the Dowager. But the thing was to be managed quite differently; the Duc de Vivienne was to be transformed into a government candidate (not quite identical with an official one), the prefect was to support him through thick and thin, and all imaginable lesser intrigues of sub-prefects, or any subordinates whatever, were to be trampled upon.

The curé of Belespoir triumphed completely. He secured his candidate, and the government support; and the news brought by M. de Moranges was very near being the truth; but the curé of Belespoir had overlooked one or two extremely small points of detail, as will sometimes happen with ambitious schemers on a grand scale; and these almost invisible points lay at the root of what grew to be disappointment and failure.

What the cure of Belespoir had overlooked we shall see later.

A PLEA FOR AN OLD HEARTH.

OST Londoners must begin to be aware that the city in which they have hitherto earned their bread is disappearing. What with railway companies, the Metropolitan Board of Works, the Marquis of Westminster, and other ground landlords, and the Commissioners for building the New Law Courts, we are, in fact, demolishing and reconstructing at a rate which even M. Haussman may regard as hopeful. Of the works and ways of the other corporations, and eminent persons named above, we have nothing at present to say, but are much concerned with the doings of the Commissioners. As all readers are probably aware, they have been at work for the last four months on the great block of dingy courts and alleys, which lie between Lincoln's Inn and the Strand. A clean sweep has been made of all but a few blocks of houses; and the survivors stand up gaunt, half demolished, in the midst of the waste of bricks and dust, the débris of their late neighbours. They have a melancholy kind of interest, those wretched, crazy, old dwellings, waiting for the contractor's gang to come and level them too, with crowbar and pickaxe, and cart them off in different directions to begin life again in a wholesomer atmosphere, as the foundations of villas and the like at Peckham Rye or Pentonville. There they hang together for the moment" by the mere beam-ends and coherency of old carpentry" and bricklaying; and you may see (if curious enough to penetrate within the hoarding) the deserted fire-places and chimney-corners, and

sides of rooms up there in the air, with the very marks on the papers of the places where pictures and looking-glasses have hung-as dreary a spectacle as one could well see, reminding one of the vanished life, the births, and deaths, and marriages, the struggles and sins, of the generations which have gathered round those cold hearths, and called those poor rooms home.

For the general British public, however, the block in question, to the west of Bell Yard and Temple Bar, had neither meaning nor significance, so let it go down without further comment. If the Commissioners do no other work for the next ten years than making this clean sweep, and letting light and air into the district, they will deserve well of all dwellers in Central London. But what about their new and last demonstration? Their mark of demolition has now at last passed over Bell Yard, and is creeping along Fleet Street to the east of Temple Bar. To me the Bar itself, let me own it squarely, fearless of architects and persons of refined taste, is not indifferent. The old gateway, over which the heads of Jacobite lords were grimly bleaching little more than a hundred years back, must go down, no doubt. The exigencies of modern traffic will prove too strong for the last of the gates of Old London. Those of us who cannot get over a certain ingrained sympathy with Dryasdust have doubtless made up our minds to this long since. But it was not without wincing, and a sort of aggrieved feeling, as if the Commissioners were scarcely dealing as gently as they should with persons whose very weaknesses deserve consideration, that I read the printed announcement the other day on Attenborough's, the pawnbroker's, of selling off, in consequence of notice from the Commission that the premises were wanted. Not that I, or anyone else that I know of, unless it be the inmates, care about Attenborough's. But three doors east of Attenborough's stands the Cock, in Fleet Street. Against that most illustrious of all chop-houses we hear that the sentence has also gone forth. Hence these lines, written in the hope that the eye of some member of the cheque-drawing class may fall on them, by whose aid an old hearth, of authentic historic interest surpassed by few in this country, may yet be preserved for our grandchildren.

