Feudal

of it, who was intensely ignorant, but would do as he was told; he has now become a member of a Young Men's Mutual Improvement Society, and left my cucumberframes unclosed (one of those nice May evenings we had this year, with the thermometer down at any thing) in order to attend an adjourned debate on the System. He has unhappily "improved" himself to that extent, that he makes the most dashing experiments, by the help of scientific horticultural publications, at my expense and that of my favourite fruits and flowers. I have a weakness for gooseberries; he has destroyed all my excellent old favourites, Hairy Bobs and Golden Farmers, and replaced them by improved varieties of enormous size, which I honestly believe are not gooseberries at all, which never ripen, and are too big to put into one's mouth if they did. I find all the peaches except three stripped off my best tree, and those three I dare not touch, as they are in training for a prize which I am happy to say they never get. I strongly suspect my groom (a member of the same society) of giving my horses arsenic to produce that fine polish on their coats which is properly obtained by honest rubbing and whistling; and have serious thoughts of testing him by making him eat a feed of oats it could not hurt him, unless he has been medicating them; for we have taken to bruise them, in deference to Mrs Mary Wedlake's repeated pathetic inquiries.

I have no children myself, but I can sincerely pity my friends who have. I don't mean because they have children-that may be all very well; but that they should be-persuaded to pack them into perambulators and baby-jumpers, in order to enable the nurse-maids to do their crochet undisturbed. To see an unhappy infant-or a couple of them-wriggling their heads about in one of the former machines, instead of being properly carried, or

set down to do a little wholesome toddling, would have been a sight for Herod. Need parents wonder at pale faces, and undeveloped muscles? We call it barbarous in the Indian mothers to pack their piccaninnies like mummies, and carry them about as if they were bags of old clothes; or in the women of Australia, who throw a child over their shoulder hanging by one leg; yet after all, for a lively specimen, the latter position is at least favourable for the kicking and sprawling which is the delight of all children, black or white.

I have already observed that the opinions of one's childhood, on certain points of social observance, undergo considerable modification. Although there is every reason to believe that fingers were made before forks, still it must be allowed that in most cases forks have proved a cleanly and convenient substitute for fingers. But modern ingenuity has not been content with giving nature merely this legitimate assistance. Having done something to make the road to the mouth easy, we have next proceeded in our wisdom to raise artificial difficulties; just as it was the fashion, a century ago, for gentlemen of taste to level all the natural inequalities in their pleasure - grounds and parks, and then proceed to throw up composition rock-work and construct formal slopes. A knife had been a very handy thing to cut butter with; it was resolved to improve upon it. An instrument was invented, in shape between a scoop and a small scimitar, whose peculiar properties are to take up a portion of butter, wildly uncertain in its dimensions, and generally ridiculously disproportioned to your requirements, and to retain it pertinaciously, owing to its peculiar form, against every attempt to deposit it upon the plate. The secret of doing this last successfully is to take a real knife, and to scrape the butter out again with this; but this is a process in which it is desirable to escape the eye of the lady who presides over the establishment,

the crucible and turn up five hundred years hence, what discussions it will furnish for the archæologists who shall then be sitting! There is a third inconvenience still patronised by the dining public, or rather by their butlers and silversmiths, known and hated by all lovers of asparagus. It is called an asparagus-tongs. It takes up a very uncertain number of the heads-depending a good deal upon your luck-say it takes up nine, which is a very fair haul. It drops three out on one side and three on the other-into the dish, if you are tolerably expert-on the carpet or on the lady's dress who sits next to you, if you are nervous and a bungler; and if you are very sharp, you get the remaining three on to your plate, and feel that it is scarcely worth while to trouble the man who follows with the melted butter. It is, in fact, an abominable implement, adapted for the suppression of asparagus altogether, and I always long to get hold of it, and treat it as the Oxford undergraduates of my day used to treat a freshman's sugar-tongs, then considered too lady-like a luxury-twist it into any shape that will disqualify it from appearing as a tongs thereafter. Dr Krapf, in his travels, tells us of an African chief to whom he made a present of a silver fork, and who immediately stuck it in his woolly head, and wore it there as a compliment to the doctor during the whole of his visit. I wish I could get some enterprising traveller to go the round of my friends' tables with me, taking one of this black aristocracy with him as a lion, and giving him a private hint that such an appropriation of the asparagus-tongs would be felt by the company present as a very delicate attention.

