what they want, will buy no more than they want, and will take care that what they buy is fitted and finished in the precise manner which suits them best. The consequence is, France.as a country has a kind of finish which England wants. Each machine in England is exactly adapted to make what it is meant for; but what is made is often coarse and clumsy. A different thing would do what was desired better or more neatly. The process of production is exquisite, but the tools are better than the effect.

like the place is very bad. This universal admission by many nations, of whom not one loves the French and who all think very much of their own taste and themselves, is in such matters almost conclusive. The kind of ornamentation universally received among the most cultivated, nations may indeed have defects; each age will have its own errors; still, that universal taste will be better than cotemporary partial tastes; it will presumably be finer, better adjusted, and more discriminating.

The great lines of human industry are In houses it may be said that the French three-food, clothes, and houses; and in are not so good as the English, and in one each of these the French get precisely what sense- the sense of smell-and in their they want better than we do, and - what is steady intention not to admit into their much the same-know with more delicate houses any bad or unwholesome smell, the precision what they do want and what they English are certainly superior not only to do not. As to cookery European taste the French but every continental nation. agrees. Probably each nation, whether And the French cannot show any such numGerman, or English, or Spanish, has some ber of finished country houses as the Engnational dishes which it deems delicious, but which no one else much likes. But every nation thinks - "Except these beautiful dishes of our own country, French is by far the best." As in the story it was said that every Athenian would say first that he was himself the most fit to govern Athens, but that if he was himself rejected then that Aristides was the most fit; just so every nation thinks French cookery the best where hereditary and inbred prejudice does pot disturb. The statesman who was named on every ticket as second was in reality best, and so what each national taste sets down as next in each case to their own is in reality in all cases superior to their own. And in every European nation too the highest class has abandoned its national taste and become in these matters French. The most exquisite diners of all nations say that the French are the most exquisite din

lish. But this is not so much because they do not understand the finish of such things, or at least might not with practice and experience be brought to understand it, as because what we mean by a country life is all but impossible in France. Here and there a Tocqueville or a Guizot may live in thought and among books, but neither of these things take Englishmen to the country. An English squire lives on his estate because he believes he is of use, and because he likes to feel that he is of consequence. But neither, the pleasure of utility nor the pleasure of self-importance would be possible to him in France. He would not be a justice of the peace; he would not be supreme in local matters; he would not fine a shopkeeper for keeping false weights, or send a labourer to jail for stealing wood. All these duties are performed in France by the administration-by the maire, and the prefet and the sous-prefet. For many years, long even In clothing, the second great object of before the first revolution, the resident production, it is admitted too that the French owner of land in France has had less rule in are supreme in all the ornamental part of it. his district, has had less to give there, and The greater part of the dress of mankind is has been able to hurt there less than the determined, like the shape of an English- most subaltern employé of the central Govman's hat, by some harsh hereditary custom. ernment. Nor does he obtain the least soPeople wear what they had rather not be- cial observance. A little freeholder with cause they have always worn it and because his own land is in all countries a proud man, others wear it. Dress is not regarded as a little disposed to worship any one, kind of art or as a source of enjoyment. France is a country of such freeholders. But in all civilised communities the dress of The little strips that make it look like patchwomen is so regarded, and Paris gives its work all belong to different people; each law to the female dress of the whole civilised" rood of land maintains its man," and world. The fashion comes from thence and there maintains one sure to be occupied with changes there. According to the likeness himself, and very little likely to admit that or unlikeness of the costume to that of Paris any other people are really his betters." a place takes its rank; if the costume is Some years ago we heard a distinguished very like the place is very good; if very un-French nobleman say he was told at his own

ers.

and

eted and admired. Being made for a nation of nice consumers, though not much intrinsically, they make themselves desired on account of their niceness.

