Oblig'd him soon to go to bed."
 
 64 Domesticities 
 
 Then comes Peter. Peter was stingy, too, but 
 stingy to himself as well as to others in short, 
 a miser. 
 
 9 
 
 " And sometimes silently he'd go, 
 When all he thought engag'd below, 
 To eat a very little piece, 
 For fear his treasure should decrease. 
 
 When'next he went (it makes me laugh), 
 He found the mice had eaten half ; 
 And what remain'd, though once a treat, 
 So mouldy 'twas not fit to eat." 
 
 Lastly, William. William was free-handed, 
 virtuous ; William behaved nobly. 
 
 " ' Come round," he cried ' each take a slice ; 
 Each have his proper share of ice ! 
 We'll eat it up among us here ; 
 My birthday comes but once a year.' " 
 
 At this point, lo ! a blind beggar, to whom 
 William incontinently yielded his own slice and 
 a penny besides. The poem ends 
 
 " I need not ask each youthful breast 
 Which of these boys you like the best ; 
 Let goodness, then, incitement prove, 
 And imitate the boy you love. " 
 
 How can the youthful breast demur ? William,
 
 Concerning School-Hampers 65 
 
 William it is who, of course, comes out at the 
 head of the poll. 
 
 Quite as interesting a study to the psycho- 
 logist is the conduct of the other boys when one 
 of their school-fellows receives a hamper. But 
 there are pleasanter matters for inquiry. Poor 
 human nature ! 
 
 The hamper is not for food alone ; it is also 
 the travelling compartment of live stock. Dogs 
 who travel without a ticket usually do so in a 
 hamper. Cats are conveyed by that means 
 from Blackburn to Torquay, and the next day 
 but one, dishevelled and footsore, they creep 
 into the Blackburn kitchen once again, and thus 
 win attention from the Spectator and Mr. Teget- 
 meier of the Field, who occupies the same 
 attitude to the homing instinct that Mrs. Prig 
 did to Mrs. Harris. It is strange that no one 
 ever meets a cat under the dominion of the 
 homing instinct. It would be quite unmistak- 
 able, because of the bee-line which it takes and 
 the rate it has to travel at. As Mark Twain 
 wrote of the jackass rabbit " Long after it is 
 out of sight you can hear it whizz." I suppose 
 a homing cat never stops for a mouse. 
 
 Carrier pigeons are conveyed in hampers to
 
 66 Domesticities 
 
 the place where their flight is to begin ; but 
 not all birds are so lucky. I was never so sur- 
 prised in my life as when the naturalist's man 
 from whom I once bought a cockatoo thrust 
 the screaming thing into a deal box hardly 
 bigger than itself, and hammered nails two 
 inches long through the lid. Then he sawed 
 off a corner for ventilation, wrapped up the 
 box in brown paper, fastened it noisily with 
 string, and slammed it on the counter before 
 me. Five hours later, after a weary and cold 
 railway journey, a very angry and very dirty 
 cockatoo was liberated by two frightened men 
 in wicket-keeping gloves. 
 
 The Stores-supplied hamper is, I take it, de- 
 signed to meet the requirements of the bache- 
 lor uncle who has no kitchen where he may 
 prepare one. It therefore has notable uses. 
 But the hamper, as most boys understand 
 it, is a home-made blessing. More than 
 one friendly intellect has contributed to its 
 plenishing. The maternal mind is, of course, 
 the fount and origin of good, but cook has 
 had her say too. Cook knows Master Tom's 
 tastes as well as any one, perhaps better. Cook 
 has memories . . . hence the cold plum-pudding.
 
 Concerning School-Hampers 67 
 
 And at hamper-time a certain reason for the 
 existence of sisters becomes evident : they can 
 make toffee. The " i Bottle sweets " is un- 
 known to home-made hampers, but a bottle of 
 raspberry vinegar has sometimes found its way 
 therein. I have also a recollection of dough- 
 nuts. Quince jam was of old a stimulating 
 surprise. But the crowning triumph of any 
 hamper is, of course, the cake. That is the 
 nucleus ; all else is accessory.
 
 Concerning Catalogues
 
 Concerning Catalogues 
 
 AT a time when too much is done for the 
 inassiduous, roving reader; when the 
 tendency is entirely towards frangible, even 
 friable, reading-matter ; one hesitates to com- 
 mend to those that love literature the merits 
 of catalogues. And yet a catalogue a thing 
 that costs nothing, a thing rescued possibly 
 from the waste-paper basket may be more 
 stimulative of pleasant thought and fancy, may 
 launch the mind on longer and more eventful 
 voyages across the seas of memory, than can 
 many an expensive and well-bound book. The 
 catalogue itself is nothing ; its strength is in its 
 profusion of suggestions, of potentialities, of 
 words that stand for facts. One is continually 
 reminded. Reminded of what ? Of a thousand 
 things. 
 
 Keats has told us what Fancy can do (pro- 
 vided you have it) to alleviate a winter night : 
 
 " She will bring, in spite of frost, 
 Beauties that the earth hath lost." 
 
 But if you have it not if your own unaided 
 7*
 
 72 Domesticities 
 
 resources are powerless in drear December to 
 re-create the pomps of June there is a sure 
 passport to those joys. A catalogue of roses. 
 The tender poetry, the rich extravagance, the 
 warm enthusiasm of a rose-grower's list cannot 
 miscarry. Wherever the eye alights it is glad- 
 dened. At the head of all Abel Carriere : 
 "Dark velvety crimson, with fiery red centre, 
 perfect form, handsome foliage." A line or so 
 lower Alfred Colomb : "Brilliant light scarlet 
 crimson, large, full and globular, a magnificent 
 rose of superb shape, very fragrant." Ah, those 
 Frenchmen! How is Monsieur Boncenne de- 
 scribed ? " Dark velvety crimson, superb, one 
 of the best dark roses." Could anything be 
 better? we ask ourselves, and come forthwith 
 upon the Baron de Bonstetten : "Velvety 
 blackish crimson ; an improved Monsieur Bon- 
 cenne " ! Thus the rose-grower lures one on ; 
 next year there will be an improved Baron de 
 Bonstetten. 
 
 What must one do for one's own name to be 
 whispered to the coming ages by the breath of 
 a rose? In imperial action, to conquer the 
 Soudan would seem to be not enough, for there 
 is no bloom, free-flowering or rampant, velvety
 
 Concerning Catalogues 73 
 
 or superb, known as Lord Kitchener. There 
 is, it is true, a Sir Herbert Kitchener chrysan- 
 themum : " A very large Japanese, with very 
 broad florets; bright golden chestnut bronze, 
 with golden amber reverse florets, long and 
 drooping, forming a very deep and graceful 
 flower; one of the grandest novelties of the 
 season." But the rose, the rose ! How does 
 one commend one's name to the grower of 
 roses ? One, apparently, need not be a professed 
 lover of the flower, for Charles Lamb, who cared 
 little for the garden, has the honour; and so 
 has Socrates, who preferred hemlock. The 
 Charles Lamb is "a soft cherry rose, very 
 bright " ; which sounds far more like Leigh 
 Hunt. Socrates is "coppery bronze shaded 
 with pink." Among other literary roses one 
 finds Lord Macaulay, "variable, from scarlet 
 crimson to rich plum ; " Lord Bacon, " deep 
 crimson, shaded with velvety black, blooming 
 abundantly;" Charles Darwin, "a rich brownish 
 crimson, perfectly reflexed and imbricated;" 
 John Stuart Mill (a rose may bear any name), 
 " a bright clear red, beautiful form." But the 
 mystery of rose-christening is still thick. Why 
 is there no Shakespeare, no Thackeray, and
 
 74 Domesticities 
 
 especially, no Waller? Among the living the 
 honour is given only to Royalty, to Dean Hole 
 (as is fitting), to statesmen, to warriors, and to 
 enviable ladies. Authors are not recognised 
 until they are dead. There is a Marquis of Salis- 
 bury, with a character that should rejoice the 
 truly blue : " Rich crimson, constantly in flower, 
 semi-double, a very beautiful variety." 
 
 But the sweetest names are the French : 
 "Souvenir de Malmaison," "Camille de 
 Rohan," " Eugene Verdier," " Victor Verdier," 
 "Gloire de Dijon," "Marechal Niel," "Maurice 
 Bernardin," "Dupuy Jamain," " General Jacque- 
 minot," " Flora Nabonard," " Prosper Laugier," 
 "La Boule d'Or." What poignant memories 
 must 'such names bring to the English exile in 
 arid wastes abroad, in the Australian "Never 
 Never " or the brumal fastnesses of the Yukon ! 
 
 "These will bring, in spite of frost, 
 Beauties that the earth hath lost." 
 
 So also will the pages of a cricket outfitter's 
 list ; but whereas the poetry of the rose list 
 is lyric, that of Wisden's is epic. The post 
 brought me, one morning recently, a copy of 
 " Wisden's Illustrated Catalogue," with its won- 
 derful array of old, scarred, and honourable
 
 Concerning Catalogues 75 
 
 bats. They stand in eloquent pairs, two 
 couples to the page; they are cracked and 
 splintered and pegged and bound ; and on 
 each is the short and simple testimony of some 
 mighty cricketer. Cricketers who write letters 
 do not waste words. "The best bat I ever 
 used " is the laconic tribute paid by poor 
 George Ulyett of Sheffield to a " Crawford's 
 Patent Exceller." Six words only, but how 
 tremendous their force ! The best bat ever 
 used by that genial giant, now gone for ever, 
 the hero of a thousand matches, the darling of 
 Yorkshire's three ridings, and the terror of every 
 other county ! Turning on, you come upon 
 a bruised and buffeted relic with several black 
 bands. " This old bat," says the inscription, 
 " has done wonderful service. I played with 
 it both with Lord Sheffield's and Mr. Stoddart's 
 teams, and three summers at home. It was 
 the best bat I ever played with. In first-class 
 cricket alone more than 3500 runs must have 
 been made from it." And now it lies idle, 
 resting until the day of dissolution. The writer 
 of these words is Johnny Briggs. Turning 
 on again, Brown's "grave-digger" is before 
 you the bat with which Brown of Driffield
 
 76 Domesticities 
 
 made his 140 for Mr. Stoddart's Australian 
 team in 1895. "Brown often has a look at 
 it when he is in London," says the catalogue. 
 Had it been mine (and my runs) it should 
 never have left my possession. But cricketers 
 are more generous than ordinary persons. 
 
 To certain temperaments a mere list of roses 
 would, in default of the flowers themselves, 
 be more satisfying than a description of those 
 flowers from the pen of the richest writer 
 the pen of, say, Dean Farrar. The catalogue, 
 so to speak, touches the button, and yourself 
 does the rest. It is automatic literature. 
 Sometimes a catalogue far transcends the 
 event. Compare with the noise and unrest 
 of the auction-room the quiet pencilling of a 
 book-sale inventory secure in an arm-chair. 
 Again, the compiler of catalogues (such is 
 human optimism) is rarely a realist ; he prefers 
 to overlook blemishes and fractures, stains and 
 incompleteness. Thus, to the arm-chaired 
 student of the list every book is fair and un- 
 cropped, whereas the purchaser may have many 
 imperfections beneath his faltering eye. Simi- 
 larly, there are programmes which are more 
 alluring than the performances to which they
 
 Concerning Catalogues 77 
 
 point. Many persons on a return visit to 
 Barnum's must have found the welter of super- 
 latives in Olympia's astounding official pamphlet 
 a good substitute for feats which familiarity had 
 rendered unexciting. The gentleman, for 
 instance, who curled himself in a metal ball and 
 rolled himself to the summit of a spiral stair- 
 case could surprise but once, whereas the 
 adjectives employed to describe his achievement 
 surprised continually. There are novels (in 
 the halfpenny papers) more interesting in the 
 synopsis than the narrative, and there are many 
 stories more notable in their chapter headings 
 than in themselves Ainsworth's, for example. 
 I never tire of reading his full-bodied promises: 
 " How Queen Mary visited the Lions' Tower ; 
 how Magog gave his dame a lesson ; and how 
 Xit conquered a monkey and was worsted by a 
 bear ; " " How the Princess Elizabeth was con- 
 fronted by Sir Thomas Wyatt in the torture 
 chamber " these are ever interesting ; but with 
 the text of " The Tower of London " I have, I 
 feel certain, done for ever. 
 
 A like pleasure may come from the table of 
 contents in a collection of poetry, but particu- 
 larly from an index of first lines. I remember
 
 7 8 Domesticities 
 
 once picking up the publisher's circular of one 
 of Mr. Bullen's volumes, " Lyrics from the Song- 
 Books of the Elizabethan Age," and being 
 almost as much fascinated by the index of first 
 lines which it contained as afterwards by the 
 poems in their entirety. Indeed, in several cases 
 the first line is more satisfying than the complete 
 lyric, for the Elizabethans had a special genius 
 for beginnings. In the first line the great poet 
 and little poet may meet on common ground ; it 
 is only in the sequel that they are distinguished, 
 and you learn which has the finer note, which 
 the true staying power. On the threshold there 
 is equality. " There is a garden in her face ; " 
 " A little, pretty, bonnie lass was walking ; " 
 " Come, sorrow, come, sit down and mourn 
 with me ; " " Lie down, poor heart, and die 
 awhile for grief ; " " My thoughts are winged 
 with hopes, my hopes with love ; " " The cypress 
 curtain of the night is spread ;" " Arise, my 
 thoughts, and mount you with the sun ; " " Care 
 for thy soul as thing of greatest price " these 
 are a few of the circular's first lines ; and each 
 one makes even a prosaic man something of a 
 poet by mere incitement to him to speculate as 
 to the issue.
 
 Concerning Catalogues 79 
 
 To a mind at all active or curious an odd 
 number of Dr. Wright's " English Dialect Dic- 
 tionary" is intensely absorbing. For solace 
 less academical there is an artless and unexact- 
 ing paper which can impart more delight than 
 anything produced by the deliberate fusion of 
 Fleet Street intellects. This is the sturdy little 
 catalogue of wants and redundancies called 
 The Bazaar or rather, The Exchange and Mart ', 
 for The Bazaar is the paper proper, which is 
 little ; while The Exchange and Mart is its 
 advertisement supplement, which is every- 
 thing. Like a flourishing rose on an insig- 
 nificant manetti stock, the supplement puts 
 forth the blossoms, while the parent un- 
 obtrusively avoids the eye. These blossoms 
 have a variety of which one cannot tire. 
 Advertisers from every part of the United 
 Kingdom meet there to accommodate each 
 other. Magic-lanterns are offered for guinea- 
 pigs, bicycles as good as new for sitting 
 hens, complete sets of the Penny Encyclopedia 
 for double-barrelled guns, old Broadwoods for 
 young spaniels. One need require nothing 
 oneself to find the prettiest amusement in the 
 desiderata of others. On a railway journey one
 
 8o Domesticities 
 
 reads and reads, knowing neither fatigue nor 
 satiety ; section gives way to section, and the 
 miles are eaten up until the haven is reached 
 and real life substituted for the half-life of the 
 train. Taken from beginning to end The Ex- 
 change and Mart will last you from St. Pancras 
 to York, from . Exeter to Paddington, from 
 London Bridge to Charing Cross. It is the 
 best railway reading. I can delight in it when 
 I cannot read Mr. Herbert Spencer. 
 
 Kindred pleasure may be extracted from the 
 illustrated advertisements of houses in the paper 
 called Country Life. It is nothing that one's 
 own belongings are permanently settled in a 
 London street : this need not diminish fas- 
 cinated interest in eligible manor-houses in 
 Surrey or unique moated granges in Kent. 
 You can still choose or reject the unassailable 
 privilege of the reader of catalogues. "Too 
 damp" is one; "Too overgrown," another; 
 and " I don't much care for that gable " you 
 say of a third. And then comes the ideal. 
 " What is the agent's address ? Oh, well, 
 perhaps it doesn't matter. . . ." An author 
 must be successful indeed if his local colour 
 can so bring the country before one as
 
 Concerning Catalogues 81 
 
 these three or four pages of photographs 
 can. 
 
