we still endure the oppressive, though unwritten, law which constitutes the chimneypot hat to be the only decorous head-dress for well to-do male humanity? Woe! woe! æsthetic woe to the sons of men who, having cast aside one after another the Phrygian cap, the furred birrus, the slashed bonnet, the knightly beaver, the three cocked hat, and the feathered glengarry, have resolved that whosoever will enter good society must bind his brows with the gloomy cylinder of Lincoln & Bennett! None has a word to say in its favor; every one hates it and condemns it. In travelling, the hideous object has to be provided with a special case; yet for more than three generations it has been held indispensable. There is a cynical levity in the ribbon which still encircles its rigid circumference, recalling the happy days when a hat-band was a reality, used to adjust the flexible covering to the head. Odious as it is admitted to be, perhaps the most serious objection to it, from the point of view of taste, is the hindrance it presents to any tendency in our other garments to become more picturesque. Every visible article of outfit has to be brought to the aesthetic level of the headpiece. A chimney-pot hat crowning a tasteful costume reduces it to ridicule.

Only the other day I received an agreeable morning visit from a French prior, dressed in the black and white garb of a canon-regular of the Order of St. Benedict. It was pleasant to rest the eyes on a dress that has altered little or not at all since the days of the Crusades; and as he sat before my study fire sipping a glass of sherry, I felt as if I ought to apologize for not having the recipe for burnt sack or hippocras. Marry! my shooting suit of modern" mixture" seemed all too vulgar beside his classical raiment. But when he rose to go what disillusion awaited me, on finding that he had left in the hall an unmitigated chimney-pot hat, crowned with which his figure, as he retreated down the avenue, lost all its medieval grace.

If there is one point on which an Englishman preens himself, it is his personal cleanliness. In this respect he is prone to draw Pharisaic comparisons between the habits of his own and those of other nations. Yet our ablutions are much less elaborate than those of the ancients. The

If

tub has taken the place of the bath. it were possible for cne of the Romans who garrisoned Britain in the third or fourth century to revisit it in the nineteenth, he would, of course, be amazed at the wealth and size of our cities, but he would not fail to be puzzled by the insignificance of the public baths therein, or even by their complete absence. Nor would the bathing arrangements in private houses strike him any more favorably. Imagine him paying a visit in a large country-house: how perplexed he would be to make use, unaided, of the tin saucer containing three or four inches of tepid water, the sole substitute for the luxurious balnearia of many chambers, which formed part of a Roman villa of any pretension. A sponge, a towel-horse, a lump of soap -the meagre accessories of the British tub he would feel to be a barbarous exchange for what he had known of yore. Marble tanks through which flowed limpid streams heated to different temperatures. and often perfumed; silent-footed attendants to conduct the bather from one chamber to another; then the delightful lounge in the tepidarium, where his body was anointed and his hair dressed by light-fingered unctores and alipta (most charming fellows, who played on the muscles and joints, bringing them all into tune-body-tuners, in fact); lastly, in the public baths, the pleasant loitering with those of his acquaintance in the porch and vestibules, for such accustomed pleasures he might long and look

in vain.

As an institution the bath has passed completely away, though the Turkish hammam in Jermyn Street has its devotees. The people are clamoring now for free education; the citizens of Rome were kept in good humor by free baths. It is difficult to realize that, in a state of society where the limits of class were at least as sharply defined as in our own, the Patricians, even the Emperors themselves, resorted to the same baths as the lowest of the people. Among those who had leisure, it was no unusual thing to bathe six or seven times a day. The Emperor Commodus set the example of taking his meals on a floating table. Bathing, indeed, was only part of the attractions of the public baths; they were great social centres, where all the latest, freshest news was to be picked up. Here the latcst

lion might be seen, Juvenal's last satire laughed over, or the newest novel of Marius Maximus discussed. Here a brilliant young general, fresh from a successful campaign in Africa, might be sure of a degree of attention more flattering, because more discriminating, than the public ovation that was arranged for him in the streets on the morrow; or another, appointed to a command in distant, cloudwrapt Caledonia, would receive condolence from his friends of both sexes on his approaching exile.

Of both sexes-for although in most establishments there were separate bathing-places for men and women, there was undoubtedly a great deal of promiscuous bathing. Anyhow, the galleries and palmfringed courts afforded delightful resorts for conversation and flirtation, ideal shrines for that divinity whom a French writer of the school of "Gyp" lately referred to as "le petit dieu dont les yeux sont cachés et les fesses sont à découvert."

