it was in former times. The fall in the price
of wax has entailed a diminution in the value
of the sacrifice. The gift of a taper can no
longer procure absolution.

The cost of wax lights continued to be
exceedingly high until the sixteenth century. Up
to that time there were very few wax tapers
burned, even in king's palaces, except on
extraordinary occasions. About the period of the
Tudors, the price diminished sufficiently to allow
monarchs and very rich noblemen to adopt this
method of lighting; and in the year 1509 the
idea occurred to certain chandlers, of mixing
animal fat with wax, and forming a cheaper
"composite." For some unaccountable reason,
however, a royal edict put an abrupt stop to the
development of this new invention. Perhaps it
was that fraudulent dealers (there seems to have
been no lack of them, even in "the good old
times"), had passed off the composite candles
for genuine wax, and so wrought scandal in the
land, or perhaps it was simply that the new
discovery threatened to prove a dangerous
competition to the real wax trade, of which some
mighty noble, according to the fashion of the
day, had a monopoly. But whatever may have
been the reason, the invention came to nought.

It is a well-known circumstance, that Oliver
Cromwell once blew out one of two wax candles,
that he found burning simultaneously on his
wife's work-table. This excellent man—who
amidst all the cares of state, ever kept a shrewd
eye to his own affairs—had probably remarked
in his grocer's bill that wax tapers (of the size
we now call "fours"), cost five-and-thirty
shillings the dozen, in the year 1654. Indeed,
the item "lighting," continued up to the beginning
of the present century to form one of
the most dispiriting entries in a household
budget. Louis the Fifteenth, whose
predominant quality was not precisely thriftiness,
exclaimed one day that one could keep a regiment,
music and all, with what was spent each
year at Versailles on wax lights alone.
Voltaire, when dissatisfied with the pay afforded
him by Frederick the Great, used to pocket the
candle ends of his royal master. During
Napoleon's consulship, the cost of lighting at the
Tuileries, averaged twenty thousand francs per
annum; and eleven years later, during the
emperor's stay at Dresden, there were burned
in one night, at a state ball, six hundred-weight
of wax tapers: the cost being three thousand
two hundred francs (one hundred and twenty-
eight pounds).

But meanwhile, the burning of wax candles
in drawing-rooms had caused the oil lamps to
descend into the parlours and kitchens. There
was no place for the smoky, grimy contrivances
in apartments where paintings and gildings
flourished; for throughout the lapse of ages the
oil lamp had remained exactly what it was at
first; being neither modified, nor in any way
improved. There was this difference, however,
that towards the middle of the eighteenth
century, the number of oil lamps amongst the
poorer classes increased considerably, by reason
of the invention of colza oil. The new liquid
was by far cheaper than either the olive oil
used in the south of France and in Italy, or
than the oil made out of whale's blubber, and
burned in England and the north of Europe.

It was not till the year 1783, that the regeneration
of the oil lamp was seriously undertaken.
In that year appeared a radical reformer in
the science of lighting. His name was Argand;
he was a native of Switzerland; but resident
in London, and an Englishman by adoption.
This man invented the cylindrical wick of
hollow form, and so devised as to fit between
two cylinders of metal, placed one within the
other, and standing up like a funnel from out
of the body of the lamp. By a somewhat
complicated process, the oil was made to flow up
between the metal cylinders and saturate the
wick; the which, thanks to its peculiar form,
allowed a current of air to circulate within and
around it, and thus double the force of the light.
But this was not all, for it remained to discover
some way of suppressing the smoke, and adding
yet more, if possible, to the brilliancy of the
flame. This twofold result was obtained by
placing a glass chimney over the wick. By this
means the smoke was consumed by the strength
of the draught of air, the unpleasant smell of
oil was abolished, and the glare of the lamp
was rendered so powerful, that shades or screens
became necessary.

The new lamps were at once popular, both in
England and France. In the latter country
they took the name of "Quinquet," from Jean
Quinquet, the man who had imported and
slightly improved them, by the addition of a
convex reflector of polished metal, which,
placed behind the lamp, had the effect of
rendering it too dazzling for the sight to bear.
Soon after, the brothers Frederick and Philippe
Girard, Frenchmen, yet further improved the
"Quinquet" by simplifying the method of
conveying the oil into the wick-holder. They
placed the receptacle for the oil below the wick,
instead of above it, thus rendering the apparatus
less cumbersome; and in order to deaden
the crude glare of the flame without diminishing
its intensity, they contrived those well-
known globes of whitened glass, which give
such a pretty effect to artificial light.

The first public appearance of the brothers
Girard's new lamp took place in London in
1807, at a party given by the Duchesse de
Berry, then in exile. It was enthusiastically
admired; so much so, indeed, that the Empress
Josephine, although a little nettled that the two
Frenchmen should have taken their invention
to England, ordered the brothers to attend at
the Tuileries, and bring a lamp with them.
This circumstance, though of no great moment
in itself, becomes so from the fact that the
lamp presented by the MM. Girard to the wife
of Napoleon, was adorned with paintings on
China by a young and obscure artist, at that
time poor and struggling hard for bread, but
destined later to become known throughout the
world by the name of Jean Augustin Ingres.

The next inventor, or rather improver, of
oil lamps was Carcel, another Frenchman,