I am not quite sure of my memory nowa-days, and have not the book at hand to refer to, but I am much mistaken if in Akerman's Collection of London Tradesmen's Tokens there is not one of the Cock. At any rate,

anyone may see for himself the image of the old token on the stout stands now in use. There is no mistaking the date of the great fireplace, which stands there undoubtedly just as it stood in late Tudor or early Stuart days. So whether the then host was a man of enterprise enough to stamp his own coin, or of credit enough to get it accepted among his neigh-❘ bours in Fleet Street in exchange for Queen Bess's, matters little to our purpose. It is not on the dim legends of Stuart or Tudor times that I base my argument, though by no means insensible to their charm. For instance, I never pass that way that I do not turn the silver in my breeches pocket for good luck to the enterprising barber who shampoos and brushes hair by machinery almost opposite the Cock, in a portion of the palace of Henry VIII. and Cardinal Wolsey; wishing him luck, the reader will please to understand, not because he brushes hair by machinery, which happens to all barbers, or that he does it in a palace, which may happen to many, but that he has faithfully preserved this old structure so far as he could, and notifies us of the historical fact by an inscription which every passenger in Fleet may read. Neither should I be pleading for the Cock were it only for the later legends of Dr. Johnson and Bozzy. It is more than probable, almost certain, that the tavern-loving big man who has left his name stamped on this particular bit of London, has laid down the law in the boxes of the Cock, and drunk punch out of some of the handsome china bowls, which now stand ranged high up on the bar shelves, unused except for purposes of contemplation, having fallen on degenerate days. Oliver Goldsmith, when in funds, has doubtless lounged in there, and overpaid the head waiter many a time. I myself have heard distinguished judges and jurists of the last generation speak with enthusiasm of their own experiences of the Cock in early life. But all this might be as truly said of the Mitre, Dick's, the Cheshire Cheese, or a dozen other places of entertainment up one or another of the neighbouring courts. There is no record of these facts stamped indelibly on the face of English literature, and the tradition of them will wax weaker, and vanish altogether in another generation with the houses themselves. But it is otherwise with the Cock in Fleet Street. Will Waterproof's Lyrical Monologue will be read with delight by Englishmen five hundred years hence, in every corner of the great belt of English-speaking nations which by that time will be girdling the earth, and wherever it is read, the heading, “Made at

the Cock," of the earliest editions, and the piquant and graphic allusions to the tavern all through the poem will rouse curiosity, interest, enthusiasm, and that natural and healthy desire and longing for a visible and tangible link with the great poet and his favourite haunt, which it is the present writer's hope yet to preserve through this iconoclast age of ours.

Are my readers thoroughly familiar with Will Waterproof? If so, they can appreciate the strength of my case. If not, they will be eternally grateful to me for this introduction. There are great men who are bad in their shirt sleeves; who can't really stand the most searching test of all, familiarity; who have no natural playfulness, none of that delightful power of giving themselves up with "Basta, let the world slide," to the most humorous maggot that bites for the moment, without any risk of getting coarse or dull. There are others, commonly the greatest (such as Luther), who have this power in perfection, and our laureate is one of them, as every one will admit who will at our instance go off and spend a quiet half-hour with him at his favourite tavern thirty years ago.

First we have him, a law student as he was in those days (heaven save the mark), finishing the usual chop dinner in one of the snug little boxes which encircle the hearth of the Cock. He watches the waiters gliding about to other boxes, in answer to the signals of other customers (there is no shouting), conveying—

To each his perfect pint of stout,
His proper chop to each;

and at last orders his wine, and flinging the reins on the neck of his fancy, lets himself revel in the canter she takes him by the help of his pint of port, "the best that ever came from pipe." As the wine moves she soon settles to her stride :

I pledge her silent at the board;
Her gradual fingers steal
And touch upon the master-chord
Of all I felt and feel.

Old wishes, ghosts of broken plans,
And phantom hopes assemble;
And that child's heart within the man's
Begins to move and tremble.

Through many an hour of summer suns,
By many pleasant ways,
Like Hezekiah's, backward runs
The shadow of my days;

I kiss the lips I once have kiss'd :
The gaslight wavers dimmer;
And softly through a vinous mist
My college friendships glimmer.

