forgery, denied that they were preventive, and
made no account of the judge who, when a man
about to be sentenced to death for horse stealing
said it was hard he should lose his life for
only stealing a horse, replied, "You are not to
be hanged for stealing a horse, but in order that
horses may not be stolen."

Don Manuel remarked upon the holiday
migration of the English. Two generations before
his time, mineral springs were the only places of
such holiday resort; but then, in the beginning
of the century, the steady movement of holiday-
makers to the coast had fairly begun. He wrote
also that within the last thirty years a taste
for the picturesque had sprung up, and so,
while one of the flocks of fashion migrated to
the sea-coast, another flew off to the mountains
of Wales, to the Lakes, or to Scotland. He
should himself, he said, follow the fashion and
go to the lakes. Holiday question is now often
complicated with another question that in the
first instance is said to have been confined to
London. At the beginning of the century the
King of England had a regular bug-destroyer
in his household, a relic of dirtier times. This
suggests mention that the objectionable creature
was the gift of France to her neighbour. An
English traveller of the earlier part of the
seventeenth century calls it, says Southey, the French
punaise. It was entered to the port of London,
and when first received into our country
districts, was known always as the London bug.

Espriella visited Oxford and Cambridge,
Birmingham, Manchester, and Liverpool, as well
as the Lakes; but we shall not follow him out of
London. Here, in the way of fashion, he found
women more extravagant than men; to be more
foolish, he said, was impossible. For instance,
a fashion had then lately been started in Bond-
street, of oiling a gentleman's coat and cold-
pressing it. This gave it a high gloss; but as
every particle of dust stuck to it, the coat, after
it had been worn three or four times, was unfit
to be seen. Fashion regulated whether a coat
should be worn open, or buttoned; and if
buttoned, whether by one button or two, and
by which. Sometimes a cane was to be carried,
sometimes a club, sometimes a common twig.
At one time every man walked the streets with
his hands in his coat pockets. Espriella found
a professor in Bond-street who, in lessons at
half a guinea, taught gentlemen the art of tying
their neckerchiefs in the newest style. Men
were as far as women from satisfying Feyjoo,
who said, "All new fashions offend me except
those which either circumscribe expense or add
to decency."

Of newspapers at the beginning of this
century, which had the greatest sale, four or
five thousand were printed, and it was thought
marvellous that there were a quarter of a
million of people in England who read the news
every day and conversed upon it. Indeed the
sense of over development was so strong, that
the English philosophers and politicians, both
male and female, were in a state of great alarm.
"It has been discovered," Espriella writes,
"that the world is over peopled, and that it
must always be so, from an error in the
constitution of nature; that the law which says,
'Increase and multiply,' was given without
sufficient consideration; in short, that He who
made the world does not know how to manage
it properly, and therefore there are serious
thoughts of requesting the English Parliament
to take the business out of His hands."

CARNATIONS AND GILLYVORS.

THE poet who "was not of an age but for all
time," with reference to what he called the
"piedness" of flowers, speaks of an art which
he says, "does mend Nature, change it rather;
but," he adds, "the art itself is Nature." We
may consider, if we please, poems, pictures,
and statues to be the correspondents of such
flowers in the garden of intellect. "To me,"
wrote a recent poet-laureate, who was not too
proud to describe the habits of the peasantry of
our English lakes:

    To me the meanest flower that blows can give
    Thoughts that do even lie too deep for tears.

Perdita, in whose person Shakespeare utters
the words of wisdom we have quoted concerning
the practice of gardeners, preferred the more
simple and natural products of the nursery.
"The year growing ancient," says this prettiest
and most poetic of foundlings:

    Nor yet on summer's death, nor on the birth
    Of trembling winter, the fairest flowers of the season
    Are our carnations and streaked gillyvors,
    Which some call nature's bastards; of that kind
    Our rustic gardens barren; and I care not
    To get slips of them.

Further on, the fair shepherdess grows more
energetic, and exclaims:

                                                I'll not put
    The dibble in earth to set one slip of them.

The natural, pure, and simple, has had
distinguished followers among our poets and
romancers past and present. Our younger
bards, however, and some of them of no mean
promise, have lately aimed at a classicality of
theme and an ornateness of style, which stands
in striking contrast with the subjects and
methods of their immediate predecessors. Even
in treating the more familiar aspects, whether
of nature or society, in spite of the charming
Perdita's energetic protest, they persistently
prefer the "painted face" to the "untouched"
countenance.

Society, too, follows in the wake of art and
literature. Not only would we have our
photographs coloured, but the belle of the modern
ball-room adds to her own attractions by a little
rouge.

Something is to be said on the other side, and
our great poet has said it. The artificiality of
our modern life is not a whit less natural than
the simplicity of the antique time. Improved
nature is still nature; although it may be