acquire a position. Certain country noodles fancy they constitute a race, and would not like their name to die out. We must not forget marriages of inclination; they are the most natural and the most moral, but not always the happiest.

Why do people not get married? Often through indolence; often through fear of responsibilitieswhich is not a blamable sentiment. There are bachelors of feeble health and weakly constitution, whose conscience revolts from entailing on their children the inheritance of a morbid principle. Others, arrived at the dull days of life, at the days when men cease to build up projects, hold it immoral as well as imprudent to amuse their old age with a tribe of youngsters whose education and establishment they can never direct. Better to buy kittens, as Chateaubriand did, and renew them when they get grave and sulky.

Bachelors are not selfish, because they deprive themselves of family pleasures. You might as well call a young man a coward, because he rejoices at having drawn a good number at the conscription. The bachelor is a courageous man, for he tranquilly looks his last hour in the face. He does not paint a fancy picture of his dying bed surrounded by three sorrowing generations— whose 'expectations' he is realising by his decease. He knows full well that his last drop of drink will be handed to him by his man-servant. The controversy between a single and a married life might be enlivened or saddened to any extent, for it comprises the whole history of humanity. A confirmed old bachelor declared that celibacy and marriage, in a moral and theoretical point of view, were equally open to attack and defence; that practically, marriage is an excellent thing in provincial towns, in the country, and in Switzerland. In Paris, there is only one good social positionthat of a widower (rich, of course). The Parisiennes take men at a general valuation, comprising in their estimate the manners, the social position, and the fortune. Paris, happy city for célibataires;

true paradise of men in good preservation! But, ye well got-up, wellpreserved men, never venture into Italy or Spain. In the land of the guitar and the mandoline, you will be looked upon as a set of mummics. Nobody, in those barbarous regions, has the right to be eight-and-forty. Twenty or thirty, at the outside, is the utmost limit.

Men, now-a-days, do not avoid the ladies; they neglect them. Is it the fault of the ladies? Perhaps a little. Perhaps they count too frequently, in the life of a man, either for everything or for nothing at all. What a lesson they might learn if they had the opportunity of observing how men contrive to pass long evenings stolen from the household, the family, and even from gallantry! How surprised they would be to find that nothing is more simple, and that men by themselves are often better behaved than when they are in ladies' society!

This scission of the two sexes in Paris is the work of the cigar and of chic. The cigar has become so preponderant, that women have given way to it, although with a bad grace, certainly. They have their revenge, indirectly, by complimenting some perfumed Adonis with, You are always welcome here. You never smoke!' Or they send the culprits into a chilly little den, which they call the 'fumoir' or smoking room. The culprits go there after dinner, but don't expect to see them back during the rest of the evening. Ladies, you are turned adrift! A few women of excessive liberality have consented to smoke a little themselves. But there is no treating with the smoker. He wants to smoke at all times and places, while playing cards, dancing, and even at meals. The Cercles have received the smokers, who are not to be coaxed back by ungracious concessions. It is too late. The time is past.

Chic, which is the love of notoriety, urges the Parisian youth to indulge in astounding freaks. A horse and a celebrated and expensive mistress-that's chic. To sigh, write love letters, make music, and turn spoony, all that is nothing but

serenading, contemptible in the eyes of chicky men. The word chic is ugly and badly connected. The words of its family generally express nothing but disagreeable, vulgar, repugnant, or ridiculous things. Thus, chique is a quid, the lump of tobacco which makes you fancy the quidder has caught a very bad swelled face. Apropos to which, as the French have adopted many of our popular expressions—' All right!' for instance-it is not impossible that chic may owe its origin to the English cheekey.' Whatever, however, its derivation, it is an ungraceful but necessary monosyllable.

Chic is not to be defined. It manifests itself in a variety of ways.

How many times does the word 'grâce' occur in Isabelle's air in the fourth act of Robert the Devil?' Well, it occurs only two-and-thirty times. How many times the word chic will occur in this dissertation, we cannot yet guess; but as the total will be considerable, we cease to italicise it: and it is impossible to express it by a periphrasis.

