genius very speedily became the leading spirit of the first French Revolution. The well-known case of M. Jourdain, Molière's 'bourgeois gentilhomme,' is one scarcely in point. He was undeniably a gentleman; but he was never himself in trade, nor, according to his own showing, had his papa ever been actually a woollen-draper. The paternal Jourdain, his son pointed out, was an excellent judge of cloth; so he had bales of cloth brought to his house from all parts, and gave those bales away among his friends-for money.

'Now, because,' proceeds the gentleman-woollen-draper's wife's friend, Mrs. Wolley, I would have every one complete who have a desire to serve in great and noble houses, I shall here show them what their office requires; and, first for the kitchen: because without that we shall look lean and grow faint quickly.' This as a beginning is, in its candid naïveté, delicious. The cook, according to Mistress Hannah, should, whether man or woman, be thoroughly skilled in fish and flesh, and good at pastry business, in knowing all kinds of sauces and meat jellies; and they should be, moreover, very frugal of their lord or their lady's purse. They must be cleanly and careful, obliging to all persons, kind to those under them, quiet in their office, not swearing or cursing; and they ought also to have a good fancy; for without one, adds Mistress Hannah briskly, neither man nor woman deserves the title of cook. Two hundred and four years have elapsed since good Mrs. Wolley unlocked her Queen-like Closet, and civilisation and education have of course done wonders for our cuisine; but will any lady or gentleman be good enough to recommend me such a cook as the deft hand of a Wolley has painted-a cook who does not curse and swear, who has a good fancy, and who will accept a salary of some thirty pounds a year, and all found? But, alas, where is fancy bred? Not in the hearts or the heads of modern cooks, I am afraid. To 'the maid under such a cook' the wise Wolley speaks gravely and somewhat sharply. She is told that she must be of a quick and nimble apprehension. She is warned not to dress herself, especially her head, in the kitchen, for that is abominable sluttish' (surely Swift must have read this passage; and do you remember Thackeray's passive allusion to the man-cook who was so fond of his master's guests that he sent them up a lock of his hair every day in the soup ?). The kitchen-maid is farther reminded that she must not have a sharp tongue, but must be humble, pleasing, and willing to learn; for ill words may provoke blows from a cook, their heads being always full of the contrivances of their business, which may cause them to be peevish and froward, if provoked to it. Yes; I think that if I were a cook with a good fancy, and I found that the sauces were going wrong, or that the meat in the stewpan declined to get tender, that I should be occasionally tempted to give the scullion a rap over the mazzard with a ladle or a rolling-pin; and I

am certain that I should kick the shins of the boy who cleaned the knives. I kick where I dare,' remarked the lieutenant of the line who had been caned by William III. at a review, and who, without taking the slightest notice of the assault on the part of royalty, turned round and began kicking the nearest grenadier his boot could reach. Most of us kick where we dare; did we not do so there would not be so many contented wives and loving children. But Hannah Wolley has much more to say to the kitchen-maid. She is bidden to keep her larder and the kitchen-floor clean scoured, and not to sit up junketing and giggling with the fellows when they should be in bed.' This is an awful warning; but to the kitchen-maids of the present day it would have little if any significance. They never sit up giggling and junketing when they should be in bed.' They know nothing of the fellows,' bless you; for the few visitors' connected with the Household Brigade or the Metropolitan Police whom they may openly or surreptitiously re ceive at sweet eventide are of a far higher rank than fellows.' Next does the perspicuous Hannah pass to the butler; and that functionary does she recommend to be gentile and neat in his habit,' and not suffering his master's wine or strong drinks to be devoured by ill companions, nor the small-beer to be drawn out in waste, nor pieces of good bread to lie in mould. The butler is to keep his plate clean and bright, and to be sure to have all kinds of sauce ready, which is for him to bring forth, that it may not be fetched when it is called for-as oil, vinegar, sugar, salt, mustard, oranges, and lemons. He must lay his napkins in different fashions; have ready his water-glasses on the sideboard, and be careful to set the salts on the table, and to lay a knife, spoon, and fork at every plate. The bread is to be chipped before he brings it in, and he is to have his cistern (his wine-cooler) ready to set his drink in, that none of it be spilt about the room. He is to wash up the glasses after the guests have drunk, and he is not to fill the glasses too full. 'Such a one,' ends Hannah triumphantly, may well call himself a butler.' I have heard of a recently-deceased Lord Mayor who saved nearly seven hundred pounds in his wine account during his year of office by inflexibly drilling his butler to fill the glasses at the Mansion-house banquets exactly to a certain height, but no higher. Altogether, with the exception of the hint as to washing up the glasses, which points to a paucity of crystal in the reign of the Merry Monarch, and which may remind the student of Pickwick of the domestic arrangements at Mr. Bob Sawyer's supper-party, the instructions delivered by Hannah might be profitably marked, learned, and inwardly digested by a nobleman's butler in the year 1874. From the butler Mrs. Wolley turns parenthetically to the carver, and observes benignly that if any gentleman who attends the table be employed or commanded to cut up any fowl or pig, it