 Private enterprise has provided The Exchange 
 and Mart with at least one worthy companion. 
 In one respect, at any rate, it is better; for 
 The Exchange and Mart is without personal 
 character, whereas The Amateur Trader, the 
 periodical catalogue of curiosities which Miss 
 Millard, of Teddington, prepares for her clients, 
 is a work of abounding individuality. " With 
 sweet variety your taste I'll please," is Miss 
 Millard's motto and achievement. The copy 
 of The Amateur Trader which I quote from 
 has, by way of coy preface, some of the com- 
 pliments which have been paid to its strenuous 
 editor. " A Viennese gentleman says: 'Your 
 brilliant talents ' ; " "A New York collector 
 says : ' There is a snap and earnestness about 
 your communication and catalogue not a 
 usual characteristic ' ; " "A Lancashire lady 
 says : ' Your letters are delightful reading 
 marvels of style, diction, easy grace, and, may I 
 add ? erudition.' " A catalogue thus graced at 
 the portal would fail indeed were it unenter- 
 taining. Miss Millard has something of every- 
 thing, and snap and earnestness, as the New 
 
 F
 
 82 Domesticities 
 
 York gentleman says, behind all. More, she 
 has poetry, as we see in this entry : 
 
 " SAMPLERS. A small lot of pretty specimens 
 of late last, and early this century, of more or less 
 quaint designs, the work of several childish fingers. 
 In handling these samplers one must confess to a 
 tender and pathetic feeling in having the poet's 
 words vividly brought to mind : 
 
 ' Long laid to rest the patient hands 
 
 That played with formal tints ; 
 And faded are the silken strands, 
 As sad and sallow chintz.' 
 
 Prices vary from half a guinea to a guinea." 
 And in this : 
 
 "BLUE Worcester China bead bracelet and 
 pair of aigrettes, possible date, 1760 so, judging 
 by the mountings, and judging by the colour 
 'heavenly blue,' denoting 'constancy,' could they 
 not have been ordered by a love-sick swain of 
 the period as an injunctive present to his lady- 
 love to beware of inconstancy ? This is the story 
 they conjure up to the writer of this, who vividly 
 sees back to it all. Let the mere Philistine gain- 
 say it? 4, 45." 
 
 The transition from dreamy fancy to bald com- 
 merce is as abrupt as a cab accident ; but who 
 would resent it ? Again :
 
 Concerning Catalogues 83 
 
 "NAPOLEONIC. When you seriously com- 
 mence to build up a collection I will be ready to 
 greatly enrich it. The very continuous romance 
 of the life of this delightfully human and grandly 
 historical ' Soldier of Fortune,' with his dignity 
 and his frailties, his magnanimity and his petty 
 meannesses, his intrepid bravery and his con- 
 temptible cowardice, is alone so complete with 
 fascination that I never can understand why this 
 distinctly characterised mortal is, so to speak, 
 passed over coldly, whilst so many insipid charac- 
 ters are gushed about ridiculously, in a comparative 
 sense." 
 
 Miss Millard, when she has amassed the fortune 
 that must inevitably be the reward of her energy, 
 should take to literature. The ball is at her 
 feet. 
 
 Another catalogue which has the stamp of 
 personality is Mr. Bertram Dobell's. Mr. 
 Dobell enriches the concluding pages of his 
 list of second-hand books with passages from 
 his reading and tender little poems of his own 
 composing, even translations from Heine and 
 three-lined prettinesses in a Japanese measure 
 called the Haikai. But catalogues to be on 
 occasion the best possible reading do not 
 actually need such embellishment. A book 
 catalogue, indeed, is self-sufficient.
 
 84 Domesticities 
 
 Of the delectation which accompanies the 
 leisurely examination, pencil in hand, of a 
 second-hand bookseller's list, something has 
 just been said. In the recesses of an arm-chair 
 one can become the owner of first folios without 
 even the exertion of nodding. By a stroke of 
 the plumbago whatever is most desirable on 
 Mr. Quaritch's shelves becomes (in fancy) your 
 own. "Gerard's 'Herbal,' 2!" "Yes, I 
 may as well have that ; " and the proprietary 
 cross springs into being on the margin. " Dame 
 Juliana Berners' ' Boke of St. Albans'?" 
 " And I will have that too " another cross. 
 " John Florio's ' Montaigne,' quarto ? " " Ah ! 
 at last ! " And so one goes on. What it is 
 like actually to buy from Mr. Quaritch's list I 
 have no notion. Such purchases as I have 
 made of that great man (now, alas ! no more) 
 were carried through one-sidedly, in a not 
 strictly commercial manner, for the library of 
 a castle on the other side of the Pyrenees; 
 hence I can speak only as a poor man. 
 A poor man with a book catalogue is a 
 feasting Barmecide, yet without his haste to 
 despatch the meal. Or, rather, he is as one 
 who through the panes of a sealed window
 
 Concerning Catalogues 85 
 
 watches without envy a procession of those 
 dishes of which he may not partake. Without 
 envy; for, if covetousness at all worthy the 
 name takes part in his feelings, he can never 
 know the enjoyment of catalogues to the full. 
 A mild, well-ordered inclination (to add sauce 
 to the perusal) may be his, but nothing more; 
 he must be utterly without rancour that others 
 are richer than he.
 
 Concerning Clothes
 
 Concerning Clothes 
 
 IT is a curious experience to walk, as I did 
 recently, behind a man dressed in one's 
 old suit. You have a vision of yourself, or, 
 if you will, a glimpse of your double, a re- 
 minder that you are not everybody. This being 
 the first time I had seen the suit from the back, 
 a vague sense of familiarity preceded recogni- 
 tion, and then, looking steadfastly on its pattern, 
 I remembered how kindly and liberal a coat 
 it was, and how easy and unconstrained all 
 movements of limb had been in it, and how 
 many years it still had before it, and I perceived 
 sorrowfully that I had given away as noble a 
 set of hartogs as man ever possessed. This 
 proves how careful we should be in parting with 
 cast-off suits. Thoreau affirmed that old clothes 
 should be burnt : and, from the point of view of 
 those who hold that attire ought to be auto- 
 biographical, this is true; for how can tweeds 
 handed on from one man to another continue 
 to be autobiographical ? But Thoreau's con- 
 tention was a counsel of perfection that is to 
 8 9
 
 90 Domesticities 
 
 say, advice for Thoreaus and, moreover, so 
 few persons have autobiographies that we may 
 as well persevere in the bestowal of old clothes. 
 Of all old clothes, none wears so sorry an air 
 as the old fur-lined coat. A new fur-lined coat 
 is magnificent. It is a symbol of luxury, the 
 antithesis of the hair shirt. It is more than a 
 garment, it is a fortification. An Englishman's 
 fur coat is his castle. But when decay has 
 set in, when it is partly bald and entirely 
 weather - worn, then the fur coat is the 
 wretchedest object in civilisation. It is not 
 good even for charades; although, in its 
 luxuriant days, how versatile it was ! From 
 time to time it had been (inside out) most of 
 the larger animals in the Zoo. Such versatility, 
 indeed, has the fur coat that on the night of a 
 children's party the prudent father turns the key 
 upon it. Fur-lined coats never become hartogs ; 
 nor do overcoats. These, therefore, may be 
 given away or sold without heart-flutterings ; 
 although the ordinary overcoat should not be 
 parted with lightly. An old overcoat is a good 
 fellow to accompany one to sea, to wear on deck 
 on rough or rainy nights. But, strictly speaking, 
 no overcoat becomes a hartog.
 
 Concerning Clothes 91 
 
 And what, I seem to hear you ask, what are 
 hartogs ? Old clothes that are less imposing and 
 more comfortable than any others are hartogs. 
 To be old is not sufficient ; nor is it enough 
 that they are easy. To be hartogs they must 
 combine both these merits. Good clothes when 
 they grow baggy and faded become hartogs ; 
 bad clothes, never. Inferior and ill-fitting clothes 
 become merely " old clo." The derivation of 
 hartogs is a secret ; but all philologists, and all 
 who, like Mr. Stevenson, have a " love of lovely 
 words," will recognise in the term a neologue of 
 singular fitness and attraction. Think about it 
 for a minute or two, and you will realise that 
 clothes of the kind described above could not 
 possibly be known in any other way. They are 
 hartogs just hartogs, and nothing else. Old 
 clothes of the common type one thinks of with- 
 out affection, but hartogs are beloved. Anything 
 is good enough to cover nakedness ; hartogs do 
 more they confer cheerfulness and irresponsi- 
 bility, they fit the wearer for a freer life. Yet 
 it must be understood that hartogs are never 
 absolutely disreputable, never so old that one 
 cannot meet the vicar's wife without shame. 
 
 In ordinary life the wearer of hartogs disdains
 
 92 Domesticities 
 
 coats and mackintoshes, except in extreme 
 stress of weather. It is the winds and rains 
 of heaven and the might of the sun that have 
 made his hartogs what they are, the indoor life 
 produces a very inferior result. The best hartogs 
 are stamped by the universe itself. They are the 
 garb of the wise traveller. You meet hartogs on 
 Helvellyn and among the Langdale Pikes ; you 
 recognise them in the Black Forest and on the 
 Furka ; you are aware of them in the Trossachs 
 and beneath the smooth rotundities and swel- 
 ling undulations of the South Downs. Nature's 
 best lovers woo her in hartogs. 
 
 This definition should be exhaustive enough, 
 but still a little may be added. It should be 
 said, for instance, that few women have enough 
 courage to achieve hartogs. The mass dare not. 
 There are also men who dare not, and there are 
 men whose position is against it. Bishops pro- 
 bably have no hartogs. 
 
 Of all hartogs the coat is the most dearly 
 prized. One does not feel so affectionately 
 towards a waistcoat : little is lovable about a 
 waistcoat ; but a coat becomes a friend, a 
 brother. Men have worn coats for decades. 
 A satisfying coat is worth its weight in platinum,
 
 Concerning Clothes 93 
 
 because it is so rare. The waistcoat is within 
 the compass of any tailor ; but a coat is 
 different. Nothing is quite so disgusting as the 
 determination of one's tailor to have his own 
 way in the matter of the coat. You order a 
 dozen personal touches ; you stipulate for no 
 pads in the shoulders ; for a deep collar, to turn 
 up in wet or cold ; for extra pockets inside ; for 
 no lining in the back; for no fashionable antics 
 in the cutting. And the tailor smiles and 
 smiles. None the less is he a villain, for when 
 the coat comes home it is precisely what you 
 struggled to make certain it should not be. A 
 tailor who will obey to the letter is more than 
 rubies. Hence the lovableness of a truly good 
 coat. 
 
 Hats are lovable, too. Boots, however, are 
 too transient to be loved. One dares not love 
 them. At the most a pair of boots can be 
 hartogs for a year. Boots seem to me 
 civilisation's most conspicuous failure : they 
 pinch, they cramp, they mar, they have every 
 tightness but water-tightness ; they are hot in 
 summer and cold in winter; they have no 
 durability; they are costly. They make it 
 almost worth while to have one's feet amputated
 
 94 Domesticities 
 
 early in life. Lord Erskine said it was comfort- 
 ing to remember that when the hour came for all 
 secrets to be revealed, then, at length, we should 
 learn why shoes are always made too tight. 
 And yet what is to be done ? To go barefoot 
 is, after all these ages of shoe-leather, impossible, 
 and sandals are chilly and Socialistic. Indoors, 
 of course, there are slippers, and latterly a very 
 excellent kind devised of felt has been obtain- 
 able. But no good work, it has been said, has 
 ever been done in slippers, and certainly no good 
 walking. For out-door life in this mutable 
 England we have yet to discover the fitting 
 boot. The quest of it is the business of a life- 
 time : a man may be said never to come within 
 measurable distance of being well-shod until he 
 has one foot in the grave. 
 
 In winter there is nothing more comfortable 
 than hartogs ; but in summer flannels supersede 
 them. Buoyancy, liberty, the power to do 
 these are put on with flannels. Flannels are as 
 levelling almost as nakedness. On the cricket 
 field all men are equal. Has not Richardson 
 bowled Lord Hawke these many seasons ? and 
 I doubt not but he would york even the Prince 
 of Wales. But once, in appearance at any rate,
 
 Concerning Clothes 95 
 
 there were distinctions. In the old days, when 
 George Parr hit to long-leg for six, and George 
 Freeman bowled like lightning, flannels were a 
 distinguishing sign. In those days the profes- 
 sional was marked by his dress for the dependant 
 he was. He wore a coloured shirt and his 
 whites were not white. You may see them in old 
 photographs. My earliest recollection of county 
 cricket is a Sussex and Surrey match twenty 
 years ago; and I remember distinctly that 
 Pooley's flannels were yellow, Jupp's grey. But 
 now, except in a few cases, there is nothing to 
 distinguish the two classes of cricketers. A 
 change has come over the professional, and his 
 flannels shine like an amateur's. From the 
 pavilion a stranger would find it impossible to 
 pick out the paid and unpaid Professionals 
 even wear ties, a thing unheard of in the 'sixties 
 and not to be endured. Yet this new sartorial 
 complexion which the game wears is good, for 
 it emphasises the socialism of cricket. 
 
 The opponents of the press ought to bear it 
 in mind that no substitute for clothing is more 
 effective than a newspaper that is to say, no 
 sudden substitute. An American enthusiast 
 who recently walked round the world for a
 
 96 Domesticities 
 
 wager wore only a copy of the New York Herald 
 until he had amassed, by exhibiting himself, 
 enough money to buy clothes; and now and 
 then come tidings of a party of tourists who 
 have escaped from the attentions of Italian 
 banditti or Hungarian brigands in nothing 
 more substantial than last week's Times. It 
 seems to be established that when in difficulties 
 for clothes the first thought of civilised man is 
 for a newspaper; just as the first thought of 
 primitive man was for a leaf. Not the least 
 funny story in that diverting book, "Many 
 Cargoes," tells of a captain who lost his " does 
 at cribbage," and was found the next day by 
 his rescuer " in a pair of socks and last week's 
 paper." This, as we have seen, is not a par- 
 ticularly novel position, but what distinguished 
 Captain Bross from his companions in this form 
 of misfortune was his occupation. When dis- 
 covered he was "reading the advertisements." 
 That is true philosophy. The completest desha- 
 bille is obtainable in the tropics. The late 
 Henry Drummond once wrote home from Cen- 
 tral Africa that he had nothing on but a helmet 
 and three mosquitoes. Sydney Smith, who was 
 the first man to pray in August for the power
 
 Concerning Clothes 97 
 
 to take off his flesh and sit in his bones (a 
 blessed condition, which, on paper at least, has 
 been made possible by Professor Rontgen), de- 
 scribed the height of bliss attainable by a Sierra 
 Leone native, as sitting in one half of a 
 melon, with the other half on his head, eating 
 the pulp. 
 
 Of all men, tramps and peers care least about 
 their appearance. This indifference to public 
 opinion of one's clothes is indeed an enviable 
 state to reach. I have always liked the story 
 of the old fellow who at home dressed badly 
 because every one knew him, and badly when 
 he travelled because no one knew him. He 
 was one of the few men who have had courage 
 to dress to please themselves. Most of us dress 
 to please other persons ; and, even then, it must 
 be added, rarely succeed. The late Professor 
 Fawcett objected on principle to make himself 
 uncomfortable by dressing for dinner, but he 
 had a very charming way of disarming criticism 
 and propitiating his hostess. He had upstairs, 
 he would assure her, an excellent dress suit for 
 which he had paid a high price, and if it would 
 be any satisfaction to the company, his secre- 
 tary would bring it down and display it. But
 
 98 Domesticities 
 
 one has to be a Professor Fawcett to carry off 
 such an idiosyncrasy as this. At many dinner 
 parties the guests have been asked as much on 
 account of their clothes as their wit the man 
 without a wedding garment in the parable appa- 
 rently had no compensating distinction of in- 
 tellect. A good dinner-story tells how Dean 
 Stanley once arrived at table with one side of 
 his collar flapping in the air. During the meal 
 his hostess asked him if he was aware of its 
 condition, and if he would like any assistance 
 in rectifying it. "Oh, no," he replied genially; 
 " it broke while I was dressing. I don't mind. 
 Do you ? " These are the great men. 
 
