three of which nations torches, and rushes
dipped in fat, were the only methods of lighting
known, until the Roman conquest. The Picts
and Scots, the Danes, and the tribes of
Scandinavia, were even not so far advanced in their
mode of illumination. They were not
acquainted with the rushlight. When torches
were wanting, they stuck a bit of wood into
the carcase of a fat bird, and, supporting the
stench as best they might, allowed this dismal
sort of candle to burn until the bird became a
cinder. Travellers in Lapland and Iceland,
during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries,
observed that this way of lighting was
still common among such of the natives as were
too poor to buy oil.

The lamp, as brought from Rome, continued
in use, without being in any manner modified,
until the time when candles were invented.
This will explain how it was that our ancestors
kept such early hours. During all the mediæval
ages, men rose at daybreak, and went to bed at
about the time when now-a-days we set off for
the theatre. The curfew bell, which tolled at
eight o'clock under the reign of William the
Conqueror, to warn citizens to put out their
fires and lights, was not such an oppressive
institution as most of us have supposed in our
school-boy days. It was not imposed upon the
conquered English as a sort of punishment, nor
to prevent factious people from meeting by
night, as many people have supposed. It was
a police regulation, as we should now call it:
nothing else. It was promulgated in the same
spirit as the modern rules in our barracks and
prisons, which prescribe the extinguishing of
all lights at ten o'clock, to diminish the danger
of fire. Under the name of couvre-feu (from
whence curfew is derived) the law had been in
use in France long before it crossed over to
England; and the appalling catastrophes that
always resulted in those days, whenever a fire
broke out, furnished sufficient reason to render
its strict observance eminently necessary.
Besides, as we have said, the badness of the lamps
and the early hours that were kept in
consequence, rendered the edict a grievance to no
one. In summer time, people who had been
up since four o'clock in the morning, were not
sorry to go to sleep at sunset; and in winter there
was very little pleasure in sitting up in a dusky
hall, to be smoked black by a flickering lamp.
As for the poor, the question of economy was
the best of all curfews in their case; oil was too
expensive for any but people of means.

The first step towards the invention of
candles was taken in the twelfth century, when
tallow torches came into use. A hundred years
later, the tallow candle, pretty much as it
exists now, made its first appearance, and was
deemed so great a luxury that only people
of real wealth could afford to buy it. The
haughty barons who forced King John to sign
Magna Charta would, probably, have
considered a parcel of tallow dips as a most
welcome present at Christmas time; and to have
stolen one of these precious luminaries, or only
the end of one, from a kitchen dresser, would
have been to incur the noose without any hope
of pardon. It was not until the fifteenth
century, that burgesses and tradespeople were
enabled to purchase candles. The price had
become somewhat lower by that time. The
cost of one candle (they were sold singly until
the present century) was about sixpence of
modern money; and for this sum, one had the
wherewithal to escape darkness, for half an
hour. For it must be remembered that the
primitive dips differed from those now in use,
in two points; firstly, in the fact that the
tallow was not refined, and secondly, in that
the wicks continued, in most instances, to be
of flax. Cotton was more expensive than silk
in those days. A pair of cotton stockings cost
sixty shillings. And, under the circumstances,
it would have seemed an extravagant folly to
burn cotton wicks elsewhere than in palaces.
On the other hand, the flaxen wicks acted very
ill; there was always a great deal of trouble in
lighting them, and when once the feat had
been accomplished, they burned at such a
terrific rate, that they melted half the tallow
without consuming it. This last fact gave rise
to a quaint form of economy. Instead of casting
the drippings of the tallow candles into the
fire, as now-a-days is done, every scrap was
saved, and when two or three pounds had been
collected the chandler bought them back, at so
liberal a rate, that the drippings of four
candles afforded the price of a new one.

Some half century or more after the
invention of tallow candles, wax lights were
introduced into a few palatial residences.
Wax tapers had been in use in churches in
the ninth century, but their cost had been
so far beyond the limits of ordinary purses,
that no one would have dreamed of wasting his
money upon such an expensive article. The
offering of a wax taper to a chapel or a shrine,
was looked upon throughout the middle ages as
a princely gift. A man who presented a taper
weighing a pound, to his parish priest, was
certain of receiving absolution; and, as every
one knows, it was customary to vow a taper to
the Virgin Mary, in the same way as the
ancients vowed a hundred doves to Venus, or a
white heifer to Juno. As a first attempt to
pacify Thomas a'Beckett, Henry the Second
sent two wax tapers weighing twenty pounds
each to the cathedral at Canterbury, and this
munificence cost him four hundred crowns of
gold. When Richard the First returned to
France after his release from captivity, he
bestowed the first five hundred crowns he could
obtain, in buying tapers for the church of
Fontevrault; and Louis the Eleventh, during his
reign of one-and-twenty years, spent a perfect
fortune in candles for "Our Lady of Grace."
Now-a-days, the practice of burning tapers as
peace-offerings, or sin-offerings, still prevails
in the Roman Catholic church. Two years
ago, on the occasion of the Prince Imperial's
illness, the Empress Eugénie went in person to
offer a taper at the Virgin's shrine of Nôtre
Dame. But the existing custom must be looked
upon as merely a pale reminiscence of what