The prospect gets wider and wider, and he

soon passes out of the narrow coffee-room, and his own memories, till—

High over roaring Temple Bar,
And, set in Heaven's third story,
I look at all things as they are,
But through a kind of glory.

Through the glory he soon gets to the brave, cheery view of men and things, as old as time, and yet always worth repeating :

Let Whig and Tory stir their blood;
There must be stormy weather;
But for some true result of good

All parties work together.

This earth is rich in man and maid,

With fair horizons bound,

This whole wide earth of light and shade
Comes out a perfect round.

The mood changes, and his gossip "the plump head-waiter" again attracts Will's attention, and the muse stoops into the coffee-room only to spring up again in a moment for another rollicking flight, inspired probably by the last glass of that "perfect pint :”

The muse, the jolly muse, it is!
She answers to my call,

She changes with that mood or this,
Is all in all to all.

In her new mood she throws off the mirthprovoking legend how the mighty Cock in past years had lived a majestic private life :—

Till in a Court he saw

A something pottle-bodied boy
Who knuckled at the taw;

how, clutching that pottle-bodied boy, he flew by farmstead, thorpe, and spire, his brothers of the weather standing stock still in amazement, until

Right down by smoky Paul's they bore,
Till, where the street grows straighter,
One fixed for ever at the door,

And one became head-waiter.

The pint is now fairly out. Will sits with his glass reversed, thrumming on the table, and inclined to take his fancy to task for trying to make

The violet of a legend blow

Among the chops and steaks!

He begins to think of that half-crown which he will have to pay; also to call himself over the coals, to doubt whether he shall ever prove a poet after all; to con over other views of life which he had steered clear of during his earlier libations :

So fares it since the years began,
Till they be gathered up;
The truth that flies the empty can
Will haunt the flowing cup:

And others' follies teach us not,

Nor much their wisdom teaches;
And most, of sterling worth, is what
Our own experience preaches.

But Will throws up at this point. His fancy may go where she will, but just now nothing shall induce him to follow her in this direction. He has had a pleasant hour. Well, it is gone; and on the whole, he thinks, let it go, where its elders and betters have gone before :

I hold it good good things should pass,
With time I will not quarrel :

It is but yonder empty glass

That makes me maudlin-moral.

And so will gets up to pay his half-crown and depart, when the contact with the plump headwaiter, who comes to take the money, tickles his fancy, and sets her off again; and away she spins into the five stanzas of inimitable banter, playful but painless, with which the monologue finishes, and which have immortalised that "somewhat pottle-bodied servitor. We have not the heart to break them up; they move altogether, or not at all, so let him who will, go and read them again for himself.

Well, but what is all this coming to? Do I suppose if twenty Johnsons, and Goldsmiths, and Tennysons had lived all their lives in the old tavern, that such memories would save the Cock from being ruthlessly knocked off his perch over the door, and the house from being pickaxed down by Irish labourers, and the materials sold, to make way for the new Law Courts? No, I don't. But what I do say is this: Up and down this British Empire, and in the United States, there are at this moment thousands of men, at least, to whom the old hearth of the Cock would be invaluable. There are, first, young gentlemen inheriting great houses, none of whom seem to be able to live in their father's homes without rebuilding and enlarging. There is no historical house in England which would not be honoured by having the quaint old mantel-piece and grotesque panneling of the Cock hearth, before which our laureate has mused till the inspiration fell on him, set up in hall or study. Infinitely more valuable, however, would it be to you, my fellow-countrymen, who have heaped up wealth by your own industry, of one kind or another, and are bent on building a new house, and founding a family. Men of your class often spend large sums on pictures, statues, and the like, with this object; but how unquestionably more effective for your purpose would it be, to transport reverently the

old hearth of the Cock in Fleet-street, brick by brick, and panel by panel, to your new home. Fancy the effect, in the third generation, of your grandson, as sheriff, entertaining the judges, and saying, as he points to the hall fire-place, “Ah, by the way, there's a piece of old-world work which should interest your lordships. That is the fire-place of the Cock in Fleet-street, which my grandfather bought, and brought down here, when the old place was pulled down to make room for the present Law Courts. Many of your lordships' predecessors have sat before that fire and dreamed of the Woolsack. They tell me it is of Queen Elizabeth's time." Now, I put it to you, gentlemen, whether that will not do more for your descendants, as English country gentlemen, than a gallery full of Titians-if you could get them?