is requisite that he have a clean napkin on his arm, and a knife and fork for his use; and that he should take the dish from the table until he has made it handsome and ready for his superiors to eat from it. The gentleman who carves is not to touch the meat with his hands so far as he can avoid it; but if he inadvertently does so, he is not to lick his fingers, but to wipe them on his cloth or napkin. He must be very gentile and gallant in his habit to be fit to attend such persons-meaning the nobility and gentry. Allusion is here made to a very curious custom of our ancestors, and one of which, unless I am mistaken (but I have not the book at hand), no mention is made by Macaulay in his celebrated chapter on manners in the time of Charles II. He tells us all about the chaplain who was allowed to fill himself with corned beef and carrots at my lord's table, but who was expected to withdraw when the pudding made its appearance.

The warrant for this assertion is to be found in Echard's Contempt of the Clergy, and Echard-a virulent and prejudiced writer is not always to be believed. I never placed much credence in the pudding story, although it has been with exquisite tact adopted by Thackeray in Esmond. I doubt its veracity, however, first, because in many of the old cookery - books (Hannah Wolley's, for instance, among the number) puddings, in the bills of fare for dinner in great houses, often make their appearance in the first course; and again, because it was the chaplain's duty to say grace both before and after dinner. How could he express his thanks for what he had received when he had had no pudding? However, there is the chaplain, very graphic and humorous in Macaulay, but I fail to discern the gentleman-carver, who is employed or commanded by my lord to cut up fowls and pigs, who is enjoined not to lick his fingers, and who is advised to assume a gentile and even gallant habit. Who was the gentleman-carver? A lack-penny younger brother? a distant connection who had spent his substance in riot, and was glad to have the run of his teeth and a roof over his head, with a few broad-pieces now and then, with the obligation of standing every noon and evening with a napkin on his arm at his noble kinsman's sideboard, cutting up pigs and geese in a handsome and symmetrical manner? Was he allowed to marry her ladyship's waiting-woman? No; according to the historian it was the chaplain who was usually permitted to contract such an honourable alliance. I think I can see the gentleman-carver-a swaggering, roistering Michael Lambourne kind of gentleman, parcel sober and passing honest; a great hand at bowls and tennis; an adept perhaps at fencing, quarter-staff, and the manége of the 'great horse;' a constant attendant of his noble patron in all exercises of hunting, coursing, and hawking; and not averse from time to time to a little giggling and junketing with the maids in the kitchen

after my lord and my lady had retired to rest. I can only express my hope that the gentleman-carver-we have a pale reflex of him in the yeomen-carvers of royal households-had nothing in common with Captain Saltabadil or Commander Sparaferule; that he was not my lord's bravo; and that he did not occasionally vary his gentile and gallant employments of cutting up pigs and fowls at the sideboard by stabbing or pistolling people against whom my lord may have had a grudge. But there certainly were such gentile and gallant servitors of the nobility and gentry in the seventeenth century. In any case, the character of the gentleman-carver is worthy of study. Mistress Hannah Wolley takes us back, all unwittingly on her part, to the Canterbury Tales, and we see the Knight's son in Chaucer: 'Curteis he was, lowly and sensiable,

And carf before his fader at the table.'

