Then again, it is forgotten that the meagreness and bareness of the domestic fashions at that time may have had some foundation in real indigence. The noblesse (stript of their possessions) who escaped the guillotine fled to England and deluged us with refined, heartbroken Emigres, who thankfully stooped to tuition for their daily bread. A very few chairs ranged in frigid symmetry supply the wants of people both poor and pre-occupied; cartloads of Sevres and gilded shepherdesses naturally go ' up the spout'; and if they care to have an ornament or two as days grow brighter, it will be a little grey bit of Wedgwood to make tea in, or a little drab bit of Chelsea, or a whitish patch of Leeds ware; and neither recalls Eros or Aphrodite in its pallid bas-relief, but Pallas or Nemesis. Black horsehair is more suitable to such a room than velvet or Gobelin work. It wears' well, and gives no trouble. One little mirror with Jove's eagle aloft is also in character; we don't want to look at ourselves now; besides, our hair is grizzled and our cheeks sunken with tears and watching and mean food, and if we do catch sight of ourselves we prefer the image blurred, distorted out of recollection.

1 'Fraternite, egalite, ou la mort,' was a favourite inscription on Nevers fayence at the time of the French Revolution, and there were others fiercer.

A convex, or worse, concave, mirror becomes absolutely sympathetic. Hard are the seats, for life is hard; hard are the pierced strapwork backs, made by Heppelwhite; the walls are covered with a thin ugly paper or whitewashed, and the books we need are together in the neat, paned bookcase that also holds our wardrobe. Bureau and linen chest are also combined - that needs less room. Everything has a rectangular way with it - that means straightforwardness. Everything looks naked - that means candour. A map on the wall, the globes in the window, a wooden stool or two for the children, with a slit for the hand; the tea-caddy, the well-used work-box, and the tall corner-clock with its severe round face and classic pediment slightly spatterdashed with mock Chinese sketches - here is our survey of a regular 'Empire ' room in England. A lithograph of a close-capped mother teaching her child to pray, and the black paper profiles of our lost relations (a plain 'honest' remembrance of them as they sat in our light, as usual - no fulsome flatteries to wake criticism or vanity) - completes the inventory.

It is simple; is it beautiful? ah ! that word has not so much meaning now - we forget whether these things can be called beautiful; the canons of taste were all banished - lost - guillotined perhaps, a few years ago. We are very grave strict people. The father does not like to see the children stoop; that means weakness, which must be checked. The mother does not like her girls to enter the room without gloves; that is too familiar; and if there was a hole in one------Ah !

Most of us who have had oldfashioned relations or friends in childhood, can remember the curious stigma attached to the words 'proud,' 'vain,' 'selfish,' 'affected.' Such terms meant much more to them than they do to us, the spirit of the times was so severe, emulating classic patriotism, primitive candour. To say a woman was vain implied a real fault of heart, not mere consciousness of beauty; to say she was affected was to impugn both her sincerity and her taste. Even in Miss Austen's novels we feel the influence; we get no hint of a heroine's face; but we are told she was remarkable for a 'candid' mind, for good-sense, and a disposition so - decorous as to be positively arctic. Duty, not enjoyment, was the aim of life. We constantly find people approved for being 'candid,' which probably meant sincere, well-mannered. We never hear that anyone is 'unselfish,' the antithesis called up is too violent. Marianne1 admits that her lover is mercenary, dishonourable, profligate, and a dastard - but she defends him against the ghastly obloquy of selfishness! 'What is proper' was the bugbear, for it had been a question of life and death; and hardly any gaiety was held proper, as once it had been scarcely safe.

Pride was a sin, for Egalite had taught us so in letters of blood.

When I hear people praise that time, so stony and so grim, from the harsh unbecoming costume which I have elsewhere criticised, down to every detail of awakened life, I am certain that they do not understand it. In France David and his partisans played at being Greek as children might play in a churchyard. But the false, stilted fashions that covered London and Paris with pseudo-classic conventionalities in the very worst taste became quite unmeaning in this climate; where the sapient architects built Greek temples with windows(!) of course nearly rectangular, terraces darkened by colonnades, changed every teakettle to a cinerary urn, even to the name, coalscuttles to sarcophagi, and beds to hearses. The 'propriety' which refused a tired child a chair with a back if the seat was over four inches wide, and discouraged all freedom of activity and self-forgetfulness or pleasure in everyone young and old, has much to answer for in the inherited delicacy of many of our girls and boys.

1 Miss Austen's Sense and Sensibility.