corner it is one that has turned many things upside down, and changed the very lines of being to whole classes of men. No such change accomplishes everything that is looked for from it; and we doubt whether the general level of intelligence has been as much elevated as it ought to have been: but we hope it is true that it has reduced the number of criminals, though that is a matter of statistics of which we cannot help feeling a deep distrust. One thing is certain that new readers have called forth a mass of literature so-called, which cannot be in any way considered an advantage either to the language or to the public. Books by millions, which have no right to be called books, and depreciate instead of elevating the intellectual taste of the multitude, have come into being. We must, as the French say, accept along with all the virtues les défauts des ses qualités. And this is certainly a great drawback to the universal reading and writing which is now characteristic of our time. But, at the same time, the opening of these gates of knowledge to all is in itself an enormous thing. To read alone is of itself to receive a new birthright, to enter a new world. Even the 'Family Herald' (we believe a most respectable publication, though too fond of the aristocracy, like most of its kind) must make an opening in the spheres, when bad weather, or bad trade, or sickness leave the toilers of humble life in languor and idleness: and there will always be some who will rise to better things. It is said that foolish boys are taught by much of this cheap literature to make a hero of a burglar and emulate him in his adventures. But we put little faith in these reports: for it is certain that the tendency of all

the books and stories for the million is moral in the highest degree, and nowhere is the villain painted so black as in a penny publication-the villain whom Sadler's Wells, and indeed Drury Lane, hiss instinctively from the first moment of his appearance : which it may be presumed is accepted by those important members of the theatrical fraternity as the highest applause.

We have already said something of the extraordinary advance of surgical Science in the Victorian age. Not Medicine: we believe that the art of curing disease is almost as empirical as ever. Its methods change from one ten years to another, so that the panaceas of yesterday are considered quite untrustworthy, if not dangerous, to-day. And we confess that there is something loathsome in the newest medicaments of all, the decoctions made from diseased animals, which are supposed to be about to revolutionise the Science. Concerning such cures we hesitate and doubt in the face of the most confident asseverations. The vaccine lymph is different. It is no hell's broth of corruption and disease. But, fortunately, it is not our business to give any opinion in such recondite matters. Surgery, however, instead of the beneficent but bloody agent it used to be, the dealer of dreadful strokes, and wounds worse than a battle, has now become, of all Sciences in the world, the kindest, the truest ministrant to the suffering. It is said that it was a sudden perception of "the gay motes that people the sunbeams which suggested to the mind of Lord Lister-or was it a dreaming predecessor?-the treatment which is called antiseptic, and means the rigorous shutting out of every possible or impossible germ from the

broken skin or open wound in which it might lodge and breed harm. If it were so, that sudden gleam of the sun was certainly a ray direct from heaven, and more to be remembered still than the singing kettle which made so great a suggestion to the brain of Watt. The sunshine had done nothing but point out this for hundreds of ages, how the air teemed with every kind of invisible life, and how expedient it was to watch lest that dust of organisation might have particles in it of harm. But till the eye comes that can see, what matter how Nature opens her secrets!

Earlier than that great discovery, and more wonderful still, was that other of Sir James Simpson, by which pain was charmed away altogether, and it was found that the most dreadful operations might be accomplished in the human body while the owner of that body lay as in a pleasant dream. Most amazing and most blessed of all the discoveries! As his nephew and successor has recently told us, in a very touching commemorative address: "Sir William Fergusson was well within the mark when he said, 'It was at least fortunate for anæsthesia that Simpson took it up.' Ere humanity could reap the benefit of the discovery, a hard battle had to be fought against ignorance, apathy, and prejudice, and James Simpson was the protagonist in the scene. He did not cease his efforts until he had seen the importance of anaesthesia fairly recognised, and such an impetus given to surgical progress as it had never before received, and such as has only been rivalled since when Listerpraised be the Queen who has raised him to the peerage!-inaugurated the Antiseptic Era." Where can we find honour enough to bestow

on those who, pondering, brooding, investigating, experimenting, brought at last those angelic arts to light? A peerage! Folly ! the recompense of men who cut other men to pieces, not of those who, with a patience almost divine, а preoccupation that swept away every other thought, laboured and combined and were silent until the great work of Charity came softly into being, touching with soothing hands every quivering nerve, making even the sharp steel blade a benediction, diction, keeping every adverse breath at arm's length. This has been done before our eyes. It is another glory, perhaps the highest, of the reign of Victoria, the victor's age, triumphant over so many demons, economist of so many sufferings, the mother age more tender of human pain than ever age has been before it, the era of our Queen.