Hannah, having disposed of her cooks and carvers, grows somewhat discursive. She tells the men-servants and the maid-servants generally that they must keep an eye on the guests, not forcing them still to want because they are silent;' that they must not dare to lean on the back of the chairs for fear of soiling them'-but should not the servants themselves be clean ?-that they must not hold the plates before them and breathe thereupon; that when any dish is taken from the table they must not lay it down for dogs to eat, nor pick and fumble it themselves in any way, but carry it straight away to the kitchen, and deliver it to the cook. And when all is taken away and thanks given (this rather militates against the theory of the chaplain going away on the appearance of the pudding) they must help the butler out with the things that belong to him, 'that he may not lose his dinner.' For you may be sure that Mr. Butler, and perhaps Mr. Gentleman-Carver, were by no means unready, when my lord and my lady were withdrawn, to repair to the buttery and make a clean sweep of what titbits remained of the banquet before they became the portion of the footmen, the scullions, and the dogs. As for the cook, he had doubtless taken good care of himself while his superiors were dining.

Hannah's concluding admonition is of a benevolent nature. If a poor body comes to ask an alms,' she says, 'the door is not to be shut against them rudely; but the servants should be modest and civil to them, and see if they can procure something for the poor bodies; and then,' she adds, with cheerful wisdom, 'you may think of yourselves, that now, although you are full fed, and well clothed, and free from care, yet you know not what may be your condition another day.'

I have called these New Directions for Servants,' when in literal strictness they are very old ones. But might they not be advantageously reprinted in extenso for the edification of the domestics of the present day?

TRIFLES LIGHT AS AIR

'More subtle web Arachne cannot spin;
Nor the fine nets, which oft we woven see

Of scorched dew, do not in the air more lightly flee.'

THE Zoology of poets appears always to have been a science very far from exact;' and I fear that Spenser's very remarkable theory above suggested of the manufacture of the gossamer, although certainly highly ingenious, is hardly above the level of poetical speculations generally upon such subjects.

Yet the extreme beauty and lightness of these fairy webs were certain to catch the poet's eye, and the Prince of Poets has woven them into that lovely passage put into Friar Laurence's mouth as he sees Juliet approaching his cell, and which seems to contain some presage of her tragical fate:

'O, so light a foot

Will ne'er wear out the everlasting flint!
A lover may bestride the gossamers

That idle wanton in the summer air

And yet not fall; so light is vanity.'

Shakespeare, you see, wisely avoids all attempts to explain the nature of the webs, and uses them here, as he does once in King Lear, as a synonym for the very quintessence of lightness.

But poets were not the only people to whom these webs were a puzzle. A grave lexicographer, so lately as the year 1740, declares them to be thin cobweb-like exhalations, which fly abroad in hot sunny weather, and are supposed to cause the rot in sheep'! The sheep-farmers of that date, it seems, were not very much in advance of the poets of the preceding century, although they had abundant opportunities of practical observation as field-zoologists, and, moreover, had their faculties sharpened, one would suppose, by the financial aspect of the question, if it were believed to cause the disease which robbed them of the golden fleece. It will be seen that the gossamers still retained so much of the poetry of their birth as to remain exhalations,' although they were attended with such unpoetical consequences, and although they had advanced scientifically so far as to have become 'cobweb-like,' which is certainly a step in the right direction.

In 1741, however, Gilbert White of Selborne, who combined the experience of a careful observer with natural acuteness and considerable education, was led by an extraordinary shower of them to