lomew massacre, the French and Italian nobles had a curious custom of always carrying about with them in the pockets of their silk doublets costly little boxes full of bon-bons.

Henri Quatre, Mary de Medicis, and all their friends and foes carried about with them little gold and Limoges enamelled boxes, still to be seen at any sale of Messrs. Christie and Manson's; no doubt there was one full of red and white sugar plums in the pocket of Mary Queen of Scots when she fell dead at the sure there was one in the pouch of grisly Duc foot of the block in Fotheringay. You may be de Guise, with the close cropped bullet head and the long spidery legs, when he lay dead and bleeding on the polished floor of the castle of Blois; no doubt as he fell, with a dull thump, a stream of red and white "ten thousands" rolled along the marqueterie. It was a childish custom, it proves that the age had a sweet tooth, and a more boyish taste than ours possesses, but it must have been useful for diplomatic purposes and highly conducive to flirting. How the custom must have helped to develop character and illustrate temper! Sir Anthony Absolute could snap his box down and refuse a bon-bon, or Malvolio could smile and present his with a bow and a conceited grimace. Jaques would moralise as he gulped a red almond, and Mercutio, holding one between his finger and his thumb, would rattle out a dozen quips before he swallowed the sweetmeat with a laugh and askance look at scornful Beatrice.

It is in Robert May's "Accomplished Cook," published in 1665, five years after the glorious and never sufficiently to be remembered Restoration of that Father of (a good many of) his subjects, Charles the Second, after, as Marvell said, he had been, like the son of Kish, in exile, Seeking his father's asses all the while.

The History of Cooking, from the Deluge to the Passing of the Reform Bill, would be one of the most stupendous works that ever ruined a publisher. It would run to, say about three hundred and thirty-two volumes folio, without the index, and would secure the author a limited income, but an enormous fame. Perhaps the world is hardly ripe for it yet. Let the globe-It was at old Lady Dormer's, that this zealous go on turning its round sides like an enormous servant in his eager pursuit of fame devised a apple to the sun's fire for a century longer, and central ornament for a dessert. It gives one a perhaps then it will be ready for the book. One strange notion of the tasteless luxury and coarse volume would be dedicated to the gay and pleasures of the society where Rochester flutsmiling subject of "Desserts," and a pleasant tered and where Buckingham daunted. Mr. anecdotic little pamphlet of four thousand and Robert May expatiates largely on the skill and odd pages it would make. art required to build a large gilded ship of confectionery; its masts, cabins, port-holes, and lofty poop, all smart and glittering its rigging all ataunto; its bunting flying; its figure head bright as gold leaf could make it. Its guns were charged with actual powder, its cargo was two turreted pies, one full (O admirable invention!) of live birds, the other (O incomparable ingenuity of the Apician art!) of frogs. When borne in by gay pages to the sound of music the guns were discharged, the ladies screamed, and fainted, so much so as to require being held up and consoled with sips of Tokay, the gallants all the while smiling and applauding.

The dessert of the middle ages had no special character. There would be a good deal of Cellini cup, and Limoges plate, and Palissy dish, and gold chased goblet, about it, and perfumes and spices enough no doubt. We picture the cakes like wedding cakes, heavy, full of citron, rather indigestible; and we imagine certain errors of taste marring the whole affair: as in Ben Jonson's time, when at a lord mayor's feast a beribboned dwarf jester at a given signal took a flying header into a huge bowl of custard, to the alarm, terror, indignation, and delight of the aldermen, the court gallants, and the ladies, whose ruffs, farthingales, and slashed hose of silk and satin must have been cruelly splashed and spotted.

In the times of the Medicis and the Bartho

This done, says the zealous and thoughtful man, to sweeten the smell of powder; "let the ladies take the egg-shells full of sweet waters (also part of the cargo of the vessel), and

whose chosen companions were Desnoyers the dancing master, and Bubb Doddington the toady, began to deride these little puppet shows that figured in the centre of the Burgundy glasses and the dishes of maccaroons. The Dilettante society and fashionable visits to Rome and Florence awakened expanded notions of art. The grandeur of size now struck these pigmy dandies. The ambitious confectioners of the fashionable squares aspired to positive statuary, spindle leg

throw them at each other, and all danger being seemingly over by this time, you may suppose they will desire to see what is in the pies, and when lifting first the lid off one pie, out skip some frogs, which make the ladies to skip and shriek; next after the other pie, whence come out the birds, who by a natural instinct flying in the light will put out the candles, so that what with the flying birds, skipping frogs, the one above, the other beneath, will cause much delight and surprise to the whole com-ged Venuses, and barber's dummy Marses, in pany." At length the candles are lighted and a banquet brought in, the music sounds, and every one with much delight rehearses their actions in the former passages. These," says May regretfully (for the immortal dish was invented in the reign of James the First) "these were formerly the delight of nobility before good housekeeping had left England, and the sword really acted that which was only counterfeited in such honest and laudable exercises as these." Such were the sports at Whitehall when black-browed, swarthy "Old Rowley" presided at the table, on which grave Clarendon condescended to smile, and which Evelyn and Waller may have watched with bland approval.