 Of the clothes of women I know little, ex- 
 cept that the fashions often change too quickly, 
 and it seems very hard for some girls to dress in 
 such a way as to satisfy their elder sisters.
 
 Concerning Fires
 
 Concerning Fires 
 
 "Oh, pile a bright fire!" 
 
 EDWARD FITZGERALD. 
 
 A FRIEND of mine making a list of the 
 things needed for the cottage that he had 
 taken, put at the head "bellows." Then he 
 thought for some minutes, and was found 
 merely to have added "tongs" and "poker." 
 Then he asked some one to finish it. A fire, 
 indeed, furnishes. Nothing else, not even a 
 chair, is absolutely necessary ; and it is difficult 
 for a fire to be too large. Some of the grates 
 put into modern houses by the jerry-builders 
 would move an Elizabethan to tears, so petty 
 and mean are they, and so incapable of radi- 
 ation. We English people would suffer no 
 loss in kindliness and tolerance were the 
 ingle-nook restored to our homes. The ingle 
 humanises. 
 
 Although the father of the family no longer, 
 as in ancient Greece, performs on the hearth 
 religious rites, yet it is still a sacred spot 
 Lovers whisper there, and there friends ex-
 
 IO2 Domesticities 
 
 change confidences. Husband and wife face 
 the fire hand in hand. The table is for wit 
 and good humour, the hearth is for something 
 deeper and more personal. The wisest counsels 
 are offered beside the fire, the most loving 
 sympathy and comprehension are there made 
 explicit. It is the scene of the best dual com- 
 panionship. The fire itself is a friend, having 
 the prime attribute warmth. One of the most 
 human passages of that most human poem, 
 " The Deserted Village," tells how the wanderer 
 was now and again taken by the memory of the 
 hearth of his distant home : 
 
 " I still had hopes my latest hours to crown, 
 Amidst these humble bowers to lay me down. . . . 
 Around my fire an evening group to draw, 
 And tell of all I felt, and all I saw. . . ." 
 
 Only by the fireside could a man so unbosom 
 himself A good fire extracts one's best; it 
 will not be resisted. FitzGerald's "Meadows 
 in Spring" contains some of the best fireside 
 stanzas : 
 
 " Then with an old friend 
 I talk of our youth 
 How 'twas gladsome, but often 
 Foolish, forsooth : 
 
 But gladsome, gladsome !
 
 Concerning Fires 103 
 
 Or to get merry 
 
 We sing some old rhyme, 
 That made the wood ring again 
 
 In summer time 
 
 Sweet summer time ! 
 
 Then we go to drinking, 
 
 Silent and snug ; 
 Nothing passes between us 
 
 Save a brown jug 
 Sometimes ! 
 
 And sometimes a tear 
 
 Will rise in each eye, 
 Seeing the two old friends 
 
 So merrily 
 
 So merrily ! " 
 
 The hearth also is for ghost stories ; indeed, 
 a ghost story demands a fire. If England were 
 warmed wholly by hot-water pipes or gas stoves 
 the Society for Psychical Research would be 
 dissolved. Gas stoves are poor comforters. 
 They heat the room, it is true, but they do so 
 after a manner of their own, and there they 
 stop. For encouragement, for inspiration, you 
 seek the gas stove in vain. Who could be witty, 
 who could be humane, before a gas stove? 
 It does so little for the eye and nothing for the 
 imagination ; its flame is so artificial and re- 
 stricted a thing, its glowing heart so shallow
 
 1 04 Domesticities 
 
 and ungenerous. It has no voice, no per- 
 sonality, no surprises ; it submits to the control 
 of a gas company, which, in its turn, is con- 
 trolled by Parliament. Now, a fire proper has 
 nothing to do with Parliament. A fire proper 
 has whims, ambitions, and impulses unknown 
 to gas-burners, undreamed of by asbestos. Yet 
 even the gas stove has advantages and merits 
 when compared with hot-water pipes. The gas 
 stove at least offers a focus for the eye, un- 
 worthy though it be ; and you can make a semi- 
 circle of good people before it. But with 
 hot-water pipes not even that is possible. 
 From the security of ambush they merely 
 heat, and heat whose source is invisible is 
 hardly to be coveted at all. Moreover, the 
 heat of hot-water pipes is but one remove from 
 stuffiness. 
 
 Coals are a perpetual surprise, for no two 
 consignments burn exactly alike. There is one 
 variety that does not burn it explodes. This 
 kind comes mainly from the slate quarries, and, 
 we must believe, reaches the coal merchant by 
 accident. Few accidents, however, occur so 
 frequently. Another variety, found in its 
 greatest perfection in railway waiting-rooms,
 
 Concerning Fires 105 
 
 does everything but emit heat. A third variety 
 jumps and burns the hearth-rug. One can 
 predicate nothing definite concerning a new 
 load of coal at any time, but particularly so if 
 the consignment was ordered to be "exactly like 
 the last." 
 
 A true luxury is a fire in the bedroom. This 
 is fire at its most fanciful and mysterious. One 
 lies in bed watching drowsily the play of the 
 flames, the flicker of the shadows. The light 
 leaps up and hides again, the room gradually be- 
 comes peopled with fantasies. Now and then a 
 coal drops and accentuates the silence. Move- 
 ment with silence is one of the curious influences 
 that come to us : hence, perhaps, part of the 
 fascination of the kinematoscope, wherein trains 
 rush into stations, and streets are seen filled with 
 hurrying people and bustling vehicles, and yet 
 there is no sound save the clicking of the 
 mechanism. With a fire in one's bedroom sleep 
 comes witchingly. 
 
 Another luxury is reading by firelight, but this 
 is less to the credit of the fire than the book. 
 An author must have us in no uncertain grip 
 when he can induce us to read him by a light 
 so impermanent as that of the elfish coal.
 
 106 Domesticities 
 
 Nearer and nearer to the page grows the 
 bended head, and nearer and nearer to the 
 fire moves the book. Boys and girls love to 
 read lying full length on the hearthrug. 
 
 Some people maintain a fire from January to 
 December; and, indeed, the days on which a 
 ruddy grate offends are very few. According to 
 Mortimer Collins, out of the three hundred and 
 sixty-five days that make up the year only on 
 the odd five is a fire quite dispensable. A 
 perennial fire is, perhaps, luxury writ large. The 
 very fact that sunbeams falling on the coals 
 dispirit them to greyness and ineffectual pallor 
 seems to prove that when the sun rides high it 
 is time to have done with fuel except in the 
 kitchen or in the open air. 
 
 The fire in the open air is indeed joy 
 perpetual, and there is no surer way of 
 renewing one's youth than by kindling and 
 tending it, whether it be a rubbish fire for 
 potatoes, or an aromatic offering of pine spindles 
 and fir cones, or the scientific structure of the 
 gipsy to heat a tripod-swung kettle. The gipsy's 
 fire is a work of art. " Two short sticks were 
 stuck in the ground, and a third across to them 
 like a triangle. Against this frame a number of the
 
 Concerning Fires 107 
 
 smallest and driest sticks were leaned, so that they 
 made a tiny hut Outside these there was a 
 second layer of longer sticks, all standing, or 
 rather leaning, against the first. If a stick is 
 placed across, lying horizontally, supposing it 
 catches fire, it just burns through the middle 
 and that is all, the ends go out. If it is stood 
 nearly upright, the flame draws up to it ; it is 
 certain to catch, burns longer, and leaves a good 
 ember." So wrote one who knew Richard 
 Jefferies, in " Bevis," that epic of boyhood. 
 Having built the fire, the next thing is to light it. 
 An old gipsy woman can light a fire in a gale, 
 just as a sailor can always light his pipe, even in 
 the cave of ufEolus ; but the amateur is less dex- 
 terous. The smoke of the open-air fire is 
 charged with memory. One whiff of it, and for 
 a swift moment we are in sympathy with our 
 remotest ancestors, and all that is elemental and 
 primitive in us is awakened. 
 
 An American poet, R. H. Messinger, wrote : 
 
 " Old wood to burn ! 
 Ay, bring the hill-side beech 
 From where the owlets meet and screech, 
 
 And ravens croak ; 
 The crackling pine, and cedar sweet ; 
 Bring, too, a clump of fragrant peat,
 
 io8 Domesticities 
 
 Dug 'neath the fern ; 
 
 The knotted oak, 
 
 A faggot, too, perhaps, 
 Whose bright flame, dancing, winking, 
 Shall light us at our drinking ; 
 
 While the oozing sap 
 Shall make sweet music to our thinking." 
 
 There is no fire of coals, not even the black- 
 smith's, that can compare with the blazing fire 
 of wood. The wood fire is primeval. Centuries 
 before coals were dreamed of our rude fore- 
 fathers were cooking their meat and gaining 
 warmth from burning logs. The wood fire 
 dates from Eden, or very little later. Coal is 
 modern, is decadent. Look at this passage 
 concerning fuel from an old Irish poem: "O 
 man," begins the lay, "that for Fergus of the 
 feasts dost kindle fire, whether afloat or ashore 
 never burn the king of woods. . . . The pliant 
 woodbine, if thou burn, waitings for misfortunes 
 will abound ; dire extremity at weapons' points 
 or drowning in great waves will come after thee. 
 Burn not the precious apple-tree." The min- 
 strel goes on to name wood after wood that 
 may or may not be burned. This is the crown- 
 ing passage : " Fiercest heat-giver of all timber 
 is green oak, from him none may escape un-
 
 Concerning Fires 109 
 
 hurt; by partiality for him the head is set on 
 aching, and by his acrid embers the eye is 
 made sore. Alder, very battle-witch of all 
 woods, tree that is hottest in the fight un- 
 doubtedly burn at thy discretion both the alder 
 and the white thorn. Holly, burn it green; 
 holly, burn it dry ; of all trees whatsoever the 
 critically best is holly." Could any one write 
 with this enthusiasm and poetic feeling about 
 Derby Brights and Silkstone even the best 
 Silkstone and the best Derby Brights? 
 
 The care of a wood fire is, in itself, daily 
 work for a man ; for far more so than with coal 
 is progress continuous. Something is always 
 taking place and demanding vigilance hence 
 the superiority of a wood fire as a beguiling 
 influence. The bellows must always be near 
 at hand, the tongs not out of reach ; both 
 of them more sensible implements than those 
 that usually appertain to coals. The tongs 
 have no pretensions to brightness and gen- 
 tility; the bellows, quite apart from their 
 function in life, are a thing of beauty; the 
 fire-dogs, on whose backs the logs repose, 
 are fine upstanding fellows ; and the bricks on 
 which the fire is laid have warmth and simpli-
 
 no Domesticities 
 
 city and an hospitable air to which decorative 
 tiles can never attain. Again, there is about 
 the logs something cleanly, in charming con- 
 trast to the dirt of coal. The wood hails from 
 the neighbouring coppice. You have watched 
 it grow : your interest in it is personal, and its 
 interest in you is personal. It is as keen to 
 warm you as you are to be warmed. Now 
 there is nothing so impersonal as a piece of 
 coal. Moreover, this wood was cut down and 
 brought to the door by some good-humoured 
 countryman of your acquaintance, whereas coal 
 is obtained by miners bad-tempered, truculent 
 fellows that strike. Who ever heard of a strike 
 among coppicers? And the smoke from a 
 wood fire ! clean and sweet and pungent, and, 
 against dark foliage, exquisite in colour as the 
 breast of a dove. The delicacy of its grey-blue 
 is not to be matched. 
 
 Whittier's " Snow Bound " is the epic of the 
 wood-piled hearth. Throughout we hear the 
 crackling of the brush, the hissing of the sap. 
 The texture of the fire was " the oaken log, 
 green, huge, and thick," and "rugged 
 brush " :
 
 Concerning Fires 1 1 1 
 
 ' ' Hovering near, 
 
 We watched the first red blaze appear, 
 Heard the sharp crackle, caught the gleam 
 On white-washed wall and sagging beam, 
 Until the old, rude-furnished room 
 Burst flower-like into rosy bloom" 
 
 That italicised line my own italics is good. 
 For the best fire (as for the best celery) the fire 
 most hearty, most inspired, and inspiring frost 
 is needed. When old Jack is abroad and there 
 is a breath from the east in the air, then the 
 sparks fly and the coals glow. In moist and 
 mild weather the fire only burns, it has no 
 enthusiasm for combustion. Whittier gives us 
 a snowstorm : 
 
 " Shut in from all the world without, 
 We sat the clean-winged hearth about, 
 Content to let the north wind roar 
 In baffled rage at pane and door, 
 While the red logs before us beat 
 The frost line back with tropic heat ; 
 And ever, when a louder blast 
 Shook beam and rafter as it passed, 
 The merrier up its roaring draught 
 The great throat of the chimney laughed" 
 
 But the wood fire is not for all. In London 
 it is impracticable ; the builder has set his canon 
 against it. Let us, then those of us who are
 
 1 1 2 Domesticities 
 
 able to build our coal fires the higher, and 
 flourish in their kindly light. Whether one is 
 alone or in company the fire is potent to cheer. 
 Indeed, a fire is company. No one need fear 
 to be alone if the grate but glows. Faces in the 
 fire will smile at him, mock him, frown at him, 
 call and repulse ; or, if there be no faces, the 
 smoke will take a thousand shapes and lead his 
 thoughts by delightful paths to the land of 
 reverie ; or he may watch the innermost heart of 
 the fire burn blue (especially if there is frost in the 
 air) ; or, poker in hand, he may coax a coal into 
 increased vivacity. This is an agreeable diver- 
 sion, suggesting the mediaeval idea of the Devil 
 in his domain.
 
 Concerning Correspondence
 
 Concerning Correspondence 
 
 NOW that four ounces of letter go for a 
 penny, the complexities of life are almost 
 over. In the old days, in the absence of a letter- 
 balance, to decide upon the weight of an 
 envelope was a matter involving the judgment 
 of the whole household. One method of com- 
 puting it was to hold the envelope in one hand, 
 and an ounce of tobacco in the other ; but that 
 was not impeccable. Another was to employ 
 the kitchen scales, which unhappily are often 
 superior to mere accuracy, or they decline to be 
 put in motion by anything less than a quarter of 
 a pound. To-day, when a quarter of a pound 
 is the standard, all such anxiety is past. Still, 
 it is distressing to think how few people keep 
 letter scales. There positively are houses which 
 possess three bicycles and a typewriter, but no 
 letter scales. On the other hand, there also are 
 houses where every postal requisite is prominent. 
 Every postal requisite means a little leather box 
 from Bond Street, with " Stamps " in gold on the 
 lid and two cedar-wood compartments within
 
 1 1 6 Domesticities 
 
 for penny and halfpenny stamps; a stick of 
 sealing wax and a seal ; a leather box of string, 
 also from Bond Street, armed with a tiny pair of 
 scissors, so small that no normal fingers can hold 
 them ; a Postal Guide ; letter scales ; a wet pad 
 for stamp-moistening, which is almost always 
 overlooked until the tongue has done its work ; 
 and a photograph of Mr. Henniker Heaton. 
 In such houses it is very hard to write 
 letters. 
 
