Leigh Hunt records as his experience of the Italians at home, that to cheat you through thick and thin was the universal endeavour—so that a perpetual warfare was inevitable, in which you were obliged to fight in self-defence. “If you paid anybody what he asked you, it never entered into his imagination that you did it from anything but folly. You were pronounced a _minchione_ (a ninny), one of their greatest terms of reproach. On the other hand, if you battled well through the bargain, a perversion of the natural principle of self-defence led to a feeling of respect for you.” Dispute might increase, it is added; the man might grin, stare, threaten; might pour out torrents of argument and of “injured innocence,” as they always do; but be firm, and he went away equally angry and admiring. “Did anybody condescend to take them in, the admiration as well as the anger was still in proportion, like that of the gallant knights of old when they were beaten in single combat.” Such chaffering, or “prigging,” as Burns calls it (in his satiric touch at town councillors waddling down the street, in all the pomp of ignorant conceit,— “Men wha grew wise prigging owre hops and raisins),” such haggling, and stickling, and demurring, and deferring, are too truly said to distinguish the British system of arranging settlements—in which, embodying completely the Oriental theory of marriage, a woman is dealt with “as a valuable security, to be exchanged for due consideration.” A marriage conducted according to the approved principles is therefore “a matter of sharp, close bargaining. No sooner is the romantic part of it over, than it is surrendered to the lawyers, who proceed to chaffer over it and cheapen their adversary’s claim, as they might do if they were purchasing a cow.” A self-styled Oriental student of the modern Syrians, in a book bearing that title, graphically sketches a representative bargaining scene in a café at Damascus, between a Christian indigo-dealer, in Beyrout costume, and a Jewish dyer; the former pretending to feel insulted at being offered so low a price, and the latter pretending to get into a passion at having his time taken up with a fruitless negotiation. Captain Marryat’s Travels in North America supply a plurality of parallel passages; now of two misses “swopping” bonnets, with an assumed indifference and a suppressed ardour almost ridiculous enough to verge on the sublime; and now of a couple of Down-Easters, whittling all the while they are bargaining, and doing both with all their might and main. Fiction-writers who make a study of character and manners are fond of introducing scenes of this kind. Scott’s Antiquary chuckles over his feats in cheapening old curiosities, and delights to tell how often he has stood haggling on a halfpenny, lest, by a too ready acquiescence in the dealer’s first price, he should be led to suspect the value Mr. Oldbuck sets upon the article: “And then, Mr.