ed to minute researches, might be
surprised, had he laid before him the history of some of the most familiar
domestic articles which, in their origin, incurred the ridicule of the
wits, and had to pass through no short ordeal of time in the strenuous
opposition of the zealots against domestic novelties. The subject requires
no grave investigation; we will, therefore, only notice a few of universal
use. They will sufficiently demonstrate that, however obstinately man
moves in "the march of intellect," he must be overtaken by that greatest
of innovators--Time itself; and that, by his eager adoption of what he had
once rejected, and by the universal use of what he once deemed unuseful,
he will forget, or smile at the difficulties of a former generation, who
were baffled in their attempts to do what we all are now doing.

Forks are an Italian invention; and in England were so perfect a novelty
in the days of Queen Bess, that Fynes Moryson, in his curious "Itinerary,"
relating a bargain with the patrone of a vessel which was to convey him
from Venice to Constantinople, stipulated to be fed at his table, and to
have "his glass or cup to drink in peculiar to himself, with his knife,
spoon, _fork."_ This thing was so strange that he found it necessary to
describe it.[A] It is an instrument "to hold the meat while he cuts it;
for they hold it ill-manners that one should touch the meat with his
hands."[B] At the close of the sixteenth century were our ancestors eating
as the Turkish _noblesse_ at present do, with only the free use of their
fingers, steadying their meat and conveying it to their mouths by their
mere manual dexterity. They were, indeed, most indelicate in their habits,
scattering on the table-cloth all their bones and parings. To purify their
tables, the servant bore a long wooden "voiding-knife," by which he
scraped the fragments from the table into a basket, called "a voider."
Beaumont and Fletcher describe the thing,

They sweep the table with a wooden dagger.

[Footnote A: Modern research has shown that forks were not so entirely
unknown as was imagined when the above was written. In vol. xxvii. of the
"Archaeologia," published by the Society of Antiquaries, is an engraving
of a fork and spoon of the Anglo-Saxon era; they were found with fragments
of ornaments in silver and brass, all of which had been deposited in a
box, of which there were some decayed remains; together with about seventy
pennies of soverei