large imports to balance the liberality of his efforts. He was conscientious about his duties in Parliament. Most men, when such duties threatened interference with a day's hunting, would have sacrificed one or the otherthe pleasure with a sigh or the duty with a pang. Not so Mr Chaplin. He snatched the best of both those opposite worlds. Like his gastronomic plan of life, the method was simplicity itself:

'After a late sitting of the House of Commons, he would engage a special train from King's Cross to take him down to a particular spot in the Burton country. By his direction the train would draw up in a cutting remote from any roadside station. From the train would then emerge a young gentleman in red coat and leathers. Up the bank he clambered, where his hack and groom were waiting for him on the top; and away he galloped to the meet of his hounds.'

In those days, as Lady Londonderry reminds us, men were not afraid of hacking long distances to the meets. 'Lord Henry Bentinck, when he hunted the Burton country from Welbeck six days a week, used to ride the thirty miles out and the thirty miles home, having three hacks each way.' If Lord Henry Bentinck could do this, it was probable that Mr Chaplin would do the same or something like it. For Lord Henry was his Mentor in youth, and even in his years of mature discretion Mr Chaplin did not forget that Mentor's example and precepts.

'In all matters pertaining to sport, and indeed in most others,' says his daughter, 'the young Chaplins had a perfect counsellor and friend in their neighbour, Lord Henry Bentinck. He was at the time Master of the Burton Hunt and Mr Charles Chaplin was his principal supporter-subscribing twelve hundred pounds a year. Lord Henry taught the children everything that they had to learn about horses and hounds, and they were proud indeed when he told them that the hounds which had been "walked" by them were among his best. He was a kind of fairy godfather to them all in his own strange way; Harry in especial owed him much, and in spite of the difference in age there was a close and lasting friendship between them.'

Late in his life we find Mr Chaplin writing, 'It was from Lord Henry that I learned everything I ever knew

about horses, hounds, deer-stalking, deer forests, and sport of all kinds and a great deal about politics too.'

There was never the slightest doubt about what Mr Chaplin stood for in politics. Probably no man ever was in less doubt about his opinions and duties. His mind had none of the subtlety which suggests doubts and difficulties. He saw his aims clearly, and rode at them as straight as he would try to ride across a country. He must have been several years short of fifty when Lady Londonderry writes of him: 'The champion, as he already felt himself to be, of the agricultural interests of England, his hands were full in urging in Parliament the claims of English land on a preoccupied Government.' In a more considered and later judgment she tells us :

'As a devout follower and admirer of Disraeli, a long line of Conservative leaders came to look on him as their most constant support. In every great issue that marked the passage of the latter half of the nineteenth century and in the war agony of the second decade of the twentieth, he bore his part. Of no outstanding brilliance, he owed his power to his sincerity of purpose. His winning personality made him friends even among his political enemies, and his kindness of heart gained him affection not only from his constituents, but from a wide circle of the British public who saw in him a statesman of single aims, and a human being whom they could understand and admire. Nor should it be forgotten that he had in his own way remarkable oratorical gifts. It was not only an agricultural meeting that listened to him with attention. He had the "grand manner" in speaking, and an air of well-bred sincerity which was extraordinary to audiences who had never met quite the like before. His daughter well remembers meetings when he was received with condescension, and listened to in a spell-bound silence which ended in a thunderous ovation.'

That is very well said, and it is true. One does not need to accept it with any discount because it is written with a daughter's partiality. A cloud of independent witnesses endorse it. Most emphatically he did express the 'grand manner.' It is not a daughter, but Lord Willoughby de Broke who writes of him:

'His stature and good looks invested him with all the insignia that constitute a great personality, a personality

that, in the language of the theatre, "gets over the footlights." . . . He was one of the last, if not the last, of the fox-hunting country gentlemen who also wielded political influence, such as Lord George and Lord Henry Bentinck and the fifth Lord Spencer. His appearance is too well known to need any detailed description. It has been said that no one was half so clever as Lord Thurlow looked. May we say that no one was half such a country gentleman as Henry Chaplin looked? He possessed a strongly marked individuality, easily recognisable, familiar to the public. Every one knows him by sight.'

Mrs Peel's hundred years make a frame into which we may fit-rather loosely-this gracious and ample figure of the Squire of Blankney. Her century begins in 1820, twenty-one years before his birth: it terminates three years before his death in 1923. He fills the frame as nearly as a man's span of life well may, and his noonday is almost the centre of Mrs Peel's picture. That being so, it is curious how little her very entertaining book touches the subjects which would have interested him, who was as typical a figure of the time as could be found. The whole of the sporting life of the century, a century which saw the rise of a keen interest in many sports which were entirely disregarded at its commencement-all this is left unnoticed by Mrs Peel. Perhaps she was right to impose on herself limitations. The century had more facets than any one book could display.

