flaring prodigality of means; all the pompous paraphernalia of tradespeople and their carts and their red-books for orders, with nothing worth the trouble of booking; and everything of less quantity and lower quality than would be if personal pains were taken--which is always the best economy. What is there in practical housekeeping less honourable than the ordinary work of middle-class gentlewomen? and why should women shrink from doing for utility, and for the general comfort of the family, what they would do at any time for vanity or idleness? No one need go into extremes, and wish our middle-class gentlewomen to become exaggerated Marthas occupied only with much serving, Nausicaas washing linen, or 'wise Penelopes' spending their lives in needlework alone. But, without undertaking anything unpleasant to her senses or degrading to her condition, a lady might do hundreds of things which are now left undone in a house, or are given up to the coarse handling of servants; and domestic life would gain in consequence. What degradation, for instance, is there in cookery? and how much more home happiness would there not be if wives would take in hand that great cold-mutton question? But women are both selfish and small on this point. Born for the most part with feebly-developed gustativeness, they affect to despise the stronger instinct in men, and think it low and sensual if they are expected to give special attention to the meals of the man who provides the meat. This contempt for good cooking is one cause of the ignorance there is among them of how to secure good living. Those horrible traditions of 'plain roast and boiled' cling about them as articles of culinary faith; and because they have reached no higher knowledge for themselves, they decide that no one else shall go beyond them. For one middle-class gentlewoman who understands anything about cookery, or who really cares for it as a scientific art or domestic necessity, there are ten thousand who do not; yet our mothers and grandmothers were not ashamed to be known as deft professors, and homes were happier in proportion to the respect paid to the stewpan and the stockpot. And cookery is more interesting now than it was then, because more advanced, more scientific, and with improved appliances; and, at the same time, it is of confessedly more importance.