table by a poor curé, who did not mean to be rude, and who said in all simplicity, "Ah, Monsieur, this is a civilised country; no one can do anything in it, neither the count nor the proletaire; all is the Govern- There is in truth a certain pause upon enment." This ineradicable feeling of per-joyment, and a certain careful consideration sonal equality would prevent any sort of of it in France, which in England there is deference to a grand seigneur, and would not. Why it is to be found there and why make the life of an English squire impossi- it is absent with us it requires a long ble. He could do no one any good, and no dissertation to explain, even if then it one would pay him homage. And as for could be set forth completely. One obvious the secondary pleasure of rearing and kill-cause has been indicated by Mr. Mill, who ing small animals and little birds, this is speaks of "the indifference to enjoyment that even more impossible where land is so di- characterises all countries over which the vided. shade of Puritanism" has passed. There is a sort of tradition that pleasure is corrupting, and therefore, though we are not indifferent to pleasure, though probably we are now as fond of it as other nations, yet still we hurry over it and are half ashamed of it. We are in this respect worse than our Puritanic ancestors. There was a certain nobleness in the contempt for pleasure, and in the disregard of it, so far as they were sincere and real; but there is no nobleness-there is only stupidity - in taking as much pleasure as we can, and yet taking it coarsely and quickly. But the principal cause of the difference-as of most differences between the two countries — is that the population of England increases very fast, and that the population of France scarcely by comparison increases at all. In consequence there is a struggle and hurry and strain in England, and a leisure and comfort and, so to say, relaxation in France. We have to provide for a greater number annually, so that at least the new ones shall not be worse off than the old, and so that the average of comfort be not diminished. The French have only to provide for about the same number, and as they are very industrious, comfort is on the increase. The French have time and leisure and, so to say, mind to enjoy, which the English have not; all their interest is invested in production.

The country houses of England are impossible therefore in France, because the country life of England is impossible. But the town houses are probably far better adapted to the life of persons of moderate means and (the sense of smell excepted) are far nicer places to live in than an English town house. In the first place, no man need be overhoused. An Englishman is forced to have a whole house, but no Frenchman dreams of it; he takes a set of apartments or a flat. It is true he does not enjoy the kind of personal importance which an Englishman feels in standing on an undivided doorstep, but this he does not value, and probably in strict rationality, it is not worth much. Nothing can be quieter or more a man's own than a nice French apartment. And in this manner a Frenchman only has just the rooms he wants, and gets them where he wants them. A French city rises in the air, and each story contains several families. In consequence people live near together, and near common sources of enjoyment and interest and instruction. But London spreads literally into distant suburbs, where friends are scattered, where acquaintances are forgotten, where there are no local pleasures and no local instruction, and which are miles from the central foci. In Paris there is still a common life and mind, but London is become an accumulation of divided dwellings, where this generation is only occupied in supporting and rearing the next.

But it is not in houses, or even in food or clothes, that France is so superior to England as in the articles de Paris, the endless incidentals and et ceteras of ornamentation and civilisation, which can hardly be said to satisfy a previously-felt want, but create a desire for themselves by a choiceness in workmanship and a perfection in indescribable detail. It is in these demand-producingarticles that France most shows her niceness of perception, because they would not be bought if they did not make themselves cov

But whatever may be the cause of the French nicety of consumption, no one can watch its effects without perceiving that it is in our existing civilisation a benefit of the first importance. The good consumer, it may be broadly said, rewards the good labourer, and the bad consumer rewards the bad. Those who buy ill-made things and coarse things increase the demand for slovenly labour and for coarse labourers. The workman who takes pains with his work is discouraged if he finds that he is not superior, possibly that he is not equal, to the careless workman who only does what he must because he must, who shuffles over

