each of the two or three courses consisted of a vast number of dishes.'

Probably most readers will be surprised to see that the cost of living in 1820 was a third as much again as in 1913. The rise since the war will not be a surprise at all. The last item of the list in The Cook's Oracle' is pleasant: 'Sundries and Forgets.' 50l. out of the 3201. total is allowed for these. 'Forgets is good.

.

Mrs Peel might have been a little more exactly enlightening about her dates, now and again; but apparently it is of about the middle of the 19th century that she writes:

'For the younger army officers in the less expensive regiments an income of 400l. a year all told was considered sufficient for a young couple to begin upon, while many curates and their families subsisted upon 150l. or 2001. a year. Incomes of between 400l. and 8007. a year were considered comfortable means for country clergy and Civil Servants. . . . In 1875, Mrs Humphry Ward, then a young married woman with two babies, was living at Oxford. It was possible, she says, "to keep as many little nursery maids as one required on 800l. or 900l. a year, which was about the income that she and her husband jointly earned."

...

'From a collection of household budgets, it seems that in 1890 a Colonel, commanding his regiment, with wife and three children under seven, found it none too easy to manage on an income varying between 1400l. and 1500l. a year, this being "because we are always moving about, which adds to our expenses. If we could settle down in the country on 1300l. I could manage most comfortably."

'A mother of two daughters living in good society in London considered that in 1913 "young people could begin on 8007. with hope of some increase of income: now (1920) I hope neither of my children will marry on less than 1000%., and it will be hard enough to do on that, even though nowadays no one hampers themselves with large families."

There is much more in this kind, more budgets, various estimates; but enough has been cited to show that much is given us to discuss, to disagree with, to get excited about, and over which to break up domestic peace. And what more should we ask of a book than that?

Other chapters tell of changes that we well knowVol. 248.-No. 491.

B

as from a slow-going to a quickly moving time, from a time when people had no book-learning at all to our present state of educational imperfection, from a time when no man was permitted to smoke tobacco in the house to the smoking by both sexes and all sizes anywhere and everywhere. An excellent change is noted in greater humanity shown to the lower animals, although Mrs Peel is constrained to tell us of an auntnot her own but a correspondent's, and again the date is left a little sketchy, but may be nearly conjectured from the surroundings-who, when of a morning, she gave out to the cook the groceries from the store:

'wore an apron, goloshes, and a silk handkerchief tied over her cap. She was then a small fragile woman of about fiftyseven, with white hair, brilliant blue eyes, and single eye-glass, and the spirit of a Napoleon. The little dear was devoted to animals, but owned with shame that she had a naughty love for a cock-fight. She wore white lace caps, generally adorned by a blue ribbon bow, and in the morning a little black silk, lace-frilled apron; all middle-aged women wore caps then.'

A fascinating little figure; but at a cock-fight! Mrs Peel casts an illuminating and an entertaining searchlight now and then on the life below stairs-not so freeand-easy as you might ignorantly imagine; but, on the contrary, fast bound by etiquette. There was 'a servant problem' then-even at Mrs Peel's earliest then-as now. The servants have much changed. But human nature is unchanged, so our forefathers groaned and grumbled much as we groan and grumble. From the point of view which we, highly educated by the modern servant, have so painfully attained, we may think that they had mighty little to grumble about. Some of the old family servants were of a devotion which we do not now find. The type is as extinct as the Dodo, or the English squire. We may permit ourselves a doubt, however, whether the Squire of Blankney could ever have had anything but loving service, even as we can have no possible doubt that all of his household found themselves treated with a kindness and liberality beyond their merits. Mr Chaplin was, however, as much an exception as were widows in the opinion of Mr Weller, senior.

It is almost comforting that Mrs Jane Carlyle found the British workman much that we have fondly believed

only a prolonged course of Trade Unionism has brought him to. 'I have often said,' she writes,' that I couldn't be at the trouble to hate any one; but now decidedly I hate our Mr — The Mr, thus left blank, was apparently by profession, though not by performance, a paperer and painter. His conduct has been perfectly shameful; not a promise kept, and not even an apology for breaking them. I have ceased to write to him, to send any messages to him. I merely pray God to "very particularly damn him." Whether any special providence did visit the victim of the invocation and the split infinitive we are not told; but the whole sentiment of the passage breathes the spirit which we had ignorantly thought was only to be provoked by the modern plumber. Perhaps, however, it took less than the modern plumber to provoke Mrs Jane Carlyle.