For good or for ill we have separated ablution from social intercourse; if we want the latter, we must take our chance in a form of entertainment utterly unknown in classical times, squeeze up crowded staircases at midnight, elbow and jostle our way through an elbowing and jostling mob, and try to feel that being in society" atones for all this discomfort and condones the mockery of it. One looking at the two systems impartially might be tempted to the conclusion that, on the whole, we have not advanced in the science of pleasure; that a stroll in bath-costume (made as graceful or coquettish as you will) through marble halls "that echo to the tinkling rills," and leisurely conversation in the twilight of oleanders, is better fun than wrestling, broadcloth-clad, with a multitude gabbling at the top of their voices in a Cubitt-built house. One feels how delightful it would be just to arrange one London season on old Roman lines, to return to the old nataral hours, instead of, as we do,

To make the sun a bauble without use

Save for the fruits his heavenly beams pro

duce;

vive, we have reason to be grateful that things are not worse than they are. Mesmerizers and thought-readers established themselves among us some time ago, hypnotists are the latest vogue; but at least the law no longer allows that any woman who happens to be old, ugly, and cleverer than her neighbors may be called on to prove that she is not a witch under pain of being burned alive. It makes us shudder to read of the atrocities perpetrated by witch-finders and witch-prickers among a fine race such as the 7ulus, and we blush as we remember that not many generations have passed since similar ignorant cruelty was permitted in this country. Not many years ago I knew an old woman who had the reputation of being a witch, prided herself, and traded on it. Undoubtedly but for the protection of the law she would have received hurt from those who believed themselves injured in person or property by her spells. One Sunday I happened to pass her house, which was on a lonely part of the road, and stepped in to ask for a light for my cigar. She was sitting reading beside the fire and rose civilly to give me what I wanted, laying her spectacles across the open book. "After all," I thought, "she is not as bad as her reputation, or she would not be reading the Bible," and I looked to see what part of the Scripture sbe had been studying. Imagine my amusement and surprise to find that it was not a Bible at all, but a copy of Lord Chesterfield's Letters to his Son"! Now this old dame would infallibly have gone to the stake in the days of Queen Anne.

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There are jealous husbands among us still; law and custom unite to give them due protection, and public opinion has prevailed to suppress the frightful cruelty of the precautions which, in primitive society, is sanctioned to ensure the fidelity of wives to their lords. It is said, for instance, that among certain hill-tribes in India, it is the custom for a husband to cut off his wife's nose as soon as the honeymoon is over, so that her beauty may not attract inconvenient admiration. associated with the marriage ceremony as Among that people the custom is as closely that of the wedding-ring is among ourselves.

Talking of marriage and its accompanying observances, it is high time to protest

against a silly exotic practice which has been allowed to fix itself in our country -namely, rice-throwing at weddings. Old shoes, if you will, though some people might be glad if these unlovely missiles were prohibited at what ought to be a picturesque and is a somewhat affecting moment; but if anything must be thrown, let it be old shoes, according to native tradition. Rice has no sanction in the annals of Christian weddings: it is a pitiful sight to see a bride and bridegroom screening their eyes to avoid the stinging grains; nor always successfully-for one instance, at least, remains in the memory, of a bridegroom who was laid up for weeks from the effects of a grain of rice in the eye.

Obviously, this is not a custom indigenous to Britain, though in the country of its origin it boasts a respectable antiquity, dating from about the year 1500 B. C., when a certain sorcerer, named Chao, was plotting against the life of a rival sorcerer,

a

young lady named Peachblossom. Peachblossom being betrothed to Chao's son, Chao fixed for the wedding a day when the Golden Pheasant, a most truculent bird, was in the ascendant (whatever that may mean). He knew that at the moment the bride should enter the palanquin the spirit-bird would cleave her pretty head with his powerful beak. But the art of Peach blossom was a match for that of Chao. Foreseeing everything, "when the wedding morning came she gave directions to have rice thrown out at the door, which the spirit-bird seeing, made haste to devour, and while his attention was thus occupied, Peachblossom stepped into the bridal chair and passed on her way unharmed. And now the ingenuous reader knows why he throws rice after the bride."

So says a writer in the "Chinese Times,'' but venerable as the story is in the Flowery Land, there is not the faint est excuse for commemorating Chao and Peachblossom in Christian espousals. Perhaps of equal antiquity, but of far deeper pathos and significance, is the custom which once prevailed in certain parts of Scotland of including in the bride's trousseau a set of grave clothes. Of such a provision much might be made by the sombre genius of Pierre Loti, the author of that heart-rending romance, "Pêcheur d'Islande.' 99

Having once opened the door to foreign customs in connection with our marriage ceremony, it is hard to say where the line should be drawn. There is a bewildering abundance and variety to choose from. One that prevails, or used to prevail (for it is said the missionaries have succeeded in making it unfashionable), in the New Hebrides would find unbounded favor with the disciples of Mrs. Mona Caird. It is neither more nor less than the elevation of elopement into a national institution. In that land a girl used to have no choice in the matter of a husband; that was left in the hands of her parents or the chief of the tribe, who generally gave her to a bridegroom much older than herself. What followed is described by Rev. Dr. Inglis in his "Bible Illustrations from the New Hebrides''