who is apt to have a prejudice against scratching her silver. Of course common sense would use the common knife to begin with; but the beautiful theory connected with the invention is that the steel disagrees with the butter; the fact that they get into much more intimate relations afterwards, when the butter is spread upon the toast by the ordinary implement, being conveniently ignored. Common-sense did indeed attempt a compromise, by introducing a silver butter-knife of plain shape; but society in general has stuck to its misshapen favourite. Another similar invention of the enemy, still to be found in orthodox establishments where innovations upon the old stock of family plate are sternly forborne, either from conservatism or convenience, is a weapon called a fish-slice, on the lucus a non lucendo principle. Its shape is much like that of the butter-knife, only on a larger scale, and it has eccentric perforations of various patterns, whether for use or for ornament seems uncertain. Its real use, indeed, has never been discovered. If it was a secret ever known, it has long perished like the learning of the Egyptians. To watch an unfortunate host manoeuvring with it in the vain attempt to slice-say a crisp fried sole, for instance, in the days when soles came to table au naturel-was a very painful contemplation, especially if the guest were hungry. The desperation with which the knife was seized at last as the only master-key of such difficulties, and the other curious implement degraded into a mere shovel, and a very poor shift even for that, put one forcibly in mind of the Irishman who found the snuffers (quite a new invention to him) "mighty convanient" as a place of deposit for the snuff when he had performed the old operation upon the candle with his fingers. But even fashion could not stand the fish-slice for ever; the flat knife and small Neptune's trident which have succeeded it do their duty better. If a specimen of the previous invention should escape

Of all the mortifications which our patient age inflicts upon itself, none is more remarkable than the eagerness with which it adopts all inventions for spoiling its coffee. Good coffee is so easily made-that is, by any cook who will take the pains to learn the method and keep

to it afterwards-that every effort has been made by human ingenuity to complicate the process so as to avoid the proper result. Coffee, fit for the Sultan, may be made either by plain boiling, or the old "percolator." A good article, plenty of it, and a careful hand, are the secrets. But go into any hardware shop, and you may see a counter covered with specimens of the most extraordinary machinery with classical names, all on different principles, and all professing to be the only true coffee-makers, and all-as you will find, if you are seduced into buying one-miserable failures. A fluent young gentleman is probably in attendance, who goes off at once into a lecture on chemistry and mechanics, and is prepared to give you every information and instruction as to their management; he will do everything but make you a sample cup of coffee-he knows better than that. I once bought, in my bachelor days, when I was not so well acquainted with the wicked ways of men (or of women either, for that matter), a patent article that to look at was a wonder in itself. It was the elaborate nature of the machinery that tempted me. It had, I remember, a small windlass, an airpump, and tubes and pipes and screws innumerable. Make coffee! of course it could, I thought to myself; it looked as if it could make anything. I forget its name now'; it was Pan-something. My own impression at this moment is that it could have made almost anything -except coffee. I am not much of a mechanician; but I have no doubt that very slight adaptations would have fitted it to serve as a very respectable electrifying machine, or a portable printing-press, or anything of that kind. I have a strong suspicion now that it was the work of some inventive genius, who had originally intended it for some other operation, and finding it a failure, had added it to the list of patent coffee-machines; feeling a justifiable confidence that, do what it would in that line, it could hardly do worse than some of

its rivals. The machine was bought and sent home; and in the pride of my new possession I invited a friend to breakfast. The coffee was to be made on the spot by the gentleman or lady requiring it; that is always the special advantage held out to tempt the purchasers of these new inventions; to make your own coffee seems supposed to be the ultimate end of human actions. Just as if a new broom were patented, the speciality of which consisted in the great fact that it would enable you to sweep out your own apartment. Well, my friend came, and found me in my dressing-gown, working away at my new apparatus, and really hard work it was, winding up the windlass which I mentioned, against a considerable power of suction produced by the air in some way below. It was very wholesome morning exercise, however, and calculated to increase the performer's enjoyment of the excellent beverage which was to follow. Twice I failed altogether; and once there was a sudden eruption which scalded my hand considerably; but I am quite willing to confess that this was rather my own fault than that of the machine; for although I thought I had pretty well mastered the theory of the science from the instructions of the fluent young gentleman who sold it, I found that I had reversed some of the processes in order of time, and thereby of course deranged the whole plan of operations. At last, with the printed instructions before me, I brought matters to a successful termination, and had the pleasure of presenting my friend with a breakfast-cup full of a very dark and viscous fluid, and retaining about half the quantity for myselfcoffee of my own making, and such as I trust never, to drink again. There was good cream and sugar; and my friend, who was a few years younger than myself, and rather a well-behaved person, with a vigorous morning appetite, was good enough to drink it without open remonstrance. My own share having been small, and highly unsatisfactory in

every respect, I proceeded to a second brew, hoping to retrieve the character of my breakfast equipage; when my guest, who was evidently imposed upon, like myself, by the elaborate" get up" of the thing, requested to be allowed to operate. He was rather given to athletics, and he worked at the windlass so energetically that the strap, which was like a small saddle-girth, gave way after a turn or two, and the whole contents of the infernal machine were divided between my friend and the tablecloth. It was my first and last attempt at fancy coffeemaking.

