the House of Commons to Buckingham Palace, in the wake of the Speaker, during the Jubilee festivities, two years ago. Setting aside the inborn gracefulness of the Spaniards and Italians, most continental nations are accustomed, from their childhood, to take part in organised movements with precision and a certain amount of ceremonial; who has not noticed with what delightful dignity little children of all ranks take part in the processions on feastdays and other solemnities of the Church in Belgium or France? Norway and Sweden and most northern countries retain something of the manners of a former time, and, when she visits our shores, the little courtesy with which a Swedish young lady will leave the room, leaves a kind of ray of sunshine behind it across our stolid immovability.

'The decline of good manners is the fault of the women,' is the often-repeated accusation, and it may be that their intrusion into so many domains which were formerly reserved to men, their abandonment or relaxation of many of the rules of bienséance which formerly prevailed, may have had a large share of responsibility in the changed order of things. But the causes alleged have been as multifarious as the results, and their enumeration would be as tedious as, in many instances, the remedies would be unobtainable, ranging as they do from the numerical superiority of the gentle sex and the changes in the marriage laws, down to the newest caprice of fashion on the part of the women, and the greater indolence of habit in the men, bred by the very excess of the modern appliances for the promotion of ease, and the saving of exertion and trouble.

It is said that there is a reaction against the excessive sansgêne of manners that was the rule three or four years ago; that the lament of the ball-giving hostess has at last got a hearing, and that there is a return to the civilities of former days in the matter of answering invitations and paying duty-calls. Perhaps, in time, it will cease to be considered within the limits of tolerated manners for gilded youths to arrive at supper-time, where the cuisine is known to be good, and to leave the house again without taking the trouble to go upstairs and make their bow to their hostess.

If, turning aside from the question of manners, we take the most cursory survey of the refinements of life nowadays, as compared with the beginning of the century, the improvement is so great as to be hardly credible; and the puzzling paradox strikes us anew, why the manners of society should not only not have

shared in the general progress, but have even retrograded-unless it be conceded that gain and loss must always go together, and that every step in advance must be compensated for in some way or another. Our adaptability is so great, we accustom ourselves so readily to an improved condition of life, in spite of all its incidental drawbacks, that we find it hard to realise with what strides the customs and habits of our race have advanced along the path of progress, or how different were the lives of our fathers, and still more of our grandfathers, in these respects.

What we gain in utility we almost always lose in beauty and in picturesqueness; but with regard to all the refinements of habit conveyed in the words cleanliness, sanitation, and facility of locomotion, the small shopkeeper, the mechanic, the very peasant of to-day is better off than were princes and noblemen seventy or eighty years ago. That little bathroom of poor Queen Marie Antoinette at the Trianon must have been almost as much an object of curiosity, for its singularity in her day, as it is now for its associations; and certain it is that in all those vast piles of buildings at Versailles, with all their gorgeous magnificence, bathrooms were an unknown quantity.

According to some authorities, Louis XIV. never washed-a little cold-cream applied with a cambric handkerchief serving instead. This-let us hope-was a calumny, but in St.-Simon's minute and detailed account of the monarch's day, from the handing-in of his periwig through the closed bed-curtains in the morning, until several dukes and marquises had handed the royal night-chemise to each other, the highest in rank placing it on the royal shoulders; and his chaplain, kneeling at a prie-dieu at the foot of the bed, had said his night-prayers for him, no mention is made of any ablutions, except that he was shaved every other day.

Madame de Carette, in her Souvenirs, gives a curious account of the state of the Tuileries under the Second Empire; the splendour of the state apartments in strange contrast with the discomfort and darkness of the interior of the palace; narrow windowless corridors and staircases, with no ventilation and lighted with lamps both night and day; the consequent heat and oppressiveness becoming quite painful with the first return of spring, and making the whole household sigh for the signal of departure for St. Cloud or Fontainebleau.

Quite recently, writing in Collections and Recollections' on the amelioration of the conditions of life during the past half

century, Mr. Russell quoted the report of Sir Robert Rawlinson, the sanitary expert, on the state of Windsor Castle after the Prince Consort's death. He told of drains of the worst description; of no less than forty-eight cesspools beneath the basement; of windows, even in the Royal apartments, of which only the lower casements could be opened; of 'vitiated air, comparatively stagnant.' If this was the condition of things in the two chief palaces of the world less than forty years ago, the mind is left free to conjecture how common mortals were contented to live.