Take a chic child. The chic child wears a Scotch dress. His smart man-servant conducts him to the Tuileries gardens, carrying his young master's balloon and hoop, and makes him join some group of rich and well-curled children. The mother, on her way to the Bois de Boulogne, bestows a glance upon her darling's recreations. The father, when he leaves the Bourse, sometimes also comes to see how young Hopeful is amusing himself.

By-and-by, the chic child is led by a tutor, as a day-scholar, to the most chic Lycée in Paris-namely, the Lycée Bonaparte. No uniform, no blue cotton stockings for this love of a boy, but elegant jackets, silken neck-shawls, pretty bottines, and half-franc cigars. On Sundays and Thursdays (holidays) he rides a pony (necessarily Shetland or Welsh). Next day he talks of it to his schoolfellows, choosing poor Lycéens for his auditors.

His studies finished, his eye-glass fixed in place, and his first visit paid to a demoiselle engaged at the BouffesParisiens, papa begins to grumble.

'I dare say,' says the son to himself. 'We'll see about that. You had better take good care of your cash-box. My head is full of chic, and chic I'll have.'

'Work,' says the father.

'Work at what? At morality? That's a little out of date, papa. You shouldn't have dressed me as a Highlander when I was little.'

Henceforth young Hopeful's situation in the world consists in impatiently awaiting papa's departure.

Chic insinuates itself, with the pertinacity of ivy, into all the interstices of life and society. Your tradesmen are chic, or they are not. Tailors, dressmakers, and bootmakers who have shops, are not reputed chic; they are all very well to supply the wants of passing strangers, visitors without luggage, and travelling Americans. There

are houses which are chic, without appreciable reason. They have no apparent recommendation beyond the eagerness of those who throng to them in crowds; neither the birth, nor the connections, nor the talents (never chic), nor the beauty of the mistress of the house, nor the excellence of the cookery, nor the quality of the wines, but almost always the fortune.

Money is always chic.

Certain towns may be chic. Rouen, Lyons, and Marseilles are large and interesting cities. Bordeaux is chic. There has been much talk about hats of late, especially since the English importation of hats with rather low crowns. Such hats are chic. To pick up curiosities and pictures wherever you can find them good, attests nothing but your discernment, artistic knowledge, and taste. To buy the same things at a public auction, is chic. You bid against Lord H. What chic! There are chic Cercles; or rather, there is only one, the Jockey Club. Why? Nobody can tell. Other Cercles are just as select, as exclusive, as well constituted, but not so chic. A journal announced, not long ago, that a ball had been given by M.* *, Member of the Jockey Club; which is just as strange as if it had said, M.**, Subscriber to the Opera, gave a grand dinner. But the Jockey

Club is so extremely chic, that many people consider the fact of belonging to it not as an ordinary circumstance, but as a dignity.

To arrive late at a house where you are asked to dinner (which in reality is merely insolent) is very chic.

What is never chic, is to fall really in love.

Two questions, often discussed in small establishments, demonstrate how tightly stretched at the present day are the relations between masters and servants. The first is the question of the liquor-stand. The French liquor-stand is a fetish, a household idol, in French families with moderate means. It is a tabernacle, a sacred shrine, whose mystic key is invariably carried by the mistress of the house about her person. At the close of every dinner she gives, the bonne, usually a maid of all work, deposits on the table the treasured box whose inconvenient mechanism is sure to bring about some ridiculous episode.

The keyhole refuses to admit the key.

What a bungle you are making of it!' exclaims Monsieur politely. Madame retorts, Open it yourself then, since you are so clever.' 'Not I,' replies Monsieur. 'I give it up. It wasn't properly wiped. The joints are glued together with curaçao.'

