beginning somewhere; and the
authors of these guides to deportment had imbibed the feeling for
something higher and better, before they undertook to communicate
their views to the young generation.

There is no doubt that the "Babies' Book" and its existing congeners
are the successors of anterior and still more imperfect attempts to
introduce at table some degree of cleanliness and decency. When the
"Babies' Book" made its appearance, the progress in this direction
must have been immense. But the observance of such niceties was of
course at first exceptional; and the ideas which we see here embodied
were very sparingly carried into practice outside the verge of the
Court itself and the homes of a few of the aristocracy.

There may be an inclination to revolt against the barbarous doggerel
in which the instruction is, as a rule, conveyed, and against the
tedious process of perusing a series of productions which follow
mainly the same lines. But it is to be recollected that these manuals
were necessarily renewed in the manuscript form from age to age, with
variations and additions, and that the writers resorted to metre as
a means of impressing the rules of conduct more forcibly on their
pupils.

Of all the works devoted to the management of the table and kitchen,
the "Book of Nurture," by John Russell, usher of the chamber and
marshal of the ball to Humphrey, Duke of Gloucester, is perhaps, on
the whole, the most elaborate, most trustworthy, and most important.
It leaves little connected with the _cuisine_ of a noble establishment
of the fifteenth century untouched and unexplained; and although
it assumes the metrical form, and in a literary respect is a dreary
performance, its value as a guide to almost every branch of the
subject is indubitable. It lays bare to our eyes the entire machinery
of the household, and we gain a clearer insight from it than from the
rest of the group of treatises, not merely into what a great man of
those days and his family and retainers ate and drank, and how they
used to behave themselves at table, but into the process of making
various drinks, the mystery of carving, and the division of duties
among the members of the staff. It is, in fact, the earliest
comprehensive book in our literature.

The functions of the squire at the table of a prince are, to a certain
extent, shown in the "Squire of Low Degree," where the hero, having
arrayed himself in scarlet, with a chaplet on his head