 The late Lewis Carroll once invented a stamp 
 case " The Wonderland " and to accompany 
 it he wrote a little pamphlet containing " Eight 
 or Nine Wise Words about Letter Writing." As 
 the unmethodical could not have a better guide 
 they should at once acquire both pamphlet 
 and case. "The Queen's laundress," Lewis 
 Carroll assures us, " uses no other." Here are 
 portions of some of these counsels : 
 
 " If the Letter is to be in answer to another, 
 begin by getting out that other letter and reading 
 it through, in order to refresh your memory as 
 to what it is you have to answer, and as to your 
 correspondent's present address. . . . Next, address 
 and stamp the Envelope. ' What ! Before writing 
 the Letter?' Most certainly. And I'll tell you 
 what will happen if you don't. You will go on
 
 Concerning Correspondence 1 1 7 
 
 writing till the last moment, and, just in the 
 middle of the last sentence, you will become 
 aware that ' time's up ! ' " 
 
 The methodical, of course, have no need of 
 such hints; but as most of us are otherwise 
 a few more rules may be quoted : 
 
 "Don't fill more than a page and a half with 
 apologies for not having written sooner ! . . . 
 Write legibly. . . . Dorit repeat yourself. . . . 
 When your letter is finished, read it carefully 
 through, and put in any 'not' that you may 
 chance to have omitted. (This precaution will 
 sometimes save you from saying what you had not 
 quite intended : e.g. suppose you had meant to write 
 ' Dear Sir, I am not prepared to accept the offer 
 you make me of your hand and heart.') .... 
 When you say, in your letter, ' I enclose 5 bank- 
 note,' or, ' I enclose John's letter for you to see,' 
 get the document referred to &&& put it into the 
 envelope. Otherwise, you are pretty certain to 
 find it lying about, after the Post has gone /" 
 
 And again : 
 
 " If it should ever occur to you to write, jest- 
 ingly, in dispraise of your friend, be sure you 
 exaggerate enough to make the jesting obvious: 
 a word, spoken in jest, but taken as earnest^ may 
 lead to very serious consequences. I have known 
 it to lead to the breaking-off of a friendship. Sup-
 
 1 1 8 Domesticities 
 
 pose, for instance, you wish to remind your friend 
 of a sovereign you have lent him, which he has 
 forgotten to repay you might quite mean the 
 words ' I mention it, as you seem to have a con- 
 veniently bad memory for debts ' in jest ; yet there 
 would be nothing to wonder at if he took offence 
 at that way of putting it. But, suppose you wrote 
 ' Long observation of your career as a pickpocket 
 has convinced me that my only hope for recover- 
 ing that sovereign I lent you, is to say " Pay up, 
 or I'll summons yer ! " ' he would indeed be a 
 matter-of-fact friend if he took that as seriously 
 meant ! " 
 
 Lewis Carroll did not, however, offer a speci- 
 men letter as model. Here he sadly neglected 
 his opportunities. There are publications which 
 repair this omission with examples calculated 
 to cover most of our commoner epistolary needs, 
 but for ordinary life their language is a thought 
 too stiff. In a much earlier compilation of a 
 similar kind the language had other faults 
 a manual which appeared in 1618, the pro- 
 duction either of the versatile Gervase Markham 
 or of another man with the same initials. Its 
 title is " Conceited Letters Newly Laid Open, 
 or, A Most Excellent Bundle of New Wit : 
 wherein is knit up together all the perfections, 
 or Art of Episteling, by which the most ignorant
 
 Concerning Correspondence 119 
 
 may with much modesty talke and argue with 
 the best learned. A Worke varying from the 
 Nature of former Presidents." This slender 
 black-letter volume contains a number of letters 
 couched in a style which it is perhaps well to 
 have superseded. The specimens given are 
 brief, but that they also are comprehensive may 
 be gathered from the two that follow : 
 
 A LETTER TO A FRIEND FOR HIS OPINION IN 
 DIVERS POINTS OF CONSIDERATIONS 
 
 "Mv HONEST NED, I pray thee write mee 
 word by this bearer how thou doest, thy opinion 
 of the World, of life and death, honesty and wit, 
 and what comes into thy head when thou hast 
 leisure to be idle. I long to heare from thee, to 
 reade thy conceits, which, if they be of the old 
 fashion, are better than the new forme : be what 
 will be, to me it shall be welcome, and thyselfe, 
 better whensoever I may see thee : for dull wits 
 and addle heads so beate about the Market in this 
 Towne, that I had rather goe a mile wide than 
 keepe way with such wilde Geese : and so loath to 
 trouble thee with trifling newes, to no good pur- 
 pose, in the affection of a faithful heart : I rest 
 " Thine not mine, 
 
 "T. N." 
 
 This is the suggested reply :
 
 I2O Domesticities 
 
 "KlNDE HENRY, To answere thy request, in 
 a few words let me tell thee, for the World, I 
 finde it a walke that soone wearieth a good spirit, 
 this life is but a puffe, and Death but an abridge- 
 ment of Time. Now for some notes I have taken 
 of the World, and divers things in it : let me tell 
 thee, that if all the wealth in the World were in one 
 chest it would not buy one houre of Life ; if all the 
 honesty of the world were in one heart, it would 
 not buy one bit of Bread ; and if all the wit in the 
 world were in one wicked pate, it would not buy 
 one jot of grace : and therefore it is meete with 
 Death at a meaner price, and to carry Money with 
 Honesty, the better to goe to Market, and to joyne 
 Grace with Wit, to find the high-way to Heaven. 
 This is all for this time I have had leasure to thinke 
 upon, as more comes into my Head, I will make 
 you acquainted with it ; in the meantime, marke 
 what I have written, and it will doe thee no hurt in 
 reading : Farewell. 
 
 " Thine, or not mine owne, 
 
 "T. R." 
 
 It is comfortable to think that people no longer 
 write letters like that. 
 
 When it comes to practical counsel, the last 
 stanza of the following poem by Mrs. Elizabeth 
 Turner, an ancient preceptor of the young, offers 
 the best instruction in correspondence that can 
 be given :
 
 Concerning Correspondence 121 
 
 " Maria intended a letter to write, 
 But could not begin (as she thought) to indite ; 
 So went to her mother with pencil and slate, 
 Containing ' Dear Sister,' and also a date. 
 
 ' With nothing to say, my dear girl, do not think 
 Of wasting your time over paper and ink ; 
 But certainly this is an excellent way, 
 To try with your slate to find something to say. 
 
 ' I will give you a rule,' said her mother, ' my dear, 
 Just think for a moment your sister is here, 
 And what would you tell her ? consider, and then 
 Though silent your tongue, you can speak with your 
 pen.' " 
 
 Speak with the pen ! that is what the best 
 letter- writers do, whether they are literary 
 artists, such as Lamb and Horace Walpole, 
 Cowper and Keats, Edward FitzGerald and 
 Shirley Brooks, or the unknown pen-gossips 
 whose letters are flying hither and thither at this 
 very moment, linking household to household 
 and heart to heart. My own theory is that as 
 good letters have been and are being written by 
 obscure people as any that find their way into 
 volumes. In many respects better, since there 
 can be no taint of self-consciousness in their 
 composition, no hint of posing, no thought of 
 posterity, no attempt to do more than interest 
 or amuse.
 
 122 Domesticities 
 
 Talking on paper : that is letter-writing ; and 
 it is because plain talk is very often better than 
 brilliant talk that education is of little service to 
 correspondents, and the best writers of books are 
 by no means the best writers of letters. Many 
 persons who spell phonetically on rules not of 
 Pitman's but of Nature's framing are better cor- 
 respondents than the Universities can produce. 
 In some of the best letters I have seen, " has " 
 was always spelt "as" and there were many 
 small capital i's ; but how interesting and com- 
 municative and shrewd they were ! It is indeed 
 time that a stand was made against the pedantic 
 and prosaic tyranny of orthography. Take, for 
 example, the following scrap of a letter from a 
 gardener to his employer were the gardener a 
 man of education how much less picturesque 
 would his message be ! The greenhouse would 
 then have possessed no sex and no individuality. 
 As it is, the greenhouse is a delightful monster : 
 
 " Sir Guy Edwardson Bart Im varry sorry to tell 
 you that I cant do enaything with the green [green- 
 house] I think he will kill every plant I have some- 
 times he will get varry hot and another time I cant 
 get eney heat in him and we cant stape him from 
 smoking so I dount know what I can do with him.''
 
 Concerning Correspondence 123 
 
 Again, incorrectness of spelling does not impair 
 the force of the following exhaustive epistle, 
 which was recently addressed to an Australian 
 politician by a supporter, who, like the poor man 
 in " Ecclesiastes " that helped the beleaguered 
 king, was subsequently not remembered. He 
 wrote, as reported by the Sydney Bulletin : 
 
 " DEER SUR, You're a dam fraud, and you 
 know it. I don't care a rap for the billet or the 
 muny either, but you could hev got it for me if you 
 wasn't as mean as muk. Two pound a week ain't 
 eny moar to me than 40 shillin's is to you, but 1 
 objekt to bein' maid an infurnil fool of. Soon after 
 you was elected by my hard workin', a feller here 
 wanted to bet me that You wouldn't be in the House 
 moren a week before you maid a ass of yourself. I 
 bet him a Cow on that as i thort you was worth it 
 then. After i got Your Note sayin' you deklined to 
 ackt in the matter i driv the Cow over to the Feller's 
 place an' tole him he had won her. 
 
 " That's orl i got by howlin' meself Hoarse for you 
 on pole day, an' months befoar. You not only hurt 
 a man's Pride, but you injur him in Bizness. I 
 believe you think you'll get in agen. I don't. An' 
 what I don't think is of moar Konsequince then you 
 imajin. I beleave you take a pleshir in cuttin' 
 your best friends, but wate till the clouds roll by an' 
 they'll cut you just behind the Ear, where the 
 butcher cut the pig. Yure no man. An' I doant
 
 124 Domesticities 
 
 think yure much of a demercrat either. Go to hel. 
 I lowers meself ritin to a skunk, even tho I med 
 him a member of parlerment." 
 
 If this writer does not possess what Matthew 
 Arnold called " a serviceable prose style," it 
 would be puzzling to say who does. 
 
 In Mrs. Trevelyan's "Glimpses of Welsh Life 
 and Character," are two letters which display a 
 similar directness. They tell of a lover's quarrel. 
 The lady wrote first : 
 
 " I do send you these few lines to say that this 
 do leave me in good health ; but I do not mean 
 to walk out with you any more, because you did 
 say as how I was as sweet as flummery, and after 
 that you did go and tell Elizabeth how that she 
 was sweeter than huney. Now, if so be I am only 
 flummery you can put on your best cloathes and 
 take to huney as soon as you like. I do mean to 
 walk out with another chap next Sunday. He's 
 huney and treakle put together. So no more from 
 your late friend and future enemy. 
 
 " M. R." 
 The gentleman replied : 
 
 "This is to warn you that if you do walk out 
 with Huney and Treakle next Sunday I will break 
 your legs. So no more whatever from your deter- 
 mined well-wisher. 
 
 " C. P."
 
 Concerning Correspondence 125 
 
 The magazine of the General Post Office 
 published recently the facsimile of a post- 
 card which, owing to the absence of any 
 address, was never delivered. It is a miracle 
 of forcible statement. The communication 
 ran: 
 
 " I have received the hamper but no trotters 
 the tripe is no good without the trotters you 
 have had the money and I want the stuff and I 
 want the trotters my money is as good as your 
 stuff." 
 
 The non-delivery of this message is one of life's 
 little ironies. 
 
 In spite of entertaining arrays of primitive 
 phonetics a prejudice in favour of correct spell- 
 ing is, one fears, certain to linger : printers'- 
 readers, parents, and schoolmasters play too 
 important a part in the control of the world. 
 As an instance of how deep-rooted this pre- 
 judice is, I might mention that in his recent 
 work on Rowing, Mr. R. C. Lehmann, himself 
 an athlete and humourist who ought to know 
 better, urges correct spelling even upon oars- 
 men oarsmen ! They are called upon to share 
 in the author's contempt for the second note 
 (and possibly the first) in the following concise
 
 126 Domesticities 
 
 correspondence between a coach and one of his 
 crew. The coach wrote : 
 
 "DEAR It has been reported to me that 
 
 you broke training last night you were seen smok- 
 ing not only a few wiffs but a whole pipe I have 
 therefore decided to turn you out of the boat. 
 
 " Yours etc. . . ." 
 
 The reply ran thus : 
 
 " DEAR I am in reciet of your letter it is 
 
 true that I smoked two whiffs (not 'wiffs' as you 
 say) out of another man's pipe but that's all how- 
 ever I don't want to row in your beastly boat. 
 
 " Yours etc. . . ." 
 
 If men who can manage an outrigger are not 
 to be permitted to spell as they like, it is time 
 we ceased to call England a free country. 1 
 
 Convention having oddly enough arranged 
 that every one to whom we write, whether to a 
 parent or an undertaker, shall be called " dear," 
 the beginning of letters, except with hyper- 
 
 1 The curious circumstance to be noted among weak 
 spellers is their inconsistency. The same word is often 
 spelled both correctly and incorrectly in the space of a 
 few lines. The following note was once pinned by a 
 neighbour to my door : 
 
 " No telegram has not come, the missus as not arrived."
 
 Concerning Correspondence 127 
 
 conscientious correspondents, is easy ; and the 
 hyper-conscientiousness which boggles at the 
 inaccurate employment of " dear " does not 
 often persist after the teens. The true difficulty 
 in most letters comes at the end, so wide is the 
 choice of adverbs with which the writer may 
 express his feelings towards the correspondent. 
 On this subject Lewis Carroll says : " If 
 doubtful whether to end with yours faithfully 
 or yours truly or yours most truly . . . refer to 
 your correspondent's last letter and make your 
 winding-up at least as friendly as his : in fact, 
 even if a shade more friendly it will do no harm." 
 This is astute ; but it will not help in the case 
 of the letter-writer who is answering nothing. 
 Southey, it may be noted, always dropped in 
 " God bless you." 
 
 The third-person note is one escape from the 
 adverbial dilemma ; but only a genius can 
 manipulate it. There is certain to be ambiguity 
 among the pronouns. If our social system were 
 not so ridiculously complex, the form would 
 never have been introduced. In more cases 
 than not the attempt is frankly abandoned after 
 a few lines, as in the following reply from a 
 farmer's wife concerning lodgings :
 
 128 Domesticities 
 
 " Mrs. Tullett wishes to tell Mrs. Smith that her 
 rooms are now let, and I don't know how long it 
 will be before they are vacant." 
 
 Experience teaches that it is best to adhere to the 
 first person singular, even at the cost of appearing 
 too familiar. By the way, among first-person- 
 singular correspondence there is nothing to excel 
 the conciseness, force, and directness of the 
 following notes, which once passed between 
 Mrs. Foote, the mother of the comedian, and 
 Foote himself. Mrs. Foote wrote : 
 
 " DEAR SAM, I am in prison for debt ; come and 
 assist your loving mother. E. FOOTE." 
 
 Sam replied : 
 
 " DEAR MOTHER, So am I ; which prevents 
 his duty being paid to his loving mother by her 
 affectionate son, SAM. FOOTE." 
 
 Millionaires correspond, one presumes, entirely 
 by telegram. An objection to such a practice, 
 apart from the detail of expense, is that in time 
 one must come to talk like Alfred Jingle. 
 
 The antithesis of the telegram is the post-card, 
 which has as little connection with true epistolary 
 art. The fact that ingenious persons can crowd
 
 Concerning Correspondence 129 
 
 many hundreds of words upon it is nothing in its 
 favour. To crowd words is indeed a fault in 
 correspondence ; to underline (a womanly ac- 
 complishment) is undesirable ; and to cross 
 is wicked. " Remember," says Lewis Carroll, 
 " the old proverb, ' Cross writing makes cross 
 reading ' " adding slyly, " ' The old proverb? ' 
 you say inquiringly. ' How old ? ' Well not so 
 very ancient, I must confess. In fact, I'm afraid 
 I invented it while writing this paragraph." 
 Another bad habit is eccentric pagination, 
 especially when indicative numbers by which it 
 may be followed are omitted. Yet considering 
 what a blessed thing the letter can be and by 
 letters I mean friendly, intimate pen-chat any 
 method, however odd, is permissible. Com 
 municativeness is the grand test.
 
 Concerning Animals
 
 Concerning Animals 
 
 (From a Country Diary. May 1900.) 
 
 FOR the past two weeks I have been watch- 
 ing two nests in the garden a thrush's 
 and a long-tailed tit's. The thrush built silently 
 and unobserved in a box tree, the first news 
 we had of the nest being the noisy departure 
 of the old bird as some one moved too near. 
 Providence surely (one cannot help thinking) 
 having done so much for birds, might have 
 gone a step further and gifted them with the 
 knowledge that when in danger it is better to 
 lie low than to bustle away. However, off the 
 thrush flew, and revealed five eggs. A day or 
 so later the young birds hatched out. 
 