affected postures. Walpole mentions a celebrated confectioner of Lord Albermarle's, who loudly complained that his lordship would not break up the ceiling of the dining-room to admit the heads, spear points, and upraised thunderbolts, of a middle dish of Olympian deities eighteen feet high.

But even this flight of my Lord Albemarle's confectioner was surpassed by an enthusiastic contemporary in the service of the Intendant of Gascony, at a great feast given in that province in honour of the birth of the Duke of Burgundy. The nobles of Gascony were treated with a dinner and a dessert. The latter concluded with a representation, by wax figures moved with clock work, of the ceremonial of the sick room of the Dauphiness and the happy birth of an heir to the great monarchy.

This reminds us of the over zeal of the late Duke of Beaufort's Neapolitan confectioner, whom Mr. Hayward describes as deeply impressed with the dignity of his art. His grace was one night in bed fast asleep, and with the curtains drawn snug, when "he was 'ware of an excited knock at the door several times impatiently repeated. Somewhat impatiently the duke stirred in his warm nest, sat up, pulled the curtains back, and asked testily who the was there?" A voice answered in broken English:

"C'est moi seulement-it is only me, Signor Duc. I was last night at the opera, and was dreaming of the music. It was Donizetti's, and I have got one grand idea. I rose from my bed. I invented a sorbet. I have named it after that divine composer, and I hasten avec la plus grande vitesse to inform your grace." This reminds the narrator, from whom we quote, of Herbault's address to an English lady of rank, when he hurried to her hotel to announce the completion of an order for a turban and ostrich feathers.

The House of Brunswick brought over sound Protestantism, but German taste. Cookery grew cumbrous, dull, and uninventive. A vulgar naturalism became the fashion with the Germanized Italian and French cooks of the eighteenth century. Horace Walpole, great about trifles, incomparable decider of the width of a shoe buckle, keen despiser of all follies and meannesses but his own, neat and fastidious tripper along a flowery path over this vulgar and pauper encumbered planet, derided the new fashion in desserts. Jellies, biscuits, sugar plums, and creams, simple, unpretending, and pleasant facts had long since given way to fashionable inanity, and fashionable rusticity to harlequins, gondoliers, Turks, Chinese, and shepherdesses of Saxon China. This was the PreAdamite formation, but these fantastic creatures, wandering about a desert in a meaningless way among dry frizzly groves of curled paper and silk flowers, were soon discovered to be insipid. By degrees the great minds in the white nightcaps soared higher (the imperfect metaphor must be excused), and there appeared at my Lord Clacklemore's dessert and at the Earl of Tattleton's dinner table, meadows full of paper cattle all over spots, sugar cottages where Damon and Chloe lived when they were not at the Ridotto, or ambiguous The Prince Regent, whose tastes inclined Madame Cornelys's great masquerade in Soho- to a sort of vulgar and spurious Orientalism, square; pigmy and long-legged Neptunes at one of his costly feasts at Carlton House, in cockle-shell cars domineering over oceans had a channel of real water running round of looking-glass and rumply seas of silver the table, and in this swam gold and silver tissue. My Lady Fitzbattleaxe, the Honourable Miss Hoopington, and plain Miss Bluesacque, came home from Chenevix's and the India shops, laden with dolls, babies, and little gods and goddesses, not for their children but for their housekeepers. Gradually even such brains as those of Frederick Prince of Wales,

Madame, after three sleepless nights the feathers are arranged."

fish.

The French epicurean writers say that the dessert should be the girandole or crowning tableau of the dinner. It should surprise, astonish, dazzle, enchant. If the dinner have fully satisfied the sense of taste and the wellbalanced appetite, the dessert should address

itself to the soul through the eyes. It should rouse sensations of surprise and admiration, and crown the enjoyments that commenced with the removal of the cover of the soup tureen : that Pandora's casket of a bad dinner: that joy and triumph of a successful and tasteful repast.

taste, lent an enchantment to the whole, turning even a wood of frizzled muslin into a slice of fairy land.

damage from them. Every one allowed that Fairy Land, on a Royal birthday, had been presented to their eyes, and that no more lively and splendid way of terminating a banquet had ever been devised.