Better still would it be if one of the workingmen's clubs now starting, and about, in a few years, please God, to extinguish the gin-palace, could secure it, and transport it to the smokingroom of the central hall, which must be built, before long, in mid London. But if none of these will move hand to save the old hearth, then I put it to my fellow-subjects of the Dominion, of Australia, of New Zealand, whether they will let such a relic slip through their fingers? Why, it would be one of the lions of any colonial metropolis for all time; at any rate, as long as English is spoken or read. If my colonial brethren will not be moved, I turn to the United States, in full confidence that there, at any rate, some man will be found with enterprise and sentiment enough to secure this, probably, the most authentic and interesting bit left of the old London of pre-Mayflower days, when his fathers were still Englishmen. Even in Boston, or Cambridge, or Concord-full as that brilliant corner of New England is of memories of its own- Will Waterproof's fire-place would be an object of interest. But conceive what it would be in Chicago, San Francisco, Leavenworth! Every Englishman, worth his salt, who landed in America, would make a pilgrimage to it; and the owner would, besides, have the unfailing pleasure of reminding every one of us," Yes, John Bull was going to let that be smashed up into second-hand bricks and firewood; but I couldn't quite stand that, so I bought it for a few dollars, and there it is, just brick for brick as it stood in the dim tavern in Fleet Street for three-hundred years and more. No, I couldn't stand that, not by a darned sight. If John can afford to let such links drop, I can't; or, at any rate, won't: and,

after all, don't Tennyson and the rest belong just as much to me as to him?" Between you all, gentlemen, don't let the old hearth disappear.

E

ON A CERTAIN CURIOUS CUSTOM.

THNOLOGISTS have found much significance in the fact that traditions, habits, and customs of a precisely similar kind are found among savage peoples apparently widely sundered by geographical distribution, and differences of race. Few of those customs are more singular than that which enacts that a man shall never look upon the face of his mother-in-law after he is once married. As this custom obtains among the Caffres of South Africa, among several of the Australian tribes, and among many of the Polynesians, it is assumed that these various races of men are derived from a general stock. We prefer to look upon this custom, however, as testimony to the existence of a natural law-as a piece of wisdom indigenous to each of these countries and the direct growth of individual experience. In England the satire of mothers-in-law has long been ranked among polite accomplishments; and young gentlemen who never had a mother-in-law, and who are much too circumspect ever to know what a mother-in-law is, can rattle you off stinging epigrams by the dozen. In fact, the abstract mother-in-law has been elevated amongst us to the rank of a fetish; and in our fright we never cease to pay a sort of homage, or devil-worship, to this evil deity. Whatever may be the character of our own particular mother-in-law, we all regard mothersin-law in general as a sort of vague, indefinable evil. The young husband, indeed, is rather glad to have a scape-goat on which to hang all the inconveniences and disagreeable accidents of marriage, so that his wife may still be a delight in his eyes.

Henri Mürger, speaking of a young lady who was as near being a wife as the fashions of the Parisian Bohemia permitted, says: Elle raccommode le linge très mal, et les querelles d'amour très bien." It is obviously of the highest importance that the ill-conduct of the linen should be blamed on somebody else, so that the wife may still be solely regarded in the light of a divine mixer and settler of lovequarrels.