 The long-tailed tits worked entirely without 
 secrecy. They sought their building site almost 
 ostentatiously, and having settled upon it, con- 
 veyed their materials thither under our very 
 eyes. Lichen from the apple trees formed the 
 outer wall, and the lining was chiefly feathers 
 from other birds, but whether picked up casu- 
 ally or fought for I know not. The building 
 
 133
 
 1 34 Domesticities 
 
 operations lasted about ten days; and then came 
 the eggs ; and then, as I had foreseen from the 
 beginning, the tragedy. For these foolish birds 
 had set up their home in the hedge that runs 
 by the footpath, in itself a ridiculous enough 
 thing, and then, nominally for protective pur- 
 poses, I suppose, had used a lichen that did 
 not in the least correspond with the surround- 
 ing colour. All this I could have told them, 
 but man is never so helpless as in his relations 
 with birds. Perhaps it would have been kinder 
 to destroy the nest's foundations at once ; but 
 only very strong people can be kind like that. 
 All that was done was to call a committee to 
 inquire into a means of hiding in some way the 
 positively clamorous visibility of the nest. We 
 walked up and down the path re-arranging the 
 branches. Finally we decided that such matters 
 are best left to Fate. 
 
 Fate, however, does not seem to think much 
 of birds, for when, after an absence of two or 
 three days, I went to see the nest again, every 
 trace of it had vanished. Some village boys on 
 a Sunday afternoon foray (Sunday afternoon 
 being the deadliest time for all accessible 
 creatures in these parts) had torn the nest
 
 Concerning Animals 135 
 
 bodily from the hedge, and it is probably now 
 on a neighbour's mantelpiece. So much for 
 the toil of two weeks and the maternal solici- 
 tude of a week longer, and so much for my re- 
 putation among long-tailed tits as a gentleman. 
 
 I then went on to the thrush's nest, and 
 behold ! it lay on the ground, under the box 
 tree, with one young bird dead beside it. 
 Later John, the odd man, told the story: he 
 had heard that morning an unusual noise in the 
 direction of the nest, and had even stopped 
 work (that extreme measure !) to see what it 
 was ; he found nothing, but could now tell that 
 a cat must have attacked the birds, and the 
 old one have done her best to repulse it, but 
 without success. 
 
 Two tragedies in as many days, two fami- 
 lies destroyed, two beautiful natural processes 
 brought to nothing ! 
 
 Of the two depredators the cat is the more 
 monstrous, because whereas a boy unthinkingly, 
 by a kind of sense of duty as a boy, takes a 
 nest whenever he finds it, a cat mercilessly and 
 deliberately marks a nest down, watches the 
 growth of the young birds, and strikes at the 
 precise moment when they are as big as they
 
 136 Domesticities 
 
 can be before flying. I am not blaming the cat 
 that would be absurd ; but I am vexed with 
 her for making my position as an oracle (to the 
 young) so difficult this morning. For the story 
 is not yet all told. I have to add that when 
 the young thrushes were still babies, and before 
 the long-tailed tit had laid at all, a little girl was 
 brought here, and I was glad to be able to 
 show her the nests and say something about 
 the beautiful ways of nature. That was all 
 right ; but this morning she came in again and 
 was for seeing how both broods had progressed, 
 and I had, of course, to tell her of our losses. 
 So far as the tits were concerned the case pre- 
 sented little difficulty, for it comes naturally 
 to even a little girl to think but lightly of 
 the enormities of " horrid boys " (as we called 
 them). But the cat? We have the misfortune 
 to keep a cat here, and to be very fond of it, 
 and the odds are quite heavy that it was this 
 identical cat that consumed the thrushes and 
 destroyed the nest. Under that impression the 
 little girl refused to take any notice of the cat, 
 nor could she understand how we can possibly 
 continue to give such a creature love and 
 shelter. She asked me the most direct ques-
 
 Concerning Animals 137 
 
 tions on the matter, and I had no answers, and 
 now I am a dishonoured thing. 
 
 And truly the whole thing is rather a puzzle. 
 Why should a cat that is properly fed, and has 
 its will of the mice, eat the birds of the air? 
 Why should boys be unable to permit a bird to 
 hatch out its eggs in peace ? The law of the 
 survival of the fittest hardly applies, for surely a 
 thrush is as fit as a cat, and a long-tailed tit as 
 fit as a boy. I know a dozen boys at least 
 whom I would willingly exchange for the inti- 
 macy of a pair of these birds. Of course, it is 
 all right, really. We all prey on one another, 
 and all in turn are preyed upon. Probably 
 those young thrushes had each eaten some 
 scores of very estimable and life-loving worms ; 
 probably the tits had slain insects by the thou- 
 sand, and equally probably our cat will one 
 night be caught in a trap, and that village boy 
 will enlist and some day fall on a battlefield 
 with a Mauser bullet through his heart. A life 
 for a life, says Nature. And yet one is puzzled 
 still. When man opened the door to let 
 humanity in, he let in a host of doubts and mis- 
 givings at the same time. 
 
 This is not our only tragedy. There is just
 
 138 Domesticities 
 
 now at the farm a little brood of ducklings, who 
 move about ever in a solid phalanx a little 
 yellow cloud which, though seven ducks compose 
 it, you could at any time cover with a dinner 
 napkin. I never saw such mobilisation. If 
 unity were really strength, this company should 
 be capable of anything. So one might think ; 
 and yet the contrary is the fact, for the motive 
 which leads to this excessive gregariousness is 
 not aggression but fear. Collectively, seven 
 yellow ducklings, with weakly, twittering beaks 
 and foolishly limp necks, are no stronger than 
 one ; but collectively their courage is greater ; 
 and just now they need courage or stimulation 
 very badly. Because of the rats. A day or so 
 ago the little band numbered nine, then it num- 
 bered eight, now seven, and to-morrow there 
 may be only six. Hence there is something 
 very pathetic in the sight of these fearful little 
 brothers and sisters crowding against each other 
 in their broad-day passage from one side of the 
 yard to the other. If they feel thus when the 
 sun shines, how must their little hearts beat at 
 night ! 
 
 Their fear of rats cannot, I think, be more 
 intense than mine. Rats are to me what
 
 Concerning Animals 139 
 
 snakes are to timid people in a snake country, 
 or tarantulas in a tarantula country. The rat 
 idea has a kindred hold on me, and has had 
 ever since at school I first heard Southey's 
 ballad of Bishop Hatto. The irresistibility of 
 that army of rats swimming nearer and nearer 
 to the castle in the river, and then up and up 
 the stairs. . . . The rat is so terrible and so 
 unclean. There is the story of the cornered 
 rat that leaps for your throat. . . . 
 
 I met a rat a short time ago. I was descend- 
 ing a little hill, and he was climbing it, both 
 of us in the middle of the road. I stood still 
 and permitted him to pass a great, surly, 
 wicked, intent grandfather. A personified sin 
 might easily have been figured thus. And yet 
 a rat's private life, a rat's thoughts and con- 
 versation, may be far more wholesome than a 
 rabbit's. (We don't really know anything.) Yet 
 a thousand rabbits might play on the floor of 
 my bedroom all night, and be hanged to them, 
 while if a single rat so much as scratched 
 beneath the flooring I would lose all sleep and 
 all peace of mind. Such is association. Such 
 is the rat idea. And such is the basis of my 
 grief for those luckless ducklings.
 
 1 40 Domesticities 
 
 The ducklings, thrushes, and tits are not the 
 only miniature things that are finding life too 
 hard a nut. Old John, on his way back from 
 dinner the other day, found a cat in the midst 
 of that ghastly game which cats play with their 
 victims. The victim in this case was a baby 
 rabbit. By a sudden movement John rescued 
 the little creature and brought it to us. To 
 transpose a box into a hutch was, as the novel- 
 ists say, the work of an afternoon, and the rabbit 
 was placed within it, together with some grass 
 and some milk. But either the nervous shock, 
 or the frequency with which callers came 
 to the hutch to make inquiries, was too much 
 for it, and the next morning its poor little body 
 was cold. A rabbit that could recover from 
 a cat's persecution would, indeed, have an 
 organisation of iron. 
 
 The memory of the bright light of fear that 
 inhabited that little rabbit's eyes has completely 
 overturned all my good feeling for cats. I never 
 was capable of very much, but such as there 
 was has gone. Our kitten may frolic and 
 curvet as she will, and twist her tiny body 
 into a thousand attitudes of freakish and fas- 
 cinating grace, but she leaves me without en-
 
 Concerning Animals 141 
 
 thusiasm. I am tired of cats. Their rapacity 
 is too continual, their cruelty too hideous, 
 their beauty too superficial. Give me a plain, 
 blundering, faithful - hearted, and true - eyed 
 dog a mongrel, even, if you will before all 
 the Persians of the Orient. 
 
 Not that one is profoundly in love with 
 rabbits. Indeed, I cannot rise properly to 
 the rabbit at all; I can only feel sorry for 
 him. To respect him is impossible : his 
 timidity goes beyond all bounds. Man may- 
 well be gratified to cause a stampede now 
 and again among the smaller wild animals 
 of his neighbourhood, but when the same 
 stampede occurs every day among the same 
 family, he deems it too much homage. 
 Rooks can at enormous range distinguish 
 between a walking-stick and a gun, between 
 friend and foe, between Saturday and Sunday. 
 Even sparrows discriminate. But rabbits are 
 just fools. A footstep on the ground three 
 hundred yards away starts them for home, no 
 matter how succulent the greenery or how 
 distant the burrow. One almost blushes to 
 think what incredible distances one's punc- 
 tual and harmless outgoing footfalls cause
 
 142 Domesticities 
 
 rabbits to run every morning, and one's re 
 turning steps every evening. In our case 
 the warren is hard by the path, and the 
 alarmed rabbit has therefore, in gaining safety, 
 to approach the enemy. "Go back, go 
 back, you little duffers ! Finish your feeding 
 and compose yourselves ! " one mentally ex- 
 claims. But it is to no purpose here they 
 all come, hundreds of them, in an agony of 
 fear. 
 
 A few rabbits attempt courage, but never 
 a one achieves it. They sit up with alert 
 ears and gather together pluck to brave it 
 out; but by the time you are within fifty 
 yards their hearts fail them, and they break 
 for home. A frightened rabbit never runs 
 straight : he swerves and swerves. This prob- 
 ably he has learned from experience or tra- 
 dition, for it baulks the sportsman's aim. 
 Nature never did a crueller thing than when 
 she gave rabbits white tails: it makes it pos- 
 sible to shoot them long after it is too dark 
 to see any other quarry. " Twinkletails " 
 would be a pretty name for them. One 
 often sees nothing of a rabbit but its flashing 
 scut. Naturalists, I believe, are puzzled to
 
 Concerning Animals 143 
 
 account for it, except as an advantage to 
 aiming man. 
 
 Young rabbits have far more enterprise than 
 old. Indeed, rabbits go off sadly, almost 
 as sadly as lambs, which take on stupidness 
 steadily with years. A peculiarity of the young 
 rabbit that is approached from a distance from 
 its abode is to lie still in the fern or grass and 
 sham death or coma. An old rabbit has not 
 wit enough to do even that. One imagines the 
 old rabbit a very treasure-house of counsel and 
 warnings. Man must get a desperately bad 
 character in the warrens. 
 
 Our squirrels are less shy than the rabbits. 
 They have more audacity, more grit, more 
 daredevil. They let us approach within a few 
 feet before moving, and then, quick as birds, 
 with tail outspread, they dart to a tree. More 
 often than not it is not the nearest tree : they 
 keep enough composure to select. A squirrel 
 seems never to lose his head ; a rabbit almost 
 always does. When a squirrel runs he loops 
 over the ground in the way the sea-serpent travels 
 in pictures. Once the tree is gained, he scampers 
 up a yard or two, on the side farthest from the 
 enemy, and then pauses as suddenly as if an en-
 
 144 Domesticities 
 
 chanter had bidden him turn to stone. Nothing 
 in nature is more motionless than a wary, watch- 
 ful squirrel. He clings to the bark, with cocked 
 head and fearful eyes, a matter of half-a-minute 
 before climbing to the first fork of the boughs. 
 But to say climbing is a mistake ; it is not climb- 
 ing : it is just running, or, better still, going. A 
 squirrel goes up a tree. 
 
 The squirrel of the artist sits on its hind- 
 quarters, under the shelter of its tail, and nibbles 
 at the nut which its fore-paws hold. The 
 position is, indeed, only one remove from saying 
 grace, and reminds one of the child in Steven- 
 son's verse who behaves " mannerly at table." 
 But one does not often catch them in this 
 attitude in the woods. There the squirrel is 
 usually seen making little furtive dashes among 
 the dead leaves on the ground : a tiny red animal, 
 which, were it not for its tail-plume, might be 
 taken at a distance for a rat. Now and then the 
 nursery illustration is realised, but only seldom. 
 Squirrels are very ready to be angry, and they 
 are incapable of disguising their feelings. They 
 are voluble as fishwives. If you would test the 
 squirrel's powers of repartee, you must drive one 
 to the branches of an isolated tree and then rap
 
 Concerning Animals 145 
 
 the trunk with a stick. He will " answer back " 
 as long as you stay there. 
 
 One pretty peculiarity touching the squirrel 
 is that we do not associate it with age. We 
 speak of a young rabbit or an old rabbit, a 
 young horse, an old cow, a kitten or a cat, a 
 puppy or a dog ; but a squirrel, no matter what 
 its development, is just a squirrel: that is to say, 
 an indescribably wonderful woodland creature 
 as far removed from our own life and ken as any 
 English animal. The lyrical swiftness of the 
 squirrel partakes of the miraculous ; and this, 
 combined with his elusiveness, though he is 
 a thousand strong in the neighbouring wood, 
 makes him a creature apart. Thousands of 
 persons in this country have never seen a 
 squirrel. 
 
 The squirrel is in the main invincibly 
 and joyously untameable, although many a 
 man has kept one as a pet. Compared with 
 a squirrel of the beech grove the wildest 
 rabbit is domesticated. But, indeed, beside 
 the squirrel all the four-footed creatures of 
 the field are pedestrian, commonplace. Even 
 the hare, with its incredible celerities, is dull 
 
 compared with this brilliant aeronaut. The 
 
 K
 
 146 Domesticities 
 
 squirrel must be emboughed if he is to show in 
 brightest pin. On the ground he is swift and 
 graceful, but his tail impedes instead of assisting 
 him ; in a tree, or in mid-air between two trees, 
 he is a miracle of joyous pulsating life, a bird with 
 an additional infusion of nervous fluid, a poem 
 in red fur.
 
 Concerning the Miseries 
 of Life
 
 Concerning the Miseries of Life 
 
 WHAT, my poor Sir, are the senses, but five 
 yawning inlets to hourly and momentary 
 molestations ? What is your House, while 
 you are in it, but a prison filled with nests of little 
 reptiles of insect-annoyances which torment you 
 the more because they cannot kill you ? and what 
 is the same house, when you are out of it, but a 
 shelter, out of reach, from the hostilities of the 
 skies ? What is the Country, but a sandy desert at 
 one season, or a swallowing quagmire at another ? 
 What the Town, but an upper Tartarus of smoke, 
 and din? What are Carriages, but cages upon 
 wheels ? What are Riding-horses, but purchased 
 enemies, whom you pamper into strength, as well 
 as inclination, to kick your brains out ? What are 
 Theatres, but licensed repositories for ill-told lies, 
 or stifling shambles for the voluntary sacrifice of 
 time, health, money, and morals? A Senatorial 
 Debate (when you have fought your way to it), 
 what is it but a national Main of Cocks? What 
 are Games, Sports, and Exercises, but devices of 
 danger and fatigue to the performers, and schools 
 of surgery to the practitioner who may happen to 
 look on? What are Society and Solitude, but, 
 each, an alternate hiding-place from the persecu- 
 tions of the other ? Libraries ! What are they
 
 150 Domesticities 
 
 but the sepulchres of gaiety, or conservatories for 
 the seedlings of disease? Nay, to descend still 
 lower, what are the indispensable processes of 
 Eating and Drinking, but practical lectures on the 
 art of spoiling food? or what even the familiar 
 operations of Dressing and Undressing, but sting- 
 ing remembrances of the privileged nakedness of 
 the savage?" 
 