But the great Dutfoy did not rest here. Naught with him was done while aught remained to do. He was exactly like Cæsar as far as that went. He had already ransacked earth, The dessert is allowed by all French writers air, water, to please the senses; he now thrust to be Italian in origin. The maître d'hôtel, his hand into the fire. He sought the aid of before the Italian dessert arrived, gloried in the pyrotechnist, and that artist, roused by friendlarge dishes, mountains of fruit, and sticky ship and money, hurried to his succour. He hills of sweetmeats. The elegance was clumsy mixed harmless Chinese and scented fireworks and ostentatious. There was no poetry in with his temples and Greek shrines; at a given it. Paul Veronese's picture of the Marriage signal fire was brought and the carefully conof Cana, will give some idea of the primeval cealed match lighted. In a moment the Temples French dessert. The newer fashion consisted in of Dutfoy were the centres of a whirl of coloured those futile trees, and shrubs, and orchards, fires; a thousand gerbes darted to the ceiling, and gardens, abused by Horace Walpole; but and shed their scented sparks on the astonished Frenchmen delighted in the seas of glass, the and delighted guests. The noise and fragrance flower-beds formed of coloured sand, and the of this fountain of light, flame, and colour, little men and women in sugar promenading in produced a surprise undisturbed by the shadow enamelled bowling-greens. This custom had of a fear, for the sparks in spite of their brilnot been introduced in 1664-1666, when liancy were so innocent, that even the finest Louis the Fourteenth gave those magnificent and most gauzy silks and tissues received no fêtes at Versailles, of which Molière has left glowing descriptions. The sand gardens first | appeared in France in 1725, at the marriage of that miserable and selfish voluptuary Louis the Fifteenth with Queen Mary of Poland; and it is said that this princess, brought up in It was at this same time that sugar rocks misery and obscurity in the little town of strewn with delicacies, were also fashionable at Wissenbourg, was delighted with the fantastic desserts, with fruits glacées au caramel, pyranew fashion. It is in the nature of art and mids of bon-bons, iced cheese, &c. At the science to advance from conquest to conquest. same period a Parisian confectioner won eternal Sir Humphry Davy once said, science grew so or almost eternal fame-say six months famefast that even while he was preparing for the by preparing for state desserts, the principal press, his work had to receive constant altera-scenes in the Opera of "the Bards." Ah! tions. Desforges, father of the author of several those were times. A confectioner had to keep romances, and the comedies of The Jealous Wife bis wits about him then, and to be at the same and Tom Jones in London, was the first deco- time icer, confectioner, decorator, painter, archirator of those days. He introduced imita-tect, sculptor, and florist. Yes. There was tion foliage, and gave to the frizzled muslin room for genius then. A dessert might run to what was then considered, in the words of one ten thousand crowns. of his eulogisers, "Un si grand air de nature et de vérité." To him succeeded another great creature, De Lorme. De Lorme had not such profundity of imagination and creative genius, yet he still found laurels in Paris to harvest, and what he left ungathered were stored up by Dutfoy, of the Rue de l'Arbre Sec, who, circa 1805, immortalised himself by forming the centre of his dessert of palaces and temples of the severest proportions, of perfect taste, and of vast extent. Domes, cupolas, huge peristyles, galleries in perspective, elegant porticoes, columns, entablatures, architraves, were moulded by his ingenious and skilful hands. The profiles were of remarkable purity, the ornaments of exquisite taste. The appropriate attributes with which he adorned his temples rendered mythology an after dinner study, at once agreeable and instructive. To these temples this great man added woods and groves (the trees full of nature), and adorned them with groups of figures of Sevres. He almost gave movement and life to these extraordinary pictures, and, by managing his light and shade with

The dessert is meant for the eyes more than the stomach. Yet what bright and pleasant things have been said " over the walnuts and the wine;" what pretty and gallant compliments paid as filberts have been cracked! How agreeable it is on a winter evening to see a broadside of honest chesnuts bounce and bang from the lower bar of the grate, what time the miserable and tepid formality of smuggling them in, wrapped in a napkin, has been forgotten for the quiet comfort and enjoyment of a really friendly party. The dinner is over, its toils, its glories, are past; we are now in a flowering prairie of idleness, with nothing to do but to try fruits, and to sip at all preserves that are not at discord with our wine.

