on of a monarch or the enthronement of a primate; the
mode of living has grown more uniform and consistent, since between
the vilain and his lord has interposed himself the middle-class
Englishman, with a hand held out to either.

A few may not spend so much, but as a people we spend more on our
table. A good dinner to a shepherd or a porter was formerly more than
a nine days' wonder; it was like a beacon seen through a mist. But now
he is better fed, clothed and housed than the bold baron, whose serf
he would have been in the good old days; and the bold baron, on his
part, no longer keeps secret house unless he chooses, and observes, if
a more monotonous, a more secure and comfortable tenor of life.
This change is of course due to a cause which lies very near the
surface--to the gradual effacement of the deeply-cut separating lines
between the orders of society, and the stealthy uprise of the class,
which is fast gathering all power into its own hands.

COOKERY BOOKS

PART 1.

The first attempt to illustrate this branch of the art must have been
made by Alexander Neckam in the twelfth century; at least I am not
aware of any older treatise in which the furniture and apparatus of a
kitchen are set forth.

But it is needless to say that Neckam merely dealt with a theme, which
had been familiar many centuries before his time, and compiled
his treatise, "De Utensilibus," as Bishop Alfric had his earlier
"Colloquy," with an educational, not a culinary, object, and with a
view to facilitate the knowledge of Latin among his scholars. It is
rather interesting to know that he was a native of St. Albans, where
he was born in 1157. He died in 1217, so that the composition of this
work of his (one of many) may be referred to the close of the twelfth
century. Its value is, in a certain sense, impaired by the almost
complete absence of English terms; Latin and (so called) Norman-French
being the languages almost exclusively employed in it. But we have
good reason indeed to be grateful for such a legacy in any shape, and
when we consider the tendency of ways of life to pass unchanged from
one generation to another, and when we think how many archaic and
(to our apprehension) almost barbarous fashions and forms in domestic
management lingered within living recollection, it will not be
hazarding much after all to presume that the particulars so casually
supplied to us by Neckam have an application alike before and after.