Perhaps nothing has had a larger share in modifying the habits of the people than the development since the beginning of the century of the methods of travel. Who, having once read, can ever forget the graphic description De Quincey gives in his 'Memoirs' of the state of the highroads of England in the days of his youth, before the advent of MacAdam? Never before or since were ruts so eloquently described-except, perhaps, by sprightly Fanny Burney, in her 'Diary' of 1778: The roads were so sidelum and jumblum, as Miss L. called those of Teignmouth, that I expected an overturn every minute. Safely, however, we reached the Sussex Hotel at Tunbridge Wells.' Compare, too, Tom Brown's' first journey to Rugby, in the days when coaching was at its best, with the same journey as accomplished by our schoolboys of to-day. There must have been an exhilaration, a sense of healthy effort and of a fait accompli, at that journey's end, which are perforce absent now. A charming old lady sometimes recounts how she and her sister once went from Woolwich to Manchester to spend the Christmas holidays. The coach was delayed three weeks in London by the snow, and then there were but eight passengers. The journey took four days, the coach toiling between two banks of snow heaped high in crisp and dazzling whiteness on either side of the road, and the whole country seemed transfigured. What a welcome the two young sisters received at their journey's end, and how the holidays, so hardly won, were enjoyed, the accents with which the story was told, after sixty years had passed, were enough to prove.

In sharp contrast with this disposition of mind were the humours of the young lady of to-day who hesitated to spend Easter in Rome until it was made certain that she could have a wagon-toilette to herself for the whole journey. When I first went to Rome,' exclaimed a woman thirty years her senior, if I

had been told I must walk, I think I should have made the attempt.' It is possible that, in obedience to some law of compensation, the very excess of well-being carries its own counterpoise with it-that good too easily and instantly attained loses half its savour-and that

'Tis expectation makes the blessing dear.

In few of our social customs has there been a greater change -in some senses an improvement-during this half-century than in the relation between master and servant: a change expressed by the almost universal substitution of the word 'employer' for that of 'master'; and it is the rare exception to hear master or mistress spoken of otherwise than as 'Mr.' or 'Mrs. —. The maid servants are not advancing so rapidly in this social equalisation as the men servants; but the day is perhaps not far distant when they will desire to be known, as in America, by the title of 'living-out girl.' In some of our great northern manufacturing towns the entire female population of the working class seems by a tacit consent to have pronounced a vow of non serviam, so far as domestic service is concerned. That ancient and honourable profession, possessing its own dignity and prerogatives ever since the days when a little Jewish handmaiden stood before Naaman's wife and spoke wise words of counsel productive of the greatest good to all whom they concerned, is now despised by every little girl who has passed the sixth standard' and has to begin to earn her bread. This action on the part of the women has the disadvantage to themselves of depriving them of the more refined habits which a few years of domestic service leave behind them, and which make it easy to distinguish the ex-servant among working-men's wives; while it may, if ever the supply which still flows in from the country districts to fill up the void they have created receives a check, produce some curious changes in the social economy of those towns.

Legislation, and the developments of habits, have tended to make the servant of to-day a kind of human machine-silent, impassible, and, so far as his employer is concerned, an automaton, articulated to perform certain acts at certain times and in certain ways, with as much regularity as it is possible to obtain. There is not even the Bon jour, monsieur,' or the ' Guten Tag' spoken of a morning to establish a little link of humanity between them, and the question is, if this state of things is altogether a gain?

What was the servant of a hundred years ago is graphically told us by J. de Norvins in his 'Mémorial,' a book which contains a fund of interesting detail as to the life in French châteaux before the Revolution. He says that the valets de chambre still much resembled those of Molière, Dancourt, and Marivaux; that they looked upon themselves as part of the family, and were on a footing of familiarity which occasionally included traits of great impertinence on the one side, corrected by the administration of a caning on the other, without the mutual good understanding being disturbed. 'On les châtiait et on les gardait.' They were intelligent, devoted, and impudent, and were expected to be good hairdressers and barbers, to be able to read, write, and carry the post. At the Château de Brienne, where de Norvins, nephew to Comte Loménie de Brienne, was a familiar guest, there were five of these valets, who were all, moreover, good shots, good billiard-players, and excellent amateur actors! The Comte de Brienne himself was admirable in the Bourru Bienfaisant and in the Misanthrope, and his old valet took Préville's parts with great distinction, and was a capital Michaut in the Partie de Chasse to his master's Henri IV. The distinctions of class were then so marked, that no one thought of there being any derogation in such familiar intercourse.

Of one of these valets, by name Duval, who remained faithful to the family through the Revolution, and died at the age of eighty in the service of a collateral relation, an amusing anecdote was told by his first master, the Marquis de Loménie. Arriving late one evening at a party, the Marquis was astonished to see in the crowd a gentleman wearing a superb court dress, identical with one his tailor had brought home that morning, and which he intended to wear at the Queen's next card-party. Even the sword and shoulder-knots, the diamond knee and shoe buckles, were faithful duplicates of his own, and what added to his curiosity was the fact that the individual's back was always turned to him as they made their way through the rooms. At last he was able to touch the man on the arm, and discovered his own valet, Duval, who uttered a careless Ah, bon soir, marquis !' and then in his ear: Do not betray me, Monsieur le Marquis; I will go away-but, all the same, I was going to marry the daughter of the house!' 'Rascal!' was his master's answer. It turned out that he had assumed the title of Marquis Du Val, of Champagne, and he had caught the young lady's fancy and