6

It is an entertaining compilation. One does it no injustice so to speak of it, for it is mainly as a collection of what are conveniently called 'ana' that its author intends it. And the intention is fulfilled. In addition to the ana' of the text, there is a collection of illustrations showing the changing fashions, which in itself makes the book worth while. It is as informing as if she had gone to 'Punch,' our greatest national gallery of social changes, had taken of its best-this is not an accusation of theft or plagiarism—and transferred the figures to her book. We go from Dundreary with his whiskers and his crinolined ladies to the slender types of to-day. It is to be regretted that the opportunity was not taken to show us, on one and the same page, contrasted, a girl of the weasel-like slimness of

the figures which are ever around us now, and the bulges and circumferences of the days of hoops and bustles. It was an occasion which it is almost criminal to have missed. This is a book which will give plenty to talk about; and we must admit that to be no mean achievement when we consider that it is down the 19th century that Mrs Peel has gone mining for 80 per cent. of her ore and nuggets.

For, truth to say, it is a mine which has been so industriously delved that one might think all that could glitter must have been extracted long ago. But yet we shall talk much over Mrs Peel's book, if I mistake not, for the details which she has brought us out of that wonderful century. It is her sumptuary chapters, her discussions on what things of domestic use cost and have cost, her family budgets now and at different times in the century, that will capture us. For most of us, not being Squires of Blankney, the saying that 'we all think a great deal too much about our money' is true, doubtless; even though it carry with it a savour of heroic counsel. That most of us do think a great deal about money is true without the moral tang.

It is not exactly the century that Mrs Peel discusses. From 1820 to 1920 her hundred years run. Neither is it all her budgets that we shall study with personal zest. She begins to treat of her great theme in Chapter III-'Life in Palaces '—the inebriety of King George IV and of King William; the sobriety introduced at Court by Queen Victoria, and so on-sketches that are familiar. She continues her studies through the classes, to the cottage and the slum. To most of us, poor and passing mediocrities, neither Alpha nor Omega of the social scale, our knowledge of palaces or of cottages comes mainly by glimpses through windows or doors. We do not expect to be kings: we hope not to be slumdwellers. So we read the budgets of palaces and slums with the admiration or distress befitting the subject; yet with no rise of temperature. But when Mrs Peel conducts us from palaces to the mansions of the rich, and so on through the dwellings of the middle-class and the lower-middle; well, there, somewhere, we are at home; because to most of us has been vouchsafed the privilege now and then of entry into rich houses, while

lawful occasions may even have summoned us into those of the lower-middle.' Somewhere, moreover, in this long gamut we shall have actually touched our own place, our own income, and then it is no longer, 'I wonder how Dives gets along in that great house,' or 'how Lazarus makes those two ends meet'; it is that's ourselves-now, how can she say we ought to be able to live on that?' Inevitably there is the servant problem, which was so much a factor in the difficulties, financial and otherwise, of domestic life then, almost as now. So, if your guests or your cooks are late for dinner you may serve up all the materials for a good dish of talk, if no more, in that cold quarter of an hour, if this book is at hand upon the table and ready to be opened at the right page. Anywhere about the middle of the book will do-say Chapters VII to XIII for preference.

She tells us of a country house, only named as CHall, but evidently of a large size, where in 1860 or so, 'Household accounts show that in winter time, on an average one ton of coal per day was consumed.' With our green experience of the longest coal strike on record, this seems much. Let us come down to more modest and common measures. From The Cook's Oracle,' date 1821-22, Mrs Peel extracts a table of expenses for a family of three in the parlour, two maids and a man, allowance being made for a dinner-party once a month.' The yearly expenditure in such a household is given at 3201. Of course, no rent or rates or house repairs are in this total, nor is any allowance made for wine, without which we hardly know whether any guests would have been found to come to the monthly dinner-party. Table ale,' however—rather a washy and watery sound about this beverage, is there not ?-is put down at 251. a year. From the above total, if we deduct, as Mrs Peel notes:

'coals, washing and table ale-757.—that leaves 245l., which is practically 4l. 158. a week or roughly 168. per head for food and cleaning materials in a household "where there is plenty of good provisions, but no affectation of profusion." Such living, in 1913, might have cost 128. a head; while, in 1920, 17. a head per week might cover the cost. One must remember, however, that dinner-parties in 1822 were costly affairs, for