And as we find that the use of letters is by no means an indispensable element of true civilisation, we should arrive at the same conclusion in examining almost every discovery which has been pointed out as a _sine quâ non_ of civilised life. Every generation is apt to consider the measure of comfort which it has reached as indispensable to civilised life, but very often, in small as well as great things, what is called civilised to-day may be called barbarous to-morrow. Races who abstain from eating the flesh of animals are apt to look on carnivorous people as savages; people who abstain from intoxicating drinks naturally despise a nation in which drunkenness is prevalent. What should we say if we entered a town in which the streets were neither paved nor lighted, and in which the windows were without glass; where we saw no carriages in any of the thoroughfares, and where, inside the houses, ladies and gentlemen might be seen eating without forks and wearing garments that had never been washed? And yet even in Paris no street was paved before 1185. In London Holborn was first paved in 1417, and Smithfield in 1614, while Berlin was without paved streets far into the seventeenth century. No houses had windows of glass before the twelfth century, and as late as the fourteenth century anything might be thrown out of window at Paris, after three times calling out “_Gare l'eau!_” Shirts were an invention of the Crusades, and the fine dresses which ladies and gentlemen wore during the Middle Ages were hardly ever washed, but only refreshed from time to time with precious scents. In 1550 we are told that there existed in Paris no more than three carriages—one belonging to the Queen, the other to Diane de Poitiers, and the third to René de Laval. In England coaches (so called from the Hungarian _kossi_) date from 1580, though whirlicotes go back to the fourteenth century. So far as we know, neither Dante nor Beatrice used forks in eating, and yet we should hardly class them as savages.