Take it altogether (conventional as it is) no one would wish the custom of dessert abolished. It is a pleasant little fruit harvest; but the ladies must no longer be suffered to leave us, now the three bottle days are gone for ever. And if English families would only get into the quiet enjoyable German way of part singing,

It is softly turning

To a downward haze
(From the charcoal burning),
Delays, and strays,

And is scatter'd in twenty different ways.

But see! at length,

At length (will it last?)
The buoyant strength
Of the bounding blast

Hath broken a breach in the grey and fast

It is driving the mist hence.

There flickers again

Strange light in the distance:

Blue sea and brown plain,

pears to be choice with the briefless class of barristers who live fast and "have no work to do" in a legal sense. But to speak to a man before he has either tubbed or breakfasted is not wise, and so I merely bade Dan make haste with his toilet, and join me in an hour (it was already past twelve o'clock) at the Albion in Russell-street, where I would beg him to partake of as good a luncheon as that excellent house could give us, and then would put something in his way which would be a clear one hundred pounds' gain within next week. Before the time specified he was at the Albion, where I had already ordered luncheon, to which he did great justice. By two P.M. we were in the

And one long leaden-colour'd slant cone of soft rain! smoking-room up-stairs, and there, over cigars

THE NORTHENVILLE ELECTION.

CHECK TO THEIR QUEEN.

FOR two or three days after the ball given nominally by Lady Vance, but really by her brother, the Honourable Captain Streatham, candidate on the other side, I felt almost as if we had been defeated. Only ten days remained before the nomination would come on. Mr. Mellam left the entire management of affairs in my hands, and gave me whatever cheques I asked for without a question.

and a couple of "cobblers," I told O'Rind that I required the services of a clear-headed lawyer who could speak French and German, to proceed to Strasbourg, and thence to Baden, Munich, and Vienna, to examine the register of births in certain churches, of which a list would be given him, and report progress to me in London. The job would probably take him from four to five weeks to get through, and the remuneration attached to it would be two guineas a day, besides all hotel and travelling expenses. In the mean time I was ready to hand him over one hundred pounds on account, provided he started that very night, would he accept it?

Would he not? The only thing that puzzled him was the shortness of time in which to find some one who would write his London letter for the Northenville Independent. His leaders for the Damager could be easily provided for in the office of that paper, but where could he find a correspondent for the Independent?

I have mentioned before that there were two newspapers in Northenville, the Mercury and the Independent. Each of these prints had its own correspondent" in town, who furnished the paper with a London letter weekly. The Independent, which was the organ of our opponents, was published on Wednesday; the Mercury, our own paper, appeared on Saturday. Both papers used to boast of their respective That, I said, should be provided for, and in London correspondents, and the editors of each such a manner that the guinea a week which used to speak openly of these gentlemen by that journal paid its correspondent should not name. No one who had ever been in company be lost to him during his absence, for I had a with Mr. Dane, of the Independent, could help very talented young friend who would be only knowing that the correspondent of his paper too glad to do the work. All he had to do was was Dan O'Rind, one of the cleverest but most to write to Mr. Dane at Northenville, and needy men in London, who never had a six-state that, having been selected by a legal firm pence two hours after he had received his to prosecute a most important inquiry abroad, weekly salary. It was through Dan that I he would be absent from his post for some intended to play my trump card, and for that weeks, and that in the mean time a well-known purpose, armed with a cheque from Mr. and very talented writer (whose name he was Mellam, I left Northenville for London on the not at liberty to mention) would continue his Friday evening after the grand ball which correspondence for the Independent. Letters Lady Vance had given at the Crown and from this gentleman to the paper would be Sceptre Inn. initialled P. W., and all letters from Mr. Dane to his locum tenens might be addressed to his chambers in Costs-court.

The letter for Mr. Dane was written there and then, and at eight o'clock I saw O'Rind off to Folkestone by the tidal train from the Victoria-station.

On Saturday morning I was at O'Rind's chambers, and found, as I expected, that he was not out of bed. At first I got no answer to my repeated knocks at the outside door of his rooms, for Dan's visitors were, as a rule, more numerous than welcome, and he generally had some little legal affair on hand which it was more judicious to ignore than to acknowledge. But after calling out my name, and being aware that some one reconnoitred me through a small port hole, I was admitted into the interior, where I found my acquaintance in the state of dressing gown, and his rooms in the state of confusion, which ap-effect:

On the following Monday, just as Mr. Dane was preparing the usual clippings from the London Observer, the Sunday Times, and other weekly papers, with which he made up the stuffing" for his paper on Wednesday, he received a telegram from London to the following