Pasdeloup, Derôme, Chameau, and others, whose
marvellous bindings in ivory, gold, or figured
leather, held a place beside the master-works of
Benvenuto Cellini, Raphael, Michael Angelo,
and Bernard Palissy.

England produced nothing very remarkable
in the way of book-binding during either the
sixteenth, seventeenth, or eighteenth
centuries. Both under the reign of Louis the
Fourteenth and under that of Louis the
Fifteenth the French continued to hold the
first place; and Boyet, Ponchartrain, Simier,
Purgold, Vaugelles, and Bauzerian, all binders
of the last century, were universally held
to be incomparable. But already the spread
of literature, under the influence of the
great philosophical school, had prepared the
decline and fall of the bookbinder's art.
The more men read, the less can they
afford to pay for their books. During the
eighteenth century the English and French
saw great authors succeed each other in such
rapid succession, that it was all the public could
do to keep step with them. To print quickly
and cheaply became the aim and object of book-
sellers. No matter what the binding looked
like, so long as the matter in it was good.
Gradually the bookshelves of libraries became
stocked with plain unseemly volumes, all
bound uniformly in brown calfskin. A handsome
volume came to be a rarity, and when the
nineteenth century dawned it would have been
difficult to find anything like a thoroughly
beautiful book in any librarian's shop in Europe.
We all remember those deplorable folios and
those unpresentable quartos out of which our
grandfathers read. Could anything be less
worthy of the noble authors they covered than
those dingy bindings, which reminded one of
untainted shoe leather? And when, some fifty
years ago, the fashion became prevalent of
giving prize books to deserving youths, could
anything have been more pitiful than the tawdry
volumes with which they were afflicted for their
merits?

For, of late years, notwithstanding the rabid
demand for cheap editions, badly printed upon
worthless paper, and ignobly bound, bookbinding
has become an art again. The magnificent
books published daily by certain great London
houses are superior in point of printing, and
equal in point of binding, to anything that the
middle ages ever produced. And it may be
looked upon as a set-off to our national inferiority
in this respect during preceding centuries
to know that, now-a-days, books bound and
printed in England are held to be better than
any published on the Continent. It is true that
at the International Exhibition of 1867 it was
a Toulouse firm that carried off the prize for
printing and binding; but we must not forget
that, in the first place, the majority of the jury
were Frenchmen, and that in the second, the
winners were awarded the prize for altogether
exceptional editions, known as "editions de
luxe," made entirely with a view to the prize,
and never intended to be offered permanently
for sale at the advertised prices. The English
houses, on the contrary, exhibited none but true
competition works, saleable to the public at the
specified charges, and not at all "got up" for
the occasion. As a general rule French printing
is slovenly and French binding careless.
And with regard to the illustration of books,
Paris has nothing to show us that can in any
way be compared with our London works illustrated
by John Gilbert, Birket Foster, and others
of equal fame. We make an exception in the
case of Gustave Doré's works however.

A word now in conclusion. It is not so
unimportant as certain people may think,
whether a good book should be poorly or
sumptuously bound. If we admit the refining and
ennobling tendencies of art upon the human
mind, we must allow that art should as much
as possible have a hand in everything; that it
should be asked to aid in all the handicraft of
man; and that all our works, whatever they be,
should more or less bear its impress. All
that strikes the eye as being fair, imaginative,
and of harmonious proportions, is good; good
because it causes a pleasing impression on the
senses, and good because it gives evidence of
careful painstaking work: that is, of industry and
diligence, the best proofs of civilisation. By
all means, then, let us have good bindings to
good books, and let us encourage those who
would give them us. Gorgeous volumes are not
within the means of every one; but we can
most of us select good editions of moderate
price in preference to bad ones. And those
amongst us who are rich can, by well-timed and
sensible liberality, make it worth the while of
intelligent publishers to sell us handsome books,
well printed, well illustrated, and well bound.

COMPANY MANNERS.

ALMOST all of us know what it is to have best
things. In dress, furniture, rooms, and personal
belongings generally, there are almost
always an upper and an under crust, and a
division into two classes—one for show, and the
other for use. But it is not merely our
persons and our rooms that we put into
company dress for high days and holidays;
we put our minds, our tempers, and our
manners as well. Only the most marvellously
amiable people have no company tempers at all,
but are as sweet and placid on work-a-days as
on Sundays; and only the very highest state of
artificial good breeding, combined with this
natural perfection of temper, makes us uniformly
courteous to every one, irrespective of station
or of degrees of intimacy.

Nothing is more rare than this unvarying
good breeding; for just as fine ladies wear their
court plumes only on court days, and as queens
lay aside their crowns and go about in caps and
bonnets like ordinary folk, so the gala dress of
minds and manners, which is adopted for
society, is dropped for the slipshod undress of
home; and the people who have just now been