The practice of warm-bathing prevailed very generally in all classes of society, and is frequently alluded to in the mediæval romances and stories. For this purpose a large bathing-tub was used, the ordinary form of which is represented in the annexed cut (No. 184), taken from the manuscript of the St. Graal, of the thirteenth century, in the British Museum (MS. Addit. No. 10,292, fol. 266). People sometimes bathed immediately after rising in the morning; and we find the bath used after dinner, and before going to bed. A bath was also often prepared for a visitor on his arrival from a journey; and, what seems still more singular, in the numerous stories of amorous intrigues, the two lovers usually begin their interviews by bathing together. [Illustration: _No. 185. Lady at her Toilette._] Our cut No. 185, from another volume of the manuscript last quoted (MS. Addit. No. 10,293, fol. 266), represents a lady at her toilette. It is a subject on which our information at this period is not very abundant. The round mirror of metal which she is employing was the common form during the middle ages, and was no doubt derived from the ancients. The details of the ladies’ toilette are not often described, but the contemporary moralists and satirists condemn, in rather general terms, and evidently with more bitterness than was called for, the pains taken by the ladies to adorn their persons. They are accused of turning their bodies from their natural form by artificial means, alluding to the use of stays, which appear to have been first employed by the Anglo-Norman ladies in the twelfth century. They are further accused of plucking out superfluous hairs from their faces and eyebrows, of dyeing their hair, and of painting their faces. The chevalier de la Tour-Landry (chap. 76) tells his daughters that the whole intrigue between king David and the wife of Uriah arose out of the circumstance of the lady combing her hair at an open window where she could be seen from without, and says that it was a punishment for the too great attention she gave to the adornment of her head. The toilette of the day seems to have been completed at the first rising from bed in the morning. There are some picturesque lines in the English metrical romance of “Alisaunder,” which describe the morning thus:-- _In a moretyde_ (morrow-tide) _hit was;_ _Theo dropes hongyn on the gras;_ _Theo maydenes lokyn in the glas,_ _For to tyffen_ (adorn) _heare fas_. --Weber, i. 169. The chamber, as it has been already intimated, was properly speaking the women’s apartment, though it was very accessible to the other sex. It was usually the place for private conversation, and we often hear of persons entering the chamber for this purpose, and in this case the bed seems to have served usually for a seat. Thus, in the romance of “Eglamour,” when, after supper, Christabelle led the knight into her chamber--