at the human body
was an obscene thing and its functions deplorable. It has the
middle-class love of good food--Colchester oysters (famous then as
now), asparagus, peaches, apricots, candied ginger, China oranges,
comfits, pancakes--enough to make the mouth water. It has the solid
English furniture, with all its ritual of solemnity; "vallians"
(valences), "daslles" (tassels), big bedsteads, Chiny-ware, plush
chairs, linen cupboards. It has all the fuss of preparation for
childbirth--the accumulations of wrappings, the obstetric furniture,
the nods and winks of the midwife and the gossips, authentic ancestors
of Mrs Sarah Gamp and Mrs Elizabeth Prig--why, the haste to fetch the
midwife at the crisis might almost be the foundation upon which
Dickens built the visit of Seth Pecksniff, Esq., to Kingsgate Street,
High Holborn.

It has likewise many touches which show knowledge of the average
fairly prosperous English life--the merchant's, the shopkeeper's, the
sea-captain's. The author clearly knew the routine of trade. He knew
that at New Year's Day the "day-book" had to be fully written up for
scrutiny and stock-taking and sending out of accounts. (But the
pleasures or torments of love are such that "the squire is so full of
business that he can't spare half-an-hour to write it out." The brief
description of his feelings which follows, conventional, perhaps, to
some extent, has a certain life in it, as if the writer, embittered,
was recalling his own youthful experience.) He knew, too, what to-day
we only know in the mass through the newspapers, that a merchant's
business depends not only upon watching the markets, but upon the
actual supply of material--"what commodities are arrived or expected,"
and whether tea is up 1/2d. or tin 3/4d. down, or if hogs closed firm. The
commercial world changes only its methods of communication and
expression.

The first chapter, indeed, is of genuine historical and literary
interest. From the literary point of view, it is a near
descendant--collateral, if not direct, and anyhow based on the same
English empirical humour of life--of Thomas Overbury's _A Wife_
(1614--only one unique copy of this is known to exist), John Earle's
_Microcosmographie_ (1628), in prose, and Thomas Bastard's
_Chrestoleros_* (1598), in verse. It is an early instance of the
stringing together, in a connected narrative, of the material
previously used only in short sketches or "characters"; and so it is
directl