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from the sentimental point of view, a holy emigrate, blow out his brains, perhaps; but business, a bond which is not only gravely in his inner soul he knows that this is all a to regulate this life, but in all likelihood to mere pretence; that his heart is not as a exercise an influence over the life to come, raging furnace, but tepid as mildest shavingthe incongruity, the indecency-nay, the water; that his pulse would not hear her very sacrilege of admitting into the spirit- and beat had he lain for a century dead ual pact more than one partner, is sufficient-- indeed, it does not even quicken now ly obvious. It savours of psychical poly- when she enters the room. He sees her gamy. "I take Beatrice," says Benedick, faults none clearer; and he intends to as the one participant in my weal or woe; correct them one day. There is nothing in I take her for time and for eternity." But his love like the wild adoring passion of the in a year or two Beatrice dies, and then schoolboy; that comes but once in life, and Benedick chooses Laura as the one partici- the love which is bold enough to propose pant for time and eternity; and if he sur- and callous enough to treat of settlements vives Laura there is nothing to prevent him is a mere earthly imitation of it. adding a third and fourth to the firm. Now How much baser, then, a second marat each new betrothment the sanctity of the riage, which means a fiftieth love! If into. business falls a peg. Nobody enters upon the first there entered some element of caua second marriage with the same reverence, tion, or more ignoble shrewdness, the secor earnestness, or ardour with which he ond is wholly compounded of these, and of a contracted the first. He is older and colder; selfishness which is the parent of them. familiarity with the estate has bred indif- The motives which lead a bachelor to proference; the being at his side is not a trem-pose are mostly single-hearted enough; he bling pure little soul whom all his strong really loves the girl, and will do all he can chivalrous nature rushes forth to protect, to make her happy. But the widower enbut a nice sort of person who is going to ters the race with the intention that she shall look after his servants and see that his lin- make him happy. He is the first party to en is kept in good order. Even with the be considered, not she. And there are few first wife romance ended by settling down single girls, and certainly no widows, coninto a Darby-and-Joan jog-trot sort of exist- templating an alliance with a once-married ence; with the second one there is not even man, who do not fully understand this. the romance to begin with. For few men When a woman accepts a widower she must so few as to be out of count-make a love-feel the second-hand nature of the bargain. match twice in their lives. The first marriage is contracted in the ardour of youth; the second is mostly a calculation. Either the widower is weary of solitude, and has been habituated to the household order over which a mistress presides; or he sees the chance of a wealthy alliance; or he has property, but no heir, and must needs have one; or he wants somebody to look after his little comforts. There are a hundred mercenary pleas for a second marriage to one plea of affection. True love -we mean now, true love in its flaming bachelor state, not the Darby-and-Joan jogtrot seldom survives in a man after thirty. The truest, faithfullest, hottest, and most blissfully uncomfortable love of all is calf-love, which seldom lasts after seventeen. All subsequent passions are a mere imitation of this—not half so absorbing, not a third so blind, not a tenth so pure. The calf outlives his calfdom, gets the better of spooniness, laughs at it, and a few years later tries to produce it over again. But he never succeeds. The taurine passion is a mere stageplay. He may persuade himself that he is desperately in love with the dear girl, that she is an angel, that if she jilted him he would do something desperate-go mad,

There is no freshness about it; all the bloom has been rubbed off; the sighs are rechauffés, the vows are platitudes, the caresses have been rehearsed before. What a worn-out pump the human heart is, so far as lovemaking is concerned, after ten or fifteen years of married life! Is there anything more bathetic than forty wooing thirty-three, and counterfeiting the langours of twenty? Or anything more cynical than the sight of a bright-eyed maiden who imagines she holds in thrall that vieux moustache of a heart which has survived the wear and tear of a matrimonial campaign? But as a rule she does not imagine anything of the kind; she accepts the situation at its true value, knowing that the widowed affections are so much Wardour-street lumber; knowing that another woman has been before her and extracted all the pith and marrow of romance, leaving the husk to the second wife. She bargains therefore for a position, and not a passion, marries him for his money, or his title, or his status, or because she may not have another offer, or for any other motive that may be dominant, love being the last and least. Will she do a true wife's duty by him; will she be a second mother to his children; will she "order all things duly,"