 At the beginning of this century a humorous 
 work appeared, entitled "The Miseries of 
 Human Life ; or, the Groans of Samuel Sensi- 
 tive and Timothy Testy," from the introduction 
 to which the above passage is taken. The 
 book was so popular that a sequel was called 
 for. The two ran through several editions in a 
 few years, and won the commendation of Sir 
 Walter Scott, who wrote to the publisher saying 
 that " ' The Miseries of Human Life ' contain 
 some wit, much humour, and perfect origin- 
 ality." The authorship, as is always the case 
 when an anonymous work is widely read, was 
 attributed to several hands, a circumstance 
 which the true author explained in a private 
 "groan" appended to the second edition: 
 "Publishing a book incog. with the misery 
 annexed of seeing one's literary delinquencies 
 accumulated on the heads of the guiltless."
 
 Concerning the Miseries of Life 151 
 
 His name was eventually printed on the title- 
 page of the sixth edition, the writer turning out 
 to be the Rev. James Beresford, fellow of Merton 
 and rector of Kebworth in Leicestershire, who 
 died in 1841. 
 
 " The Miseries of Human Life " was confes- 
 sedly a satire. Yet it is unlikely that it had any 
 ameliorating effect, partly because grumbling is 
 to the grumbler so sweet a luxury, misery to 
 the miserable so dear a happiness, and for 
 other reasons to be explained later. Mr. Beres- 
 ford had instead the satisfaction of seeing his 
 point entirely missed by a great many persons 
 which is a penalty (or privilege) of the 
 ironical mind one of whom issued an "Anti- 
 dote to the Miseries of Human Life" in the 
 shape of a book recounting the " History of the 
 Widow Placid and her daughter Rachel." This 
 work, the author of which was a Mr. Corp, 
 stated by direct means what Mr. Beresford had 
 laboured to convey obliquely; but Mr. Corp 
 was without humour, and in his pages the moral 
 superiorities of the Quakers were a thought too 
 emphatically insisted upon for the work to have 
 popularity. 
 
 The scheme of "The Miseries of Human
 
 152 Domesticities 
 
 Life " is preposterous enough. Two old gentle- 
 men, Mr. Timothy Testy and Mr. Samuel Sensi- 
 tive, vie in recording and praising the causes 
 of discomfort. As Bouvard and Pecuchet in 
 Flaubert's satire sought knowledge, so do these 
 warped enthusiasts seek tribulation in the daily 
 round. Testy is the more thorough : impatient 
 and intolerant, he feels acutely and profoundly. 
 Sensitive stands aside and notes more objec- 
 tively. Testy, as himself explains, shrinks 
 more from a hard knock, Sensitive from a 
 hard word. In the end, Sensitive is turned 
 from the pursuit of misery to philosophical 
 resignation and even optimism ; Testy dies in 
 a fit Other characters are Ned Testy, an Eton 
 boy and confirmed punster with a devilish 
 memory for classical tags, and Mrs. Testy, who 
 remains a shadow. Regular meetings are held, 
 at which long lists of miseries are read out by 
 the old gentlemen, while Ned Testy occasion- 
 ally interpolates a pun. The range is wide, 
 covering miseries of town and country, of travel 
 and reading, of eating and visiting, of games 
 and theatres ; in fact, including most phases of 
 life. 
 
 Although ninety years have passed since it
 
 Concerning the Miseries of Life 153 
 
 was written, Mr. Beresford's book is still in 
 the main true. The more subtle " groans " 
 are peculiarly so; proving once again how 
 incorrigibly stationary human nature is. Take, 
 for instance, this, which is perhaps the most 
 genuine misery (most of the examples being 
 but annoyances or discomforts) in the two 
 volumes : 
 
 "Grating the sensibility, the prepossessions, the 
 self-love, the vanity, &c., of the person to whom 
 you are speaking, by some unguarded words, 
 which, as soon as you have uttered them, you 
 would die to eat; then, floundering and plunging 
 deeper and deeper, in your wild and confused 
 attempts to recover yourself." 
 
 And sensitive persons will appreciate this : 
 
 " Stopping in the street to address a person whom 
 you know rather too well to pass him without 
 speaking, and yet not quite well enough to have a 
 word to say to him he feeling himself in the same 
 dilemma ; so that, after each has been asked and 
 answered the question, ' How do you do, sir?' you 
 stand silently face to face, d propos to nothing, 
 during a minute, and then part in a transport of 
 awkwardness." 
 
 And here are one or two other trials of mind,
 
 1 54 Domesticities 
 
 which we must owe to Mr. Beresford's own expe- 
 rience, for neither Testy nor Sensitive knew any- 
 thing of shyness. Just as adventures are to the 
 adventurous, so are miseries to the shy. A 
 nervous, retiring, sensitive man knows all the 
 petty stings of life. Here is a penalty of diffi 
 dence : 
 
 "Standing off and on in the street for half-an-hour 
 (though in the utmost haste), while the friend with 
 whom you are walking talks to his friend whom 
 you meet, and to whose conversation you are deli- 
 cately doubtful whether you ought to be a party." 
 
 Some men do not mind repeating their good 
 things a score of times in the same company. 
 The diffident wit is confronted with the follow- 
 ing problem : 
 
 "After having said what you conceive to be a 
 good thing, but which you fear that none of the 
 company heard, finding yourself reduced to the 
 horrible alternative of losing the credit of your wit, 
 or of repeating your bon-mot, with the risk of its 
 having been heard before and disapproved ; and, 
 in this case, with the certainty of being thought 
 both a fool and a coxcomb." 
 
 The two old gentlemen of the dialogues are 
 not often so penetrative. In the main they
 
 Concerning the Miseries of Life 155 
 
 feel rather with their bodies than their minds. 
 It is well, then, to abide with them a little 
 longer while they are in this unusually acute 
 condition. Here are other universal groans : 
 
 " In trying to laugh at the heavy joke of a good 
 man, but a vile jester ('hilaris cum pondere 
 virtus'), producing only that sort of spurious 
 chuckle or laborious ha ! ha ! which you feel must 
 betray you, even to the worthy wag himself, though 
 not at all of a suspicious nature ; then, on being 
 loudly asked by one of the company, ' What is the 
 joke?' being driven to confess that you 'do not 
 know' as, in truth, you do not ; having laughed 
 gratuitously (without hearing, or taking, what was 
 said), merely to pleasure the old gentleman, whose 
 smiling eye thrown round the table at the conclu- 
 sion of his speech had levied a general tax upon 
 the muscles of his friends. 
 
 " In conversation inadvertently touching the 
 string which you know will call forth the longest 
 story of the flattest proser that ever droned. 
 
 "After telling, at much length, a scarce and 
 curious anecdote, with considerable marks of self- 
 complacency at having it to tell, being quietly 
 reminded by the person you have been so kindly 
 instructing, that you had \\.from himself. 
 
 " After having left a company in which you have 
 been galled by the raillery of some wag by profes-
 
 156 Domesticities 
 
 sion thinking, at your leisure, of a repartee which, 
 if discharged at the proper moment, would have 
 blown him to atoms. 
 
 "On your return from an excursion to North 
 Wales, the lakes, &c., being asked by the first 
 friend you meet whether you saw . . . . naming 
 the most celebrated spot in the whole tour the 
 only place, however, which, by some villainous mis- 
 chance, you did not see." 
 
 This is very common. Beau Brummell's 
 method of leaving his impressions of scenery 
 in the charge of a servant was perhaps more 
 wisely decided upon than one has supposed. 
 
 The foregoing are more than favourable 
 specimens of Mr. Beresford's observation. 
 Here are three good "groans" dealing with 
 miseries that come but rarely, and to many 
 persons never at all : 
 
 " While you are laughing, or talking wildly to 
 yourself, in walking, suddenly seeing a person 
 steal close by you, who, you are sure, must have 
 heard it all ; then, in an agony of shame, making 
 a wretched attempt to sing, in a voice as like 
 your talk as possible, in hopes of making your 
 hearer think that you had been only singing all 
 the while. 
 
 "At breakfast hearing a good old lady detail
 
 Concerning the Miseries of Life 157 
 
 at full length her last night's long dull dream, 
 affording nothing more remarkable than the 
 usual chaos of conclusions without premises, 
 and that sort of topsy-turvy tangled account 
 of the flattest incidents of common life which 
 we could all give every morning, if we did not 
 make all possible haste to forget the nonsense, 
 as soon as we have recovered our senses. But 
 this is not all ; for as soon as she has at length 
 brought her idiotic narrative to an end, and you 
 begin to breathe again, your attention is once 
 more laid in irons, while she buckles to the 
 interpretation of it, in all its parts. 
 
 "When you have imprudently cooled yourself with 
 a glass of ice, after dancing very violently, being 
 immediately told by a medical friend that you have 
 no chance for your life but by continuing the exer- 
 cise with all your might ; then, the state of horror 
 in which you suddenly cry out for ' Go to the devil 
 and shake yourself,' or any other such frolicsome 
 tune, and the heart-sinking apprehensions under 
 which you instantly tear down the dance, and 
 keep rousing all the rest of the couples (who, 
 having taken no ice, can afford to move with 
 less spirit) incessantly vociferating, as you ramp 
 and gallop along, ' Hands across, sir, for heaven's 
 sake.' ' Right and left, or I'm a dead man,' " &c., 
 &c. 
 
 This is tolerable fun. If Mr. Beresford 
 kept always at such a level his book would still
 
 158 Domesticities 
 
 be amusing reading. But he did not. He 
 was often unworthily trivial and even silly. 
 He weakened his satire by including the 
 miseries of foolish persons, which do not, of 
 course, merit attention. Such groans as the 
 following are inoperative as satire, because the 
 ordinary man would not so expose himself: 
 
 " In attempting to spring carelessly, with the help 
 of one hand, over a five-barred gate, by way of 
 showing your activity to a party of ladies behind 
 you (whom you affect not to have observed), 
 blundering upon your nose on the other side. 
 
 " On entering the room, to join an evening party 
 composed of remarkably grave, strict, and precise 
 persons, suddenly finding out that you are drunk ; 
 and (what is still worse) that the company has 
 shared with you in the discovery though you 
 thought you were, and fully intended to be, 
 rigidly sober." 
 
 People rarely do such things. A social 
 satirist is mistaken also in including examples 
 which are so uncommon that one may easily 
 go through a long life and never experience 
 or even hear of them. Such as this : 
 
 " After waiting an hour for a friend's Cremona, 
 for which you had sent your servant, seeing it at 
 length brought in by him in fragments."
 
 Concerning the Miseries of Life 159 
 
 This also is too infrequent an occurrence to 
 be worth comment : 
 
 " On your entrance at a formal dinner party, in 
 reaching up your hat to a high peg in the hall, 
 bursting your coat, from the arm-hole to the 
 pocket." 
 
 Between miseries that are of one's own 
 causing and miseries that outside circum- 
 stances produce, a distinction should be 
 drawn. Such an impersonal affliction as 
 the lateness of a train would not be worth 
 noting in any book of this kind; nor so 
 momentous and real a calamity as the break- 
 ing of one's leg. These are too objective 
 or too serious. Mental miseries are almost 
 the only ones worthy the notice of the 
 philosopher. Miseries for which one cannot 
 reproach oneself belong to a less important 
 class, as the Domestic Psychologist who ought 
 to undertake the revision and improvement 
 of this book would, of course, point out. 
 Nearly all railway annoyances belong to that 
 category. Testy and Sensitive, by the way, 
 were strong on the miseries of travelling. 
 Many of their charges against stage coaches 
 have only to be transferred to cabs and rail
 
 1 60 Domesticities 
 
 way compartments to be applicable now. 
 Thus, the groan 
 
 " A coach window-glass that will not be put up 
 when it is down, nor down when it is up," 
 
 may be amplified to " Travelling in cold weather 
 with a fellow-passenger who insists on having 
 the window open ; or, in hot, with one who de- 
 mands that it shall be shut." We all know such 
 people. "In winter, finding that the stock of 
 foot- warmers is just exhausted " this is a true 
 misery. Another is : " Fitting the rhythmic 
 beat of the train to a form of words which you 
 cannot forget" a horror which Mark Twain 
 has carried to the bitter end in his story, 
 "Punch, Brothers, Punch." The miseries of 
 cabs are mostly financial Nothing is much 
 worse for an economical nervous woman than 
 to ride an eighteen-penny distance with no 
 coin less than half-a-crown in her pocket. 
 
 To the travel section belong of course the 
 miseries of inns, which still are too much with 
 us. The following groan, although tiresome in 
 its long-windedness, is valuable as a picture. 
 
 " In the room of an inn to which you are confined 
 by the rain, or by sudden indisposition, the whole
 
 Concerning the Miseries of Life 161 
 
 day, finding yourself reduced to the following 
 delassemens de casur j and first for the Morning : 
 examining the scrawled window-panes, in hopes 
 of curious verses, and finding nothing more piquant 
 than ' I love pretty Sally Appleby of Chipping- 
 Norton ;' ' Sweet Dolly Meadows ; ' ' A. B., G. M., 
 T. S., &c., &c., dined here July the 4th, 1739 ; ' 
 ' I am very unappy. Sam Jennings ; ' ' Life at best 
 is but a jest ; ' ' Wm. Wilkins is a fool,' with ' So 
 are you ' written under it ; ' dam pit ' [a political 
 sentiment] &c., &c., together with sundry half- 
 finished initials scratched about. 
 
 "Then for your Evening recreations : after having 
 for the twentieth time held a candle to the wretched 
 prints or ornaments with which the room is hung, 
 such as female personifications of the Four Seasons, 
 or the Cardinal Virtues, daubed over anyhow with 
 purple, red, and raspberry-cream colours ; or a 
 series of halfpenny prints, called ' Going out in the 
 Morning,' ' Starting a hare,' ' Coming in at the 
 Death,' &c. ; or a Jemmy Jessamy lover in a wood, 
 in new boots, but without spurs, whip, horse, or 
 hat, with his hair full-dressed, on one knee, in the 
 dirt, before a coy maypole Miss in an old-fashioned 
 riding-dress ; both figures being partly coloured 
 and partly plain ; or a goggling wax Queen bolt 
 upright in a deep glass case, among the minikin 
 pillars of a tawdry temple, wreathed with red foil, 
 tinsel, and green varnished leaves ; or the map of 
 England, with only about four counties and no 
 towns in it, worked in a sampler by the landlady's 
 
 L
 
 1 62 Domesticities 
 
 youngest daughter, ' aged 10 years ' ; or a little fat 
 plaster man on the chimney-piece, with his gilt 
 cocked-hat at the back of his head and a pipe in his 
 mouth, being the centre figure to a china Shakspeare 
 and Milton, in harlequin jackets, at the two extremi- 
 ties after getting all this by heart (I say), asking 
 in despair for some books, which, when brought, 
 turn out to be Bracken's ' Farriery,' three or four 
 wrecks of different spelling-books, 'Gauging made 
 Easy,' a few odd volumes of the ' Racing Calendar,' 
 an abridged ''Abridgment of the History of Eng- 
 land ' in question and answer, with half the leaves 
 torn out and the other half illegible with greasy 
 thumbing, an old list of Terms, Transfer days, &c., 
 with Tax Tables, &c., &c., in each of which you try 
 a few pages, nod over them till nine o'clock, and 
 then stumble to bed in a cloud of disgust." 
 
 As a contrast to the foregoing let us quote Mr. 
 Beresford in more epigrammatic moments. 
 Here are some concise groans : 
 
 " The interval between the dentist's confession 
 that your tooth will be very difficult to draw, and 
 the commencement of the attempt. 
 