But, at present, we have nothing to do with the scandal which half-a-dozen centuries have talked of mothers-in-law. We have to do with

one of those savage customs which are almost always found to be based upon physiological considerations. If we could only get at the bottom of many of those religious ceremonies which now puzzle us so much, we should find that they were the ingenious expedient of some old Egyptian priest or Indian Brahmin to get the people around him to obey this or that useful sanitary law. Now, the mere fact that this regulation, of which we speak, should be found on such widely separated continents as Africa and Australia, points to the conclusion that it must have been suggested by some common necessity of human nature. Why was it, then, that these savages discovered that it was better for a man not to look on his mother-in-law's face? Primarily, we may suggest, because that his mother-in-law was a picture in anticipation of what his wife was likely to be. Before marriage, a man's mind is not in the mood for the cold processes of comparison and deduction; but, after marriage, he begins to consider what sort of bargain he has made, and regards his wife with a more critical air. Let us say that both husband and wife are young, and that she is handsome. Very well; if he looks at her alone, he is satisfied. But suppose that her mother is constantly within sight; and that the mother has all the weak points of the daughter developed and rendered prominent by the progress of years. Naturally-inevitably, indeed-the husband looks upon his mother-in-law as a representation of what his wife is likely-nay, is certain to become. It is through this veil that he now looks at the daughter. He detects wrinkles where otherwise all would be smooth; he exaggerates the rounded shoulders, the stooping neck, or the knotted fingers; he already graces her with premature grey hair. We often hear juvenile philosophers talking sagely about the wise provision by which a knowledge of the coming years is denied us; but, in this case, the kindly curtain is drawn aside, and we look with horror on the ravages which Time, in our imagination, has already made. The magician's mirror shows the maiden her future lover; the far more accurate glass of the mother-in-law's face shows the husband his future wife-that is, his wife as she will be thirty years hence. Now, when two people grow old together, they either do not remark the signs of increasing age, or they charitably include themselves in the portrait, and regard the alteration as appropriate. A husband and wife growing old together maintain a perpetual youth, so far as their personal relations are concerned. But the husband who is suddenly

[Sept. 12, 1868.

confronted by a picture of his wife with thirty years added on to her appearance, is in a different position. Suppose, for instance, that she belongs to a family which has a decided tendency to corpulence. The gradual process by which she might become transformed from a sylph-like creature of eighteen into a monstrous woman of fifty-one of the massive Englishwomen whom Nathaniel Hawthorne satirised-would be quite unnoticed by him under ordinary circumstances. Perhaps he himself might have some predisposition that way; in any case, the transition would be so gradual as to be quite inappreciable. Suddenly, however, just when his eyes have been cleared of the scales of courtship, and he is beginning to scrutinise his wife with the affectionate curiosity of a young husband, he is confounded by the ghastly possibility of her becoming like his mother-in-law. Instantly he flies to that respected lady, and eagerly scans her face to see whether the daughter takes after her father or her mother. If he can trace a likeness to the mother, he is rendered miserable for life. He knows what his wife is going to be. He does not see that he too may change. He looks forward, and imagines himself still a young man, with a frightful, stout old creature, possessed by a fancy for gaudy colours and inappropriate costume, for his wife. Ever afterwards, he sees her through this sickening halo of anticipation; and while appearances are quite sufficient to upset his mental equilibrium, there may, perhaps, be added the further horror of a bad temper. He no longer takes his wife for what she is; he looks upon her as though she were now the picture which his excited imagination conceives and it was to obviate the possibly disastrous effects of such a vision constantly recurring to the mind, that those savage tribes -as we presume-prescribed the wholesome rule that a husband should never, after marriage, look upon the face of his mother-in-law.

Some people may see in this ancient custom only the evidence of a wretched parsimony. They will say that the savage mind did not trouble itself about how a wife might look, but was particular that household expenses should not be increased by the presence of an additional member. On that ground, we need not hope for a renewal of the custom. We are all glad to see our mother-in-law; we are delighted to observe the pile of luggage which she brings with her; and, if there is one thing more than another which we dread, it is the possibility of her fancying that we would rather have her absent. There is never any