It was even earlier in my novitiate that I was the victim of another diabolical invention. There are a good many people in these days who have come to the conclusion that scraping one's chin with a razor every morning is a very unnecessary loss of time and temper, and who would class the whole ceremony of shaving amongst the barbarisms of civilisation. This great question, like that of dress, I am content to leave untouched. But, as if the penalty of shaving were not in itself a sufficient daily mortification, there was actually an inventor, a few years ago (he has come to a bad end long since, no doubt, and therefore I forgive him), who proposed to give you a stone for a razor. He called it an axurite. It required no soap, no hot water, no strop, no apparatus of any kind; it was to do its work like a mowing-machine, smoothly and unfailingly, to be invaluable to tourists, and to keep its edge in all climates. It was a miserable weakness, no doubt, on my part; but, vexed by a succession of east winds and bad razors, I bought a patent axurite, and as they say of other patent remedies a single application was sufficient. It was a scarifier-nothing more or less. It took off small patches of the outer skin (and of course what beard was on them), and certainly put an end to all other shaving for a week. I don't approve, as I said before, of the old practice of burning all great discoverers; but I

should have liked to have put those two benefactors of the human race under treatment together for a month, and have had them both shaved every morning with the axurite, and then given them a dose of the machine-made coffee.

I am quite aware that it may be very fairly said, that if a man is green enough to be induced, by any representations of seller or advertiser, to make his coffee with a windlass and shave himself with a stone, the only verdict he can expect from an intelligent jury is, "served him right;" but look at another invention, under the tyranny of which we all groan more or less, but which very few have the strength of mind to resist. Has not the curse of steel pens swept over the land, until decent handwriting is almost unknown? Do not ninety-nine persons in a hundred use steel pens, and has more than one out of the ninety-nine the effrontery to say he can write with them? Lord Palmerston was quite right-the handwriting of this generation is abominable; and as new improvements in steel pens go on, that of the next will be worse. The fine Roman hand of the last century has died out; the steel can't do it. There is neither grace nor legibility in the angular scrawl that prevails now. Open any parish register of fifty years back, and see in

what a fine legible hand, and scholar-like, too, in most cases, the parson of that day made his entries. Our present young parson, though he took a first class at Oxford, and wears a most correct waistcoat, doesn't do it, and couldn't do it, if his benefit of clergy depended on it. Even the overseers' account in the parish books, which you may find in the same iron chest, will show writing of a similar character. It was more difficult, perhaps, in those days to find an overseer who could write at all; but those who could write, wrote far better. The first downward step in the fall of pens was the introduction of a machine, now happily extinct, called

a pen-maker. Of course, it did not make pens; but you could convert the thing it did make into a tolerable pen by the ancient process afterwards, with a very little extra trouble, so that it was rather a success for a patent invention. Even writing-masters, from laziness, adopt the miserable substitute that comes to them ready-made in boxes; and the consequence is, that the art of quill-pen making-and quite an art it is-is dying out; and the old village schoolmaster, who could mend you a bundle of real pens in half-an-hour into such perfect instruments that it was a positive pleasure to write your name with them, has long been superseded by a certificated coxcomb, who impresses upon his scholars that pen is derived from penna, a feather, which is a highly interesting illustration of the little dirty implement they are holding in their hands; according to a modern system of instruction which goes on what is called the rational plan, and which, as the last Educational Report tells us, is fast driving reading and writing out of the field.

In those dark ages, when people wrote with good pens, they had also good ink and good paper. It is the hardest matter in the world to get either now. Old ink used to be made with galls-at least we remember that great authority, Pinnock's Catechism, taught so. What they make it of now is quite impossible to say; but it is a totally different and inferior article. Whether the little insects have taken to make their gall-nuts (for there were millions of them on the young oaks last season) by some patent machine, which, of course, would account at once for deterioration in quality, or whether the human ink-makers have hit upon some valuable substitute," certain it is that the search for good ink is as hopeless as the pursuit of the philosopher's stone. So it is with paper, though in a less degree; they tell you that the reason is that good rags are scarce in the market; our linen has all become calico, and the substitute of which good paper

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is to be made, and which would be a real public blessing, is just what our modern inventors fail to find. For the curious fact is, not that in these cases you are tempted by a cheap article, and naturally find it bad, but that the good article appears to be driven out of the market altogether, and the old quality is not to be had even if you are willing to pay the old price.

It must not be rashly concluded, because I fell such an easy victim to some of these delusive contrivances, that in my maturer years I am still dragged along unresistingly with the march of invention. I am proud to say, for instance, that I still possess for my own use and that of my friends, a corkscrew-I mean a real corkscrew, that can draw corks; not one of those complicated engines with cog-wheels and levers, which merely pretend to draw corks, like the raven in Bar- naby Rudge. But I have seen an instrument the last patent invention on a friend's sideboard, which was most ingeniously contrived to render the drawing of a cork impossible. It would break it, twist it, take out a quarter of it and leave the rest in, or vice versa -or come out itself altogether and leave the cork behind, according to the way in which you arranged it; but draw the cork fairly was what it would not do. The patentee declared that it could be used with facility by "ladies and children." What should ladies and children want to draw corks for? They could use it, no doubt, and with much the same effect as anybody else; in point of fact, my friend's children always did use it whenever they could get at it, thinking, very naturally, that it had been brought home for their special amusement, and were playing at drawing corks all day, which I consider was a very demoralising recreation. But what, in the name of the great Fiddlefaddle, does a man want with a system of wheels and levers for so simple, not to say delightful,_an operation as drawing a cork? Did

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