 "Taking a step more, or a step less, than you 
 want, in going up or down stairs. 
 
 "The task of inventing a new dinner every morn- 
 ing devolving on you, in the long absence of your 
 wife.
 
 Concerning the Miseries of Life 163 
 
 "Attempting to open the stiff blade of a rusty knife 
 at a well-worn notch with a short thumb nail." 
 
 We may make other changes "to date." 
 Neither Mr. Testy nor Mr. Sensitive seems to 
 have smoked. Had they done so their groans 
 would have been fewer, for no good smoker has 
 cause for grumbling when once his pipe is alight, 
 and no good smoker foresees cause for grumbling 
 without lighting his pipe as a prophylactic or 
 palliative. But both the old gentlemen took 
 snuff. Here is a groan born of the habit : 
 
 " On the road, suddenly finding your stock of snuff 
 exhausted ; then, on flying to a shop in a country 
 town at which you are told they have all sorts 
 nothing but Scotch." 
 
 To-day we have similar tobacco trials. " Noth- 
 ing but shag " is the disheartening reply which 
 many a weary traveller receives in a village shop 
 or wayside ina " No matches " is another 
 tobacco trial. " To be offered a cigar by a man 
 notorious for his poor judgment of the leaf" 
 that is another. " Letting a choice cigar out " 
 is one more ; but the wise man does not do 
 that. 
 
 Most of Mr. Beresford's London miseries hold
 
 1 64 Domesticities 
 
 good at this moment. This is still within every 
 one's compass : 
 
 " Walking, side by side, half over London, with 
 a cart containing a million of iron bars, which you 
 must out-bray, if you can, in order to make your 
 companion hear a word you have further to say 
 upon the subject you were earnestly discussing 
 before you were joined by this infernal article of 
 commerce." 
 
 For a cart containing iron bars, one may read a 
 cart passing over a stone road. Albany Street 
 was once among the worst. " Riding in a 'bus 
 over such stones, with an old, inquisitive, and 
 loud-voiced friend of the family " is even worse. 
 Another street misery not noted by Mr. Beres- 
 ford is : " Perceiving some one advancing 
 towards you with whom you will, you feel 
 convinced, avoid a collision only with great 
 difficulty and loss of dignity " : such an embar. 
 rassment of similar purposes as that described by 
 Sterne in " The Sentimental Journey." Another 
 is : " Meeting on a muddy day an Indian file of 
 policemen who move onward like a tidal wave 
 and turn into the gutter all who hesitate to take 
 the wall." 
 
 Here are some theatre groans, still pertinent :
 
 Concerning the Miseries of Life 165 
 
 " On going to the play, to see a favourite per- 
 former, to be told, at the drawing-up of the curtain 
 (as you had augured from the rueful bow of the 
 speaker), that he or she is suddenly taken ill or 
 
 dead, and that Mr. or Miss (the hacks of 
 
 the house) has kindly undertaken to try and read 
 the part at five minutes' notice. 
 
 "Inthepit at the opera, a broad-shouldered fellow, 
 seven feet high, seated immediately before you 
 during the whole of the ballet." 
 
 To these the modern Testy would add " The 
 matine'e hat " ; and the modern Sensitive, " The 
 affliction of having, when visiting a comic opera 
 purely for the fun of it, to endure the repetition 
 of each of the saccharine songs of the tenor." 
 " Finding that a farce is not amusing " is a 
 sickening and frequent grief. Mr. Beresford has 
 this : 
 
 "Going to see a party of strolling players on the 
 strength of an encouraging report that they are 
 execrable ; but finding them so intolerably tolerable 
 that even the most heart-breaking scenes of their 
 tragedy scarcely afford you one hearty laugh." 
 
 A very slight change modernises the following 
 groan : 
 
 "After having sent from the other end of the 
 kingdom to Hookham's for a quantity of well-
 
 1 66 Domesticities 
 
 chosen books, all particularly named, receiving in 
 return, six months afterwards, a cargo of novels, of 
 their own choice, with such titles as 'Delicate 
 Sensibility,' ' Disguises of the Heart,' ' Errors of 
 Tenderness,' &c. &c. Then, if you venture in 
 despair on a few pages, being edified in the 
 margin by such pencilled commentaries as the 
 following : ' I quite agree in this sentiment,' 
 ' How frequently do we find this to be the case 
 in real life ! ' ' But why did she let him have the 
 letter?' &c. &c., concluded by the reader's general 
 decision upon the merits of the book, stamped in 
 one oracular sentence ; for example, ' This is a 
 very good novel ' ; or, to the horror and confusion 
 of the author, if he should ever hear of the critique, 
 ' What execrable stuff ! ' " 
 
 Substitute Mudie's for Hookham's, and, with 
 modifications, the case applies to-day. Here, 
 however, Mr. Beresford injures himself by 
 exaggeration and spleen. A quietly humorous 
 tone would have been so much better. More 
 annoying still is it to receive in one's library 
 parcel several of the novels which one returned 
 last month. " To find a volume of short stories 
 where one expected a long novel" is a grief. 
 "Cutting a book with the finger "has a place 
 in the Miseries. "Cutting a paper with the 
 flat of the hand or a railway ticket " should also
 
 Concerning the Miseries of Life 167 
 
 be mentioned ; and under the miseries of read- 
 ing might be put this : " Having a passion 
 for truth, and a sane admiration of Browning, 
 and being asked casually, ' What do you think 
 of Browning ? ' " 
 
 The book is weak in the games section. The 
 miseries of cricket, for example, are not summed 
 up in the following " groans " : 
 
 "At cricket, after a long and hard service of 
 watching out, bowled out at the first ball. Like- 
 wise, cricket on very sloppy ground, so that your 
 hard ball presently becomes muddy, sappy, and 
 rotten ; a jarring bat ; a right-hand bat for a 
 left-handed player ; a hat, vice stumps." 
 
 And 
 
 " Cricket by two, so that, when z, you have to 
 run a quarter of a mile behind the wicket after 
 every ball you miss your antagonist delivering it 
 with the force of a cannon." 
 
 Cricketers know more of grief than this. The 
 reviser of Mr. Beresford's book would have to 
 remember "The ordeal of walking back to a 
 crowded pavilion after an innings which con- 
 sisted of exactly one ball." It is then that 
 Mr. Alfred Lyttelton's piteous plea for an
 
 1 68 Domesticities 
 
 underground passage returns with fullest 
 force. " Bowling for catches, and seeing all 
 those catches dropped " ; " Being in, when runs 
 are wanted, with a man who has no judgment 
 or courage in running, and who refuses to call 
 with any decision"; "Being set for a long 
 innings and watching the batsmen at the other 
 end go out like street lamps in the early morn- 
 ing " ; " Being in with easy bowling or, as it is 
 now idiomatically called, ' tosh ' with a selfish 
 bat who consistently collars the over " ; " Bowl- 
 ing to a hitter with such an eye that he can 
 make a full-pitch or half volley out of anything" 
 (in short, "Bowling to Mr. Jessop"); "Feeling 
 conscious in an emergency that the only bowl- 
 ing that would be of any avail is your own, but 
 having no friend at court to suggest as much to 
 the captain" these are miseries which most 
 cricketers have experienced. 
 
 Fortunately this book was compiled before 
 golf and cycling had caught the world. Mr. 
 Testy on a bicycle, Mr. Sensitive with a cleek, 
 are not to be imagined. How the one would 
 have amplified that dread calamity, a puncture ! 
 How the other would have dilated upon a 
 grounded club ! Such cycling miseries as
 
 Concerning the Miseries of Life 169 
 
 "Struggling against a head wind"; "Purchas- 
 ing a new cycle at market price the day before 
 some one offers you his own machine, a better 
 one, at half the cost " ; " Riding upon a vocal 
 and complaining saddle"; "Running short of 
 oil on the outskirts of a town whose police are 
 notoriously vigilant " ; " Learning to ride in the 
 presence of the local satirist" Mr. Testy and 
 Mr. Sensitive between them would have fastened 
 upon these like terriers upon rats and have 
 worried them as remorselessly. But our 
 Domestic Psychologist would, we fancy, find 
 that sports and games were eating up too much 
 space. Billiards is beset with misery. Croquet 
 is a perpetual humiliation for some one. Even 
 halma harasses. While, when we come to more 
 serious pastimes, such as angling and riding, 
 the groans are of appalling variety. Mr. 
 Beresford knew what riding involved. Thus : 
 
 " At the moment when your horse is beginning to 
 run away with you, losing your stirrup, which runs 
 away too, and bangs your instep raw as often as 
 you attempt to catch it with your foot." 
 
 Finally let me quote a budget of miscellaneous 
 groans :
 
 170 Domesticities 
 
 " A fellow who treats you in all respects (the fee 
 excepted) like his physician, unreservedly laying 
 before you, while he is helping you at dinner, all 
 the minutest particulars of his most revolting ail- 
 ments, from the first attack down to the present 
 moment. 
 
 " Dropping in upon a friend at the dinner-hour, 
 upon the strength of his general invitation, and at 
 once discovering, from the countenance and manner 
 of his lady, that you'd better have waited for a par- 
 ticular one. 
 
 " A tea-pot which won't pour except through the 
 top what you intend for your cup trickling down 
 your fingers, into your sleeve, and over the cloth. 
 
 " Your watch-key having worn itself round, so 
 that it amuses you with spinning by itself upon 
 its square pin, of which it was once so fond as 
 never to think of moving without it. 
 
 "Pushing up your shirt sleeves for the purpose 
 of washing your hands, but so ineffectually, that 
 in the midst of the operation they fall and bag 
 down over your wet, soapy wrists. 
 
 " The hypochondriacal impression, under which 
 you fancy, as you lie in bed, that your fingers 
 are each as large as a woolsack, legs of the size 
 of church pillars, pillow bigger than the bed of 
 Ware, &c., &c., and all this affair seeming to 
 grow worse and worse every moment. 
 
 " In attempting to take up the poker softly (an
 
 Concerning the Miseries of Life 171 
 
 invalid asleep in the room), throwing it violently 
 down, sociably accompanied by the tongs and 
 shovel in its fall. 
 
 " Being compelled by a deaf person, in a large 
 and silent company, to repeat some very washy 
 remark three or four times over, at the highest 
 pitch of your voice." 
 
 Best of all, that is to say, cruellest of all, is 
 this : 
 
 " At a long table, after dinner, the eyes of the 
 whole company drawn upon you by a loud ob- 
 servation that you are strikingly like Mrs. or 
 Miss , particularly when you smile." 
 
 To these, taken from all parts of Mr. Beres- 
 ford's two volumes, every one would be able 
 to add a few. 
 
 The virtue of such a book resides in its 
 universality. An observer who, in this way, 
 recorded nothing but the unsolicited, inevit- 
 able woes that afflict the body and soul of 
 an ordinarily sensible and sensitive person, 
 would be contributing something to the 
 science of living. Had Mr. Beresford con- 
 fined himself to these, his compilation would 
 steadily have passed into new editions until
 
 172 Domesticities 
 
 this day. But he made the mistake of 
 choosing two abnormal persons for his prin- 
 cipal mouthpieces and indulging in continual 
 exaggeration. The result is that the book 
 has very little value except as the basis of 
 a better and as an example of the kind of 
 humour that was enjoyed at the beginning of 
 this century. Also as one of the lighter books 
 that pleased Scott. 
 
 "The Miseries of Human Life" died with 
 its own generation, although some time in the 
 fifties an American writer took the book in 
 hand, adding miseries of his own, Americanis- 
 ing the text, and multiplying Ned Testy's puns. 
 His effort is not valuable. Since then the 
 book has remained undisturbed, and will so 
 remain until our Domestic Psychologist makes 
 it the germ of a catalogue of minor normal 
 woes, mental rather than physical. Such a 
 catalogue could not but be interesting.
 
 Concerning a Gentle 
 Adviser
 
 Concerning a Gentle Adviser 
 
 I HAVE called Gervase Markham a gentle 
 adviser, because the quality of gentleness 
 has such prominence in his pages. His sen- 
 tences have a gentle euphony, his poetry has 
 a gentle melancholy, his attitude to life, as 
 we glimpse it between the lines, is one of 
 gentleness. In his treatises he does not com- 
 mand or, as we say of small tyrants, "order 
 about" he advises, suggests, in a word, per- 
 suades. "If you will roast a Piece of fresh 
 Sturgeon," says he, in the cookery, by way 
 of courteous opening, and then come the 
 directions; and, "If you will Roast a chine 
 of beef, a loyn of Mutton, a Capon and a 
 
 1 Gervase Markham (1566-1636), soldier, man of 
 letters, dilettante, and the author of very many manuals 
 of farriery, sport, agriculture, horticulture, cookery, 
 medicine, and the home arts generally. " Which," says 
 he, in one of his prefaces, if men will " once take pains to 
 read them, they will after affirm them worthy of choice 
 bosomes." The volume from which my quotations are 
 made is a compendium entitled "Country Content- 
 ments." 
 
 175
 
 176 Domesticities 
 
 lark, all at one instant, and at one fire, and 
 have all ready together and none burnt," do so 
 and so. 
 
 Not content with his own mild persuasion, 
 the gentle Markham would have us all gentle 
 too, and herein, I think, lies his peculiar 
 attraction. He presupposes an affectionate 
 nature to be a property of his reader. To 
 the owner of a pack of hounds he addresses 
 this passage (in which, as in that which fol- 
 lows, the italics are mine) : " You shall not 
 suffer your Whelps to suck above two months 
 at the most, but then you shall Wean them, 
 and if the house you keep be of great receit, 
 and many servants, you shall let your Cook 
 bring up your best Whelps, and your Dairy- 
 maid your second-best, and the rest you shall 
 put forth among your friends or Tenants, 
 according unto the love you possess in the 
 Country" That a man may keep hounds and 
 yet possess no love in the country, is a state of 
 things beyond Markham's ken. 
 
 And thus coaxingly is the erring Hawk to be 
 brought into the way of rectitude : "All Hawks 
 generally are to be manned after one manner, 
 that is to say, by watching and keeping them
 
 Concerning a Gentle Adviser 177 
 
 from sleep, by a continuall carrying them upon 
 your fist, and by a most familiar stroking and 
 playing with them, with the wing of a dead 
 fowl, or such like, and by often gazing and 
 looking them in the face, with a loving and 
 gentle countenance, and so making them ac- 
 quainted with the man." 
 
 And in breaking-in or riding a horse, we 
 must never forget to cherish the animal. See 
 how prettily Markham instructs us : " Now of 
 cherishings, there are generally in use but 
 three, as first the voice, which being delivered 
 smoothly and lovingly, as crying holla so boy, 
 there boy there, and such like, gives the Horse 
 both cheerfulness of Spirit and a knowledge 
 that he hath done well, then the hand by 
 clapping him gently on the Neck or Buttock, 
 or giving him grass or other food to eat, after 
 he hath pleased you ; and lastly, the big end of 
 the Rod, by rubbing him therewith upon the 
 withers or main, which is very pleasing and 
 delightful to the Horse." The antitheses to 
 these cherishing cries are, Ha villain, carridro, 
 diablo, delivered sharply and roughly. Such 
 like threatenings terrify the horse, says Mark- 
 ham, and make him afraid to disobey. 
 
 M
 
 178 Domesticities 
 
 But it is not often that Markham writes of 
 severe measures, and then with apparent dis- 
 taste. If, however, the husbandman is to progress 
 and the sportsman justify himself, animals must 
 be killed. Recognising the necessity, Markham 
 lays down rules accordingly, but still with 
 gentleness. There are, for example, certain 
 "ravenous creatures" which destroy fish, such 
 as the otter and the "hern," and these, in 
 the interest of the angler, must be removed. 
 Among them is "the King's Fisher (which is a 
 small green bird) . . . and the way to take 
 him is to mark his haunt where he commonly 
 sitteth, which is ever in some bush next the 
 river; then set a little cradle of limed straws 
 about his seat, and they will quickly take him, 
 for he seldome changeth, but ever sitteth upon 
 one bough." Alas, there are few of these small 
 green birds left to sit in England now ! 
 