It is opened at last. Not a single glass is clean. Nota bene, that in small establishments the liquor glasses were never known to be clean; in the first place because those glasses are elaborately cut; the multiplicity of their facettes and angles multiplies the receptacles for dirt; secondly-and reason supreme! -Madame never allowing her liquorstand, her sacred box, to quit her sight, scarcely waits for the last liqueurer to lick out his last drop of anisette before she replaces, with her own fair fingers, her cut-glass bottles and her cut-glass glasses in the complicated chest whose folding shutters open and close like those of a diptych altar-piece. Then, securing it with the key, she says to her maid, "Take that away. We will clean the cristaux to-morrow.' To-morrow

ever remains to-morrow. The 'crystals' are never cleaned; whence the multiple deposit of curaçao at the bottom of every liqueur glass.

The bottoms of bottles raise another grand question which causes many an anxious thought to vigilant, economical masters who, as servants say, look out sharp to see that nobody pays twice.' In English houses, the difficulty is in great measure avoided by the prohibition of black bottles at table, and by presenting wine thereat in decanters which are locked up in sideboards when the repast is over. French

servants have a variety of devices for appropriating their masters' wine, and so procuring a supplement to the number of bottles stipulated in the terms of their agreement. They don't care to drink the wine called vin des maitres, company wine, but greatly prefer the vin pour les gens, servants' wine, because it is rough and 'scratches' their palate. The other, according to their notions, is mere lap for invalids, with no support in it.

Every time a descent is made to the cellar to fill a basket, whether by a' confidential' servant or by the master himself armed with a candlestick, a key, and an absurdly knowing and distrustful countenance, the feat is performed, if only for the fun of playing Monsieur a trick. When they are suspected and accused, when a certain number of bottles are missing, servants instantly answer, with perfect sincerity, 'Monsieur is well aware that I don't like his wine, and that I prefer the vin de propriétaire wine supplied by the grower, which I get at the grocer's.' If it is white wine which has been so conveyanced, it is the cook who takes the burden on her shoulders. She has used every drop of it for her sauces.

'You are a wasteful hussey. It is shocking, horrible, unheard-of, to stew kidneys in l'Yquem of '48.'

"In lichen! In medicine! Who could ever guess it was that? However on earth should I know it was lichen? Ma 'foi, it is a thousand pities. I said my sauce had a queer sort of taste. Give me the petit Chablis of the wine-shops.'

It is quite true that, for her own cheek, cookey prefers the brandied petit Chablis served at the pot-house. The same is the case with restaurants' waiters, who care nothing for the delicate liquids left on the table after the choicest dinner, and who really enjoy only the petit bleu sold by the quart over the neighbouring counter and always because it gratte or scratches.

Wine and liqueurs are the articles most subject to what is called, in a household, coulage or leakage. In what are styled by servants grandes maisons, wine disappears by whole swoops at a time; in those which they stigmatise as baraques, stalls or sheds, the leakage takes the shape of ends of bottles.

'Pierre, it strikes me that there ought to be some of yesterday's Bordeaux wine remaining.'

'Madame, I did not dare set it before Madame; there was nothing but a muddy remnant. If Madame wishes for it, here it is.'

At which, Pierre brings a bottle whose conical bottom stands up like a rock left dry by the tide. Pierre is the author of the ebb. When removing it from table, nicely calculating the inclination requisite from the quantity of liquid left, he applied the neck of the bottle to his mouth, and took his dose of the precious Château Latour. This horrible partnership is customary. The only way of escaping it is to renounce all right to the remnants of bottles.

In respect to Cognac and liqueurs, is it possible to allow the disappearance of bottles from which so small a quantity has been removed? Certainly not. In that case we may employ a method adopted by a master, name not mentioned, but probably M. Roqueplan himself.

He said to his servant-always the same Pierre-Pierre! This Cognac is admirably good. I should consider you particularly stupid if you did not try to have a taste of it; and I should be still more stupid if I

gave you the chance of doing so. If you robbed me in cleanly style, by carefully pouring out a glass now and then, we might come to an understanding; but as your great delight in this matter is to stick the neck of the bottle into your mouth, I will seal my bottle after every time of using it with this ring, which never leaves me. But, as this precaution might hurt your feelings, when the bottle is coming to a close, I will make up for it by giving you the last glass.'