Mrs Peel quotes Thackeray's advice to the gentleman in Hobson's Choice,' who is thinking of engaging a manservant. The advice, to put it in a word, is 'Don't.' Parlour-maids are better. I like them, I own,' says Mr Hobson. 'I like to be waited on by a neat-handed Phyllis of a parlour-maid, in a nice-fitting gown and a pink ribbon on to her cap.' Phyllises, neat-handed and otherwise, had come much into vogue before the Great War, and were ubiquitous during its course; but until towards the end of the last century it is not to be denied that gentlefolk hardly thought it was 'gentlemanly '—the word had not quite gone out then-to have the front door opened by a woman servant. Probably the strict belowstairs etiquette had its uses, as well as the ceremony above stairs from which it was reflected. Questions of procedure have to be answered by rule; otherwise they will only be answered by unruliness.

'Visiting servants,' Mrs Peel tells us, 'were given the precedence of their employers, in some cases being addressed by their employer's names.' Yes, we know that; but consider the nicety of the following case under that dispensation. One of two gentlemen who shared the services of a valet-but can it have been a fully self-respecting gentleman's gentleman who allowed himself to be thus divided?

' relates that " Henry came to me yesterday and said, 'If you

please, Sir, I should like to know whose servant I am.' 'Well, Henry, you were engaged to look after both of us, weren't you?' 'Yes, Sir. No trouble about that, Sir. But you see, Sir, if I'm his lordship's servant I sit next to the housekeeper, and if I'm your servant I sit next the Hon. Miss maid-which I should prefer, Sir.'"

's

His frankness surely deserved the reward of the Hon. Miss's maid for his next. Mrs Peel tells us of an old lady, well-known in the North of England, who gnawed . her chicken-bones-that is, took them in her fingers and bit the meat off them-and said that as children we were allowed to gnaw our chicken-bones because, according to our nurse, Queen Victoria did it.' This legend ran in many a house. But we do not know what the etiquette about chicken-bones was, or even what it is, below stairs.

As between upper servants and lower the distance was marked then as it is marked still; and the right commanding officer of a lower servant was not the master who paid him but his immediate upper. Mr Hamley in • Wives and Daughters' as cited by Mrs Peel, had broken this iron rule and had, himself, spoken winged words to a foorman. On which the justly offended butler observed, •Anger's a good thing for Thomas' (the footman). ‘He needs a deal of it. But it should have come from the right quarter-and that is me myself, Mr Osborne. I know my place, and I know my duties as well as any badler that lives. And it's my duty to scold Thomas, and not master's' No doubt Thomas got some of that anger which was such good medicine for him from the bailer also: but that could not take the edge of the master's offending

What is the rule governing a host's rights to see that the water brought to a grasst's bedroom is properly warm? Is it permitted to the host to test it with his own ingerng is his try to be scrupulous'r led to the servant whe is the wider carrier! Lord Fiber has a story to the point, of a math to King Fäward at Sandringham when Leri Saleshile was a fellow guest 2

-The Ing was there some he means without Queen L'ezsmès, sai Lori Baleike and mys were the only guests The King vis veer Sind of Sažesika sai ruginy *3#**# most imigrāču nach

in the garden near dinner-time. The King came up and said it was time to dress, and he went up in the lift, leaving Redesdale in the garden. Redesdale had a letter to write and rushed up to his bedroom to write it behind a screen there was between him and the door; the door opened, and in came the King, thinking he had left Redesdale in the garden, and went to the wash-hand-stand and felt the water to see if it was hot, and went out again. Perhaps his water had been cold, but anyhow he came to see if his guest's was all right.'

Is not that a pleasant picture of King Edward as host? It will lose nothing of effect if we end up with another, as pendant to it, of the same Royal and very human personage as guest-this time from Lady Londonderry's book:

'On one occasion, when King Edward, as Prince of Wales, was visiting Blankney, Mr Chaplin's small son, Eric, was in his room while he was dressing for dinner. On the dressingtable stood a bowl of Indian corn from which he was in the habit of feeding the pigeons from his window. After his father had gone down to dinner, the small boy had a brilliant idea of spreading a layer of corn between the lower sheet and the blanket on the father's bed. When the exhausted host of a large house-party retired at a late hour, sleep was found to be impossible from a pricking discomfort beneath him.

'Investigation followed, and it was not until a housemaid had been roused and the bed re-made that the long-suffering parent obtained his rest. When the children came down according to custom the next morning while the guests were at breakfast, the story was told with some humour by the victim. The Prince, delighted by a practical joke very much after his own heart, gave the boy a sovereign, with the promise of another should it be repeated!'

We are left wondering what happened to Master Eric Chaplin, besides getting the sovereign. Another speculation of some interest is what would have happened to King Edward if he, as a small boy, had played a like prank on his own august father.

HORACE G. HUTCHINSON.