 Towards the whole world Markham seems to 
 have entertained a tenderness. Of the well- 
 being of his fellow-men he was no less soli- 
 citous. In his " Farewell to Husbandry," the 
 directions as to the husbandman's labours for 
 the several months of the year are rounded 
 off with a thoughtful word of advice as to the
 
 Concerning a Gentle Adviser 179 
 
 care of his health. " In January he must keep 
 warm, and rather with exercise than sauce in- 
 crease his appetite." In February, March, and 
 April he shall " bleed as art may direct." In 
 May he is bidden "beware of Mounte- 
 banks, and old wives' tales, for the latter hath 
 no ground, and the other no truth but apparent 
 cosenage." In September he must shun, "as 
 death," riot and surfeit. In October he may 
 " use all moderate sports, for anything now is 
 good which reviveth the spirits." In December 
 we find this entry : " And lastly for your health, 
 eat meats that are hot and nourishing, drink 
 good wine that is neat, sprightly and lusty ; 
 keep the body well clad, and thy house warm, 
 forsake whatsoever is flegmatick, and banish all 
 care from thine heart, for nothing is more un- 
 wholesome than a troubled spirit." 
 
 Gervase Markham, himself an Elizabethan, 1 
 
 1 Isabel Markham, great-aunt to Gervase, was one of 
 the maids of honour thrown into prison with the Princess 
 Elizabeth. Afterwards she became the lady of Sir John 
 Harrington, Elizabeth's godson, who " firste thoughte 
 her fayre as she stode at the Princesse's windowe in 
 goodlye attyre and talkede to dyvers in the courte 
 yarde." He called her "Sweete Isabella Markham," 
 and wrote poems to her during his courtship, and
 
 1 80 Domesticities 
 
 had a brimming share of the Elizabethan gift 
 of enthusiasm. Words were to these early 
 writers like a new toy to a happy child, and 
 they played with them with as much delight. 
 The old spontaneous joy has passed. For the 
 winsomeness, the comeliness, that marked the 
 literature of that early untroubled day of re- 
 birth, we look almost in vain. The world 
 is no longer new every morning as once it 
 was. 
 
 Throughout his books Markham displays this 
 zest : the subject upon which he is for the 
 moment engaged is the finest subject in the 
 world. High praise, when it is honest, is the 
 pleasantest of reading, and hence part of Mark- 
 ham's charm. Superlatives are a little out of 
 
 after they were married. The father of Gervase 
 was Robert Markham, the nephew of Sweet Isabella. 
 He was twice High Sheriff of Nottingham and thrice 
 Knight of the Shire, and was thus commemorated in 
 Elizabeth's couplet made upon her Nottinghamshire 
 knights : 
 
 " Gervase the gentle, Stanhope the stout, 
 Markham the lion, and Sutton the lout." 
 
 If, as may without violence be supposed, Gervase Mark- 
 ham was named after "Gervase the Gentle," the boy's 
 assumption of the characteristic as well as of the name 
 is curious.
 
 Concerning a Gentle Adviser 181 
 
 date with us. The finest edge has been taken 
 from life ; the sun is, in our day, too high in the 
 heavens for the ancient energy and zest. The 
 Elizabethans knew the glory of his rising, when 
 the dewdrops glistened, and the lark sang at 
 heaven's gate, and enthusiasm inhabited the 
 clear light. 
 
 Gervase Markham now and again essayed 
 poetry, but with small measure of success. The 
 verse was diffuse and over-saccharine, avoiding 
 statements. Yet there was little reason that he 
 should feel discouragement at his inability to 
 sing with the highest. He had all the enthusiasm 
 of the poet, although in verse he was powerless 
 to give it expression. Like so many other men, 
 he was a better poet in life than in literature. 
 This gift of appreciation enabled him to detect 
 the finest, most picturesque feature in whatever 
 he bent his mind upon. To a man not similarly 
 endowed, when writing upon hounds and their 
 treatment, such a passage as the following would, 
 for example, never have been possible : 
 
 " If you would have your Kennel for sweetness 
 of cry, then you must compound it of some large 
 dogs, that have deep, solemn Mouthes, and are 
 swift in spending, which must, as it were, bear the
 
 1 82 Domesticities 
 
 base in the consort ; then a double number of 
 roaring, and loud ringing Mouthes, which must 
 bear the counter tenor ; then some hollow plain 
 sweet Mouthes, which must bear the mean or 
 middle part. And so with these three parts of 
 Musick you shall make your cry perfect : and 
 herein you shall observe that these Hounds thus 
 mixt, do run just and even together, and not 
 hang off loose from one another, which is the 
 vilest sight that may be ; and you shall under- 
 stand that this composition is best to be made 
 of the swiftest and largest deep-mouthed dog, 
 the slowest middle-siz'd dog, and the shortest- 
 legg'd slender dog, amongst these you may cast 
 in a couple or two small single beagles, which as 
 small trebles may warble amongst them : the cry 
 will be a great deal the more sweet." 
 
 How ridiculous for a man who could write 
 such a passage as this, or compose some of the 
 cookery recipes that follow, ever to wish for 
 fame as a poet ! But often we stumble on our 
 best things. 
 
 Anything less dramatic than Markham's 
 " Tragedie of Sir Richard Grinvile " cannot well 
 be imagined. It is wanting in every kind of 
 force, and the knight himself resembles more
 
 Concerning a Gentle Adviser 183 
 
 nearly an enfeebled missionary than a sea- 
 ravener. Markham's gentleness here became 
 his enemy. Fortunately we have Lord Tenny- 
 son's ballad : 
 
 "And Sir Richard said again : ' We be all true English 
 
 men, 
 Let us hang those dogs of Seville, the children of the 
 
 Devil, 
 For I never turn'd my back upon Don or Devil yet.' " 
 
 That, you remember, was the beginning of the 
 fight. To such a tune men will dare any odds. 
 
 " Sink me the ship, Master Gunner, sink her, split her in 
 
 twain ! 
 Fall into the hands of God, not into the hands of Spain." 
 
 That was how, according to the late Laureate, 
 Sir Richard Grenville bade the contest cease. 
 Markham's hero abjured all such brevity and 
 pertinence, as this one of the stanzas embodying 
 his last orders (he was an unconscionable long 
 time dying, and talking about it,) will show. Sir 
 Richard is prone on the deck of the Revenge. 
 All around Spaniards are looming. Sir Richard 
 finds breath and opportunity to say, among 
 many other things :
 
 1 84 Domesticities 
 
 " Sweet Maister Gunner, split our keele in twaine, 
 We cannot live, whom hope of life hath left, 
 Dying, our deaths more glorious lives retaine, 
 Let not our ship, of shame and foile bereft, 
 Unto our foemen for a prize remaine ; 
 Sinke her, and sinking with the Greeke wee'll cry, 
 Best not to be, or beeing soon to dye." 
 
 " He was," says Stevenson, writing, in his 
 essay on the English admirals, of Sir Richard 
 Grenville, " he was a noted tyrant to his crew : 
 a dark, bullying fellow apparently ; and it is 
 related of him that he would chew and swallow 
 wine glasses, by way of convivial levity, till the 
 blood ran out of his mouth." 
 
 Gervase Markham was perhaps truest poet 
 when in the kitchen. There the inspiration 
 denied to him when he would consciously serve 
 the Muses flooded his being and impelled him 
 to great achievement. From what authoritative 
 anthology of " prose-poems " could this recipe 
 for the compounding of an excellent sallet be 
 omitted ? 
 
 " Take a good quantity of blancht almonds, 
 and with your shredding knife cut them grossly; 
 then take as many raisins of the sun clean 
 washt, and the stones pickt out, as many figs 
 shred like the almonds, as many capers, twice
 
 Concerning a Gentle Adviser i 8 5 
 
 so many olives, and as many currants as of all 
 the rest, clean washt, a good handfull of the 
 small tender leaves of red sage and spinage ; mixe 
 all these well together with good store of sugar, 
 and lay them in the bottome of a great dish ; 
 then put unto them vinegar and oyl, and scrape 
 more sugar over all ; then take oranges and 
 lemmons, and paring away the outward pills, 
 cut them into thin slices, then with those slices 
 cover the sallet all over, which done, take the 
 fine thin leaf of the red cole flower, and 
 with them cover the oranges and lemmons all 
 over; then over those red leaves, lay another 
 course of old olives, and the slices of well- 
 pickled cucumbers, together with the very in- 
 ward heart of cabbage-lettuce cut into slices; 
 then adorn the sides of the dish, and the top of 
 the sallet, with more slices of lemmons and 
 oranges, and so serve it up." 
 
 What comely phrases ! Contrast with them 
 the bald and unalluring directions to be found 
 in a modern " Enquire Within " such a work as 
 Markham would have edited and you will see 
 how the felicities of language have passed from 
 daily life. Alack ! what have we not lost in our 
 search for brevity and precision ? Where now
 
 1 8 6 Domesticities 
 
 are "the raisins of the sun," where the "very 
 inward heart"? And the niggard accuracy of 
 avoirdupois has taken the place of the generous 
 (if vague) abundance indicated by "pretty 
 quantity" and "good store." None the less 
 one looks upon " Enquire Within " as a severely 
 valuable book. 
 
 Markham's March-pane recipe is another 
 lyric : 
 
 " To make the best March-pane, take the best 
 Jordan Almonds, and blanch them in warm 
 water, then put them into a stone mortar, and 
 with a wooden pestle beat them to pap, then 
 take of the finest refined sugar well searst, and 
 with it Damask Rose water, beat it to a good 
 stiff paste, allowing almost to every Jordan 
 Almond three spoonfulls of sugar, then when 
 it is brought thus to a paste, lay it upon a fair 
 Table, and strewing searst sugar under it, 
 mould it like leven, then with a rowling-pin 
 rowl it forth, and lay it upon wafers washed 
 with Rose Water ; then pinch it about the 
 sides, and put it into what form you please; 
 then strew searst sugar all over it, which done, 
 wash it over with Rose water and sugar mixt 
 together, for that will make the Ice; then adorn
 
 Concerning a Gentle Adviser 187 
 
 it with comfits, guilding, or whatsoever devices 
 you please, and so set it into a hot stove, and 
 there bake crispy, and serve it forth." 
 
 "To make sweet water of the best kind," he 
 directs elsewhere, "take a thousand Damask 
 roses." A thousand damask roses ! What 
 opulence ! And what a picture it calls up : 
 the English housewife in her white sleeves, her 
 keys at her side ; the sunny morning-room ; the 
 mass of wine-dark petals on the table ; laughing 
 children running in from the rosary bringing 
 more, more. Opulence is indeed the note 
 under Markham's regime. Mother Earth is 
 called upon to squander her vegetable riches ; 
 fragrant, spreading gardens are deplenished to 
 assist the flavour of a single dish. And all is 
 legitimate, all in due order; there is no 
 violence, no distortion. Geryase Markham 
 could not have been less shocked than Keats 
 himself at a plate of nightingales' tongues. We 
 are never tempted to charge him with greed ; 
 Gervase Markham was too various a man for 
 that once again, too gentle. At most he was, 
 in Dr. Kitchener's phrase, "a notable fork." 
 Some idea of the estimation in which he held 
 the culinary art may be gathered from the
 
 1 8 8 Domesticities 
 
 following positive statement concerning the 
 English housewife : " She that is utterly igno- 
 rant therein [cookery], may not by Laws of 
 strict Justice challenge the freedome of marri- 
 age, because indeed she can then but perform 
 half her vow : for she may love and obey, but 
 she cannot cherish, serve, and keep him with 
 that true duty which is ever expected." Mark- 
 ham is rarely so dogmatic. For the sake of the 
 marriage tie it is as well, perhaps, that the 
 opinion is not generally held. 
 
 See what roots and fruits went to the perfec- 
 tion of the best Marrow-bone Pye, of which, 
 despite the marrow-bone basis, a vegetarian 
 might surely partake without sin. 
 
 "After you have mixt the crusts of the best 
 sort for pasts, and raised the coffin in such a 
 manner as you please; you shall first in the 
 bottome thereof lay a course of marrow of beef, 
 mixt with currants ; then upon it a lay of the 
 soals of artichokes, after they have been boyled 
 and are divided from the thistle; then cover 
 them with marrow, currants, and great raisins, 
 the stones pickt out; then lay a course of 
 potatoes cut in thick slices, after they have 
 been boyled soft, and are clean pilled; then
 
 Concerning a Gentle Adviser 189 
 
 cover them with marrow, currants, great raisins, 
 sugar, and cinnamon ; then lay a layer of 
 candied eringo roots mixt very thick with the 
 slices of dates; then cover it with marrow, 
 currants, great raisins, sugar, cinnamon, and 
 dates, with a few Damask prunes, and so bake 
 it ; and after it is bak't, pour into it, as long as 
 it will receive it, white wine, rosewater, sugar, 
 and cinnamon and vinegar mixt together, and 
 candy all the cover with rosewater and sugar 
 only, and so set it into the oven a little, and 
 serve it forth." 
 
 Not only in the composition of each dish is 
 this opulence to be found, but in the multitude 
 and variety of them on the table. Gervase Mark- 
 ham's instructions to the docile housewife on the 
 ordering of a royal feast may be left where they 
 are, but the following counsel, being addressed 
 to " any Good man," demands publicity : 
 
 " Now for a more humble Feast, or an ordin- 
 ary proportion which any good man may keep 
 in his Family, for the entertainment of his true 
 and worthy friends, it must hold limitation 
 with his provision and the season of the year; 
 For Summer affords what Winter wants, and 
 Winter is Master of that which Summer can
 
 1 90 Domesticities 
 
 but with difficulty have. It is good then for 
 him that intends to Feast, to set down the full 
 number of his full dishes, that is, dishes of meat 
 that are of substance, and not empty, or for 
 shew and of these sixteen is a good proportion 
 for one course unto one messe, as thus, for 
 example : First, a shield of Brawn with mustard, 
 secondly, a boyl'd Capon; Thirdly, a boyld 
 piece of beef, Fourthly, a chine of Beef rested, 
 Fifthly, a Neat's tongue rosted, Sixthly, a Pig 
 rested, Seventhly, a Chewets bak'd, Eighthly, a 
 goose rosted, Ninthly, a swan rosted, Tenthly, 
 a Turkey rosted, the Eleventh, a Haunch of 
 Venison rosted, the Twelfth, a Pasty of Veni- 
 son, the Thirteenth, a Kid with a pudding in 
 the belly, the Fourteenth, an Olive-pye, the 
 Fifteenth, a couple of Capons, the Sixteenth, a 
 Custard or Dousets. Now to these full dishes 
 may be added Sallets, Fricases, Quelque choses, 
 and devised paste, as many dishes more, which 
 make the full service no less than two-and-thirty 
 dishes, which is as much as can conveniently 
 stand on one Table, and in one mess; and 
 after this manner you may proportion both 
 your second and third course, holding fulness 
 in one half of the dishes, and shew in the other,
 
 Concerning a Gentle Adviser 191 
 
 which will be both frugall in the spender, con- 
 tentment to the guest, and much pleasure and 
 delight to the beholders." 
 
 With this insight into our ancestors' appetites 
 may we not understand more clearly the Eliza- 
 bethan spirit its breadth, optimism, radiance? 
 Markham in the kitchen has himself something 
 of the grand manner of the early dramatists. 
 At a table groaning beneath such dishes, so 
 wealthy in picturesque abundance, in essential 
 sweetness and vigour, and withal racy of the 
 soil, there must abide enthusiasm. Our own 
 literature would perhaps be robuster if we could 
 reinstate some of these old eatins; customs.
 
 NOTE 
 
 Eight of the foregoing Essays were printed in the 
 Cornhill Magazine. "Concerning Hampers" appeared 
 in the Windsor Magazine, and " Concerning Fires " 
 in the Morning Post. " Concerning Walks " and " Con- 
 cerning Animals " have been collected from the County 
 Gentleman and the Globe. 
 
 E. V. L. 
 
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