Pierre, accepting the compromise, carefully watched his master's consumption, and never failed at the right moment to say, 'Monsieur, don't take any more; the rest belongs to me.'

In the eyes of certain people such a dialogue and such a bargain might seem to savour too much of familiarity.

It is only small folk and illnatured folk who are not a trifle familiar with their domestics. The whole repertory of the old French comedy attests that the grand seigneurs were not haughty with the people who live our lives, whom we associate with our pleasures, our passions, and our poultices; whom we send to our sweethearts, our apothecaries, and our attorneys, insisting on a secrecy which they sometimes observe. A man who is thoroughly conscious of being 'un homme comme il faut,' is not afraid of any familiarity. It is a mistaken imitation of English manners which has introduced to France this hauteur towards people who wait on you. The difference of character between the two nations would suffice to explain the difference of their relations between master and servant. By relinquishing her old habits and customs, France has lost her old race of servants, who, with their sincere attachment and their human weaknesses, are still to be found in a few country families.

HE social history of the London streets is a book which, notwithstanding the amount of continuous employment given by the various metropolitan localities to the industrious gentlemen who compile handbooks of curious antiquities, and manuals of forgotten places, still remains to be written. The vicissitudes through which many a score of the thoroughfares of the capital have passed are all unknown to the casual lounger of to-day. The rise, zenith, and fall of Bloomsbury would introduce us to many objects of greater interest than bricks and mortar. If the mansions in the streets that abut upon what is now the Thames Embankment possessed any autobiographical capacity we should have a whole series of infinitely amusing chapters on the caprice of fashion, and the manner in which neighbourhoods once popular and famous commence their decline and consummate their failure. What material the sociologist might find for the construction of new theories of progress, what light might be let in upon the views of the philosophers of the world, it is impossible to say. Should some such treatise as that of whose suggestion we make a present, free, gratis, and for nothing, in all sincerity and good will, to Mr. Timbs or to any one of his followers and friends who may consider its adoption worth their while, ever be essayed, from the point of view and in the manner which we desiderate, Bond Street will fill in it no small space. But Bond Street will be cited as an instance not of mutability of whim on the part of mankind, but of constancy. Bond Street is exactly to-day what it was half a century ago-the chosen thoroughfare of fashion, and the favoured resort of well-appointed equipages and aristocratic loungers. The attempt has been made before now to deprive Bond Street of some portion of its traditional prestige, and to

effect a transference of it to the Street of the Regent. The idea was studiously disseminated that the glories of Bond were fast departing. A few years more, and it would be on a par, as far as regarded the vivacity of its scene, with the thoroughfares of Wimpole or Wigmore, the indisputably select, but indisputably dull. The tide of fashion had set irrevocably in the direction of the stuccoed houses of the Quadrant. The presiding deities of Bond Street had, it was confidently asserted, uttered, in tones that admitted of no doubt, the words 'Let us depart.' But the syllables of evil omen were spoken to no purpose. Bond Street remained in the possession of its pristine glories, as it remains now, and, one may be bold to say, will remain. There is an air of elegance and refined splendour about the thoroughfare which is unrivalled. Certain streets remind one of the vulgar ostentation and the tawdry show of the nouve tux riches. To these Bond Street stands in the same relation that the head of an aboriginal county family does to the self-made man of Manchester or Birmingham. At all times, night or morning, in the glare of the noonday sun, or beneath the slanting of his afternoon rays, Bond Street never forgets itself; it is always well bred-the paragon and the queen of the fashionable thoroughfares of London.

Yes, we confess to a decided partiality for Bond Street; and in the season it is as good a place for the lounger and social sketcher as the Row, the Horticultural, or the Clubs. The removal of the Academicians to Burlington House has given it a fresh stimulus; and the result is, that it is more crowded, more prosperous, and more fashionable than ever. Long live Bond Street! say we. But the Academy? Yes, we had forgotten; it was the Academy which we had intended to describe. Not the pictures, certainly not, but