The increasing taste for solid comfort and easy living which accompanied the development of humanitarianism, and in which, as we have just seen, the Evangelicals had their full share, was evidenced to the eye by the changes in domestic architecture. There was less pretension in exteriors and elevations, but more regard to convenience and propriety within. The space was not all sacrificed to reception-rooms. Bedrooms were multiplied and enlarged; and fireplaces were introduced into every room, transforming the arctic "powdering-closet" into a habitable dressing-room. The diminution of the Window-Tax made light and ventilation possible. Personal cleanliness became fashionable, and the means of attaining it were cultivated. The whole art or science of domestic sanitation--rudimentary enough in its beginnings--belongs to the nineteenth century. The system which went before it was too primitively abominable to bear description. Sir Robert Rawlinson, the sanitary expert, who was called in to inspect Windsor Castle after the Prince Consort's death, reported that, within the Queen's reign, "cesspools full of putrid refuse and drains of the worst description existed beneath the basements.... Twenty of these cesspools were removed from the upper ward, and twenty-eight from the middle and lower wards.... Means of ventilation by windows in Windsor Castle were very defective. Even in the royal apartments the upper portions of the windows were fixed. Lower casements alone could be opened, so that by far the largest amount of air-spaces in the rooms contained vitiated air, comparatively stagnant." When this was the condition of royal abodes, no wonder that the typhoid-germ, like Solomon's spider, "took hold with her hands, and was in kings' palaces." And well might Sir George Trevelyan, in his ardent youth, exclaim:-- "We much revere our sires; they were a famous race of men. For every glass of port we drink, they nothing thought of ten. They lived above the foulest drains, they breathed the closest air, They had their yearly twinge of gout, but little seemed to care. But, though they burned their coals at home, nor fetched their ice from Wenham, They played the man before Quebec and stormed the lines at Blenheim. When sailors lived on mouldy bread and lumps of rusty pork, No Frenchman dared to show his nose between the Downs and Cork. But now that Jack gets beef and greens and next his skin wears flannel, The _Standard_ says we've not a ship in plight to hold the Channel." So much for Social Amelioration. FOOTNOTES: [10] For a lively description of Andover School in the eighteenth century, see the _Memoirs of "Orator Hunt_.'" X. POLITICS.