To tell all the additions which have been made to our material greatness during this wonderful reign, the extension of our trade, the improvement of our manufactures, the vicissitudes in everything, would again require the figures which we have avoided, and such calculations as we have no desire to enter upon. The reader will find them at every hand, and may know in half an hour what is the increase in our shipping, and in our commercial transactions of all kinds, our exports and our imports, our army and our navy. There is one diminution, however, which everybody must mourn, even among those who regard the cause of it as a good thing. It is hard to allow that there is a decrease in anything that is good in this benignant reign. But it is so. The fields of golden grain that once were our pride, clothe

no longer in the luxuriance of old the slopes and hollows. We have plenty of bread, and no arbitrary want of the kind occasioned by absence of supply; but our abundance is in very small degree from the English farmer's furrows. Must there not be something wrong in that State where it is waste and loss to grow corn, and the tillers of the fields cannot live by the labour which gives bread to other men? This seems almost one of the maxims which are mathematical, with which reason cannot interfere. Whatever can be said or done, it cannot be right that we should grow less corn year after year. In the choice of evils, a transgression of those theories which have been received as economic laws would be better than such a practical misfortune. But this is one of the questions into which it is not our business

to enter.

Does the reader remember the little picture we attempted to give him of an early Victorian room, belonging say to a member of the professional classes, not rich but comfortable enough, with the two candles on the table, the one weekly newspaper, the anxious look-out for franks, the occasional journey in a stuffy coach or slow canal boat? We should like to tell him a little more about the interior of the house, through which, he will remember, persons passing from one room to another carried a candle, and little children not trusted with such aids flew breathless with beating hearts, every run from the parlour to the nursery being haunted with horror, through the dark passages. When the Queen came to the throne most of the rooms were furnished with black haircloth covering their chairs and sofas, blocks of mahogany, sideboards,

catafalques, against the walls. Moreen curtains, stiff as so many boards, hung straight over the windows. Social critics nowadays are apt to talk of Rep as the great invention of the Philistines; but if they clearly knew what they meant they would not use that word. Rep is not a lovely manufacture, yet it is capable of a fold here and there. What they would describe is the older and more awful fabric of Moreen. Who invented that extinct material we know not, any more than who invented black haircloth; but in the forties they were both in full possession of the domestic hearth. We believe the atrocious invention of "anti-macassars" (still surviving under the more human title of chair-backs) arose from a despairing attempt to soften the horror of the black haircloth sofa, which pricked the cheek of any one who ventured to repose upon it, and the so-called easy-chairs which peopled with blackness the unhappy room. Anti-macassars in their native loveliness as they appeared in the first years of the Queen-for they were, poor things, a sort of clumsy avant-coureurs, attempts at something of unskilful decoration-may still be seen in seaside lodgings, and farmhouse parlours, and other belated places, horrible webs of crochet, white, starched, and glistening, or, worse still, in coloured wool, dingy and terrible, collecting and retaining the dust of years. Young ladies executed with pride these awful works in the early days of Victoria. The catafalque in the dining-room which was called a sideboard was not the solid thing it seemed. It looked massive enough to stand a siege, but it was really all veneer and French polish, thin slips of mahogany covering a fabric made of common

wood. Sometimes there would be a relic of the elder ages, an old dining-table, slender and glistening black with the consecutive polishing of generations, as bright as a mirror and genuine all through, in the same room which contained the catafalque, to shame it; but as like as not this delight ful piece of furniture was pushed out of the way to admit a massive square table with elephantine legs, fictitious size and weight being necessary to make the art of veneering practicable. I remember a bed in those days with solemn dark-red moreen curtains drawn round it, which a wicked wit somewhat profanely called "a field to bury strangers in," seeing it was in the special guest-chamber, the "best room of the house. Such was the aspect of the dwelling in early Victorian days.