"As a general rule she lived quietly with him, through fear, for five or six years, till she reached the full vigor of womanhood, when she showed that she had a will and power of her own. She then began to cast her eyes on some vigorous young man of her own age, of that class who could more than hold his own with her husband... they then eloped; a quarrel and sometimes a war ensued, if peace was not secured by a large present being given to the injured husband and his friends. After a year or two, longer or shorter, as the case might be, the woman would quarrel with her new husband, or he with her, and she would leave him and become the wife of a third husband. This was not an exceptional case; it was the normal state of society. When we came to know the people, we found in the district where we lived, that among the thirty or forty families nearest to us, there was scarcely a who had reached middle life to whom it might not have been said, as our Saviour said to the woman of Samaria, Thou hast had five husbands, and he whom thou now hast is not thy husband.' I knew one or two women who had had as many as ten husbands."

woman

But our would-be emancipators of women must understand that before they can hope to establish this utopian state of things the male population must considerably outnumber the female, so that ladies shall be at a premium. In Aneityum, it seems, there used to be only sixty-five women to a hundred men, a result arrived at by a national custom less romantic than universal elopement, namely, the strangulation of every wife on the death of her husband, and the slaughter of female infants. It seems, fortunately, as if these restless architects of new-fangled hearths have been born centuries too late to in

duce the world to try their experiment. Christianity, chivalry, and civilization have prevailed to alter man's instinctive inquiry, "Where is a woman?" to "What is a woman!" to change his prayer from Bring me a woman," to Explain to me a woman.

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Customs connected with so primary a want as food might be supposed to be enduring, and so they are in some respects, but in others they are constantly changing. To let alone the hours of meal-times (the writer has already ventured some observations on these in the pages of Maga" *), the mode of serving dinner has been revolutionized within the memory of most of us. "To put your legs under a friend's mahogany" is still a well-understood figure of speech, but, for all you know, in sitting down to dinner with him you may be putting them under plain deal. The phrase tells of a time before dîner à la russe had made the tablecloth a fixture, by removing the joints and other dishes to the side-table, and replacing them by barrow-loads of fruit, flowers, and sweetmeats, a revolution almost as complete as took place when the Gothic conquerors of Italy set the fashion of sitting at table instead of reclining in the Roman manner. One country-house, and one only, I have still the privilege of visiting, where the carving is still done on the table; and after dinner, every movable having been lifted, the butler withdraws the cloth, and, with pardonable pride, reveals an expanse of mahogany-deeply, darkly, beautifully brown, with a surface like ice to the eye, and satin to the touch. It is probably its rarity that makes one appreciate this feature in the entertainment; but certainly, as the decanters slide noiselessly round in their silver trays, the claret seeins to borrow a more silky seduction, the old sherry a more voluptuous glow, than they possess on dinner-tables à la mode. One thing is certain, that be is a sagacious host, who, instead of following sheep-like in the ruck of every-day entertainers, has the courage to retain some distinct feature like this. It is sure to dwell pleasantly in the minds of his guests, for it reminds them of times long gone by, which always seen brighter and dearer than the present. As M. Taine re

marks in his "Histoire de la Littérature Anglaise," "Je veux bien croire qu'alors les choses n'étaient point plus belles qu'aujourd'hui; mais je suis sûr que les homines les trouvaient plus belles."

There prevails in our dinner parties a sad want of sense of the eternal fitness of things. The cookery is consummate, but there is far too much of it, except for an epicure; and if you want to play the epicure, then the party should be small, aud intent on the same purpose. The Romans of the decadence brought the art of dining to the highest perfection. Their parties never exceeded nine in number: professed gourmets, they devoted themselves during dinner to the pleasures of the table; afterward, when the body had been cared for, came the time for the exchange of such intellectual refreshment as might be had. This was rational. If one is to be sensual let it be set about in a business-like way. Under the present system we confound two things; we spend lavishly on the material part of the feast, and we set it as if it were possible to do it justice and amuse our neighbors at the same time. The moment when your spirit leaps to the knowledge that, in spite of the eleven chances to one against it in a leg of mutton, the gods have so ordered that upon your plate shall rest the succulent disk known as the "Pope's eye'— that moment, I say, is not one in which you find it agreeable to enter upon the merits of the Deceased Wife's Sister Bill with the county member's wife beside you. You feel that you must either swallow the delicate morsel with as little ceremony as if it were a piece of ordinary muscular tissue, or concentrate all your faculties on its deglutition. Nor, on the other hand, if by some harsh arbitrament of Fate you have been served with the wing of a woodcock, while an uninstructed creature in tulle and moiré ribbons picks hesitatingly at the juicy thigh of the same bird, and allows all the savory wealth of the trail to be carried untasted away, can you be expected to respond satisfactorily to the artless inquiry-"If you are fond of lawn-tennis?"

No. Business is business. The Romans acted wisely in so arranging as to attend to one thing at a time. By all means have large dinner-parties; but, by the shade of Lucullus! let there be more elasticity about them.