g to her condition, a lady might do hundreds of
things that are now left undone in a house altogether, or are given up
to the coarse handling of servants, and domestic life would gain
infinitely 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 very feebly developed gustativeness,
they affect to despise the stronger instinct in men, and think it low
and sensual if they are expected to give any special attention to the
meals of the man who provides the meat. This contempt for good living 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. It may seem humiliating, to those who
go in for spirit pure and simple, to speak of the condition of the soul
as in any way determined by beef and cabbage; but it is so,
nevertheless, the connection between food and virtue, food and thought,
being a very close one; and the sooner wives recognise this connection
the better for them and for their husbands.

The clumsy savagery of a plain cook, or the vile messes of a fourth-rate
confectioner, are absolute sins in a house where a woman has all her
senses, and can, if she will, attend personally to the cooking. Many
things pass for crimes which are really not so bad as this. But how
seldom now do we find a house where the lady does look after the
cooking, where clean hands and educated brains are put to active service
for the good of others! The trouble would be too great in our fine-lady
days, even if there was the requisite ability; but there is as little
abi