Our houses are now a little fantastic, over-decorated, too much under the dominion of Liberty and other "artistic" embellishers. The little drawing-room of a little bride who has "taste"-fatal endowment! -is often a marvellous sight with its little draperies which have no room to be graceful, its bits of strange colour in relation with nothing else, its dados, its friezes, and all the rest. The little flat which has become fashionable is often bedizened like a Parisian bon-bon box, and more like that than any thing else. But now we have beautiful stuffs of all descriptions in place of our haircloth and moreen, and if our rooms are not bright and gay, why, it is our own fault. All the monstrosities are swept away, and we could not, were we to try, find a moreen curtain for love or money. Nobody is indifferent now to the fashion of the place in which he lives. We have Indian carpets and imitations of them, silken hangings, not necessarily expensive, hanging as

an artist would choose them to hang, and furniture which, if with a proclivity towards the "quaint," is nevertheless well made, well shaped, and good to live with, almost wherever we go. If the new houses we build, especially in the country, are too palpable copies from Mr Randolph Caldecott, and our great houses too brightly, glaringly modelled on some greater Renaissance original, it is at least certain that we now fully recognise that beauty is a quality we cannot safely do without, and that Art has a right to be consulted whatever else we may do.

The happiest thing we could think of in these elder days upon which to repose our wearied limbs was a feather bed supported upon a foundation of hard straw "palliasses," such as are still to be found in oldfashioned houses. It had not yet been thought of that such a thing as hard iron made into elastic springs could make a couch more soft than the poetical bed of down. Must we, alas! confess that in the early Victorian days bath-rooms were almost non-existent, and any kind of bath an occasional luxury not to be calculated among the needs of every day? It is true, though it seems impossible. We have been reminded of what our dinnertables were by the 'Reminiscences' of Sir Algernon West. Six sidedishes on the board, that authority recalls to us, a steaming joint at top and bottom, host or hostess (or at her end of the table an unfortunate but honoured guest) working hard and hot at carvingperhaps an epergne holding sweetmeats in the centre of the table to represent ornament, not a flower visible. The recollection calls a groan from our breast-for we too well remember that dreadful state of affairs. The coming in of the diner à la Russe, and the relief and comfort of the cool and pretty

table, was, however, considered a terrible innovation, and resisted, as most improvements are. All these changes have taken place in the most familiar details of life.

Dress can scarcely have been said to be more attractive than the houses in which its owners dwelt in those days. A large square of muslin or silk folded in many folds was swathed two or three times round every man's throat, the corners of the shawl, for such it was, being tied in a straggling little knot in front; or, what was still worse, he wore a stock as stiff as iron, which was less troublesome to put on, but of a much more appalling effect. The coat was shaped like those which we all abuse as insane in their construction, the swallowtail now only known in evening dress. Insane it is, looked at in the abstract as a garment intended to cover a man's body; but there must be qualities in it, since it has borne the stress of ages and critics. But

it is the dress of women and not of men which distinguishes the generations from each other. And here let us say a word for the modes of an elder time.

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For we seem to see a kind of artless ideal in the forms of fashion in Queen Victoria's early days, which were not without their attraction, a little pathetic even, if properly considered. It was as if the happy thought of a young Queen, first to be considered in all such matters, had penetrated into the mind, if mind it can be called, of those mystic authorities who hold the female taste in fee. Fashion is not an intelligent nor highly educated spirit. It gropes its way blindly from one mode to another, and as often stumbles into as selects the variation which

tells best. There came upon it, it would seem, in face of these unforeseen circumstances, a sudden sug

gestion of modesty, simplicity, a kind of virtue in apparel which was altogether new to the imagination of the costumière. Apparently the only thing that occurred to the bewildered genius of the mantuamaker as fit for this new age was the natural dress of extreme youth, a thing altering little, whatever are the fancies of the time, but for this once adapted as the mould of form. The short full skirt, the little puff of a sleeve, the little bodice shaped to the natural waist and surrounded by the primeval girdle, became the dress of the age. I dare not ask-such mysteries are beyond me -how a large and plump matron looked in this simple attire; but the young Queen, just after her accession, looked charming in it, as may be seen in her Majesty's picture, with pretty ankles visible and carefully sandalled with narrow ribbons above the little rational shoe, where there was room for all the toes and no heel to speak of. She looks as fresh as a rose, modest, simple as becomes her age. Let us hope that in these days most ladies were young. The intention, the meaning, was indeed very creditable to fashion. The impression left on one's mind was that, for once in a way, that old and battered Divinity which has presided over so many changes was overawed and struck dumb by an ideal of Innocence heretofore unknown to her, and that she gave her whole mind to the interpretation of that novel quality. Everything followed the model of this simplicity: the smooth young hair, glossy as satin, uncrimped, unfrizzed, untortured, was braided over the brow, behind or round the shell-like ear, all natural in the dazzle of youth, owing nothing to art. When not braided it might fall in ringlets supposed also to be natural, which hung on either side and half veiled