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like Lady Burleigh the First? Let the flavour, which is somehow needed to fill up poor little neglected hearts that have sobbed the hiatus in the otherwise incomplete flathemselves to sleep on their pillows make vour of boiled mutton and turnips. Take reply. As the second mamma is to the first, these three elements together, boiled mutso is the second wife; it may be a cruel edi- ton, turnips, caper sauce, and we get tion, sometimes a careless one, sometimes what Professor Tiefdenken calls a true an indifferently honest one, always an in- gastronomic unit of phenomenon," the ferior one. For you will find the rule hold complementary flavours coalescing into one good that there is but one true-love in life perfect totality of flavour. Or, as the and one married-love; the first holds pre- Professor illustrates the matter still more cedence, the after ones weaken in arithmet- learnedly in a note, the true subsidiary dishical progression. When widows and wid-es, sauces, condiments, jellies, &c., may be owers pair, the sight has always the savour supposed to occupy precisely the same reof a huckster's bargain. On ne revient pas lation in respect to the missing flavours of á ses premiers amours. the dishes to which they are associated, which gaseous spectra, filling up with light the place of Fraunhofer's dark lines in the spectroscope of any solid substance, would occupy in relation to the spectroscopic analysis of that substance. In almost all human dishes, reasons the Professor, there is, until the highest art steps in, some lamentable hiatus of flavour, some human imperfection which only the true scientific analysis discovers. The art of cookery in its highest

64

From The Spectator.

THE CONTINENTAL USE OF VEGETABLES. THE metaphysician strives in vain to define a unit of phenomenon." The human consciousness will grasp nothing that is really simple; and if you include what is complex, you have not one phenomenon, but many. The same difficulty besets the deep-walks consists in detecting these hiatuses, er study of the art of cookery. We have these gaps in the harmonious totality of once before referred to the profound work of taste, and supplying them by true creative Professor Tiefdenken, of Giessen, entitled feeling. Thus he holds that the man who Versuch zu einer allgemeinen Theorie der Ver- first supplied the missing flavour in roast gleichenden Kochkunst ("Tentatives to- lamb by the great conception of a sweetened wards a Universal Theory of Comparative mint sauce, took as great a step towards Cookery"). One of that elaborate and care- the true scientific theory of the art of cookful thinker's chief difficulties consists in the ing as our great inductive philosopher did attempt to attain a unit of phenomenon towards the true theory of optics, when he with relation to the impression made upon discovered the theory of the prismatic colthe palate. What, he asks, is the true defini- ours. The true difficulty, however, of our tion of a "subsidiary," or, as he somewhere modern investigation is, as Tiefdenken justly illustrates it, planetary dish,—i. e., a dish points out, in investigating the border-land not entitled to occupy the whole attention of between the self-subsisting, self-containing, the eater, but the true end and intention of and the merely auxiliary and subsidiary which is simply to contribute a new element dishes. There are dishes, no doubt, which, of variety or contrast to some other central though imperfect when eaten alone, are aland, so to say, centripetal dish? ("Wie sol- so redundant in flavour when eaten as aclen wir die wahre Begriffsbestimmung einer cessories to most other dishes, — and it is untergeordneten oder, wie Ich mich aus- in dealing with these that the great diverdrucken darf, planetarischen Speise, fest-gencies of national tradition and education setzen, d. h. einer Speise die die Aufmerk- chiefly show themselves. For example, samkeit des Essenden nie ausschliesslich take the large class of dishes which the besetzen darf, sondern deren das wahre Ziel English treat as mere auxiliaries to animal hierin besteht, einen neuen Bestandtheil, food, cauliflower, kidney beans, vegetasey er Verschiedenheit, sey er Entgegenset- ble marrows, potatoes, peas, and a variety zung, in Bezug auf irgend eine andere cen- of others. In dealing with such dishes, trale Speise beizutragen?") And, no doubt, the German thinker maintains that the the question is a very profound and diffi- darkest unsolved problems of cookery come cult one. A truly subsidiary dish is, as it up for solution. On the one hand, few of were, a mere complementary colour, which them have positive flavour enough to be is needed to coalesce with other more strik- complete in themselves,-to possess "Selbsing elements of colour, so as to produce an tändigkeit,". so as to be proper subeffect of harmony in the totality. No one jects for separate consumption. would think of eating caper sauce alone. other hand, very few of them seem, in or Caper sauce is nothing but a subordinate dinary combinations, to be without redun

On the