la-king will
live to perpetuate his name as long as there are chickens to be eaten
and men to eat them. Even Sardou, spectacular dramatist, for all his
_Toscas_ and _Fedoras_ (and ten to one you think of Fedora as a hat!),
lives for me, a dramatic critic, by virtue of eggs Victorien Sardou, a
never-to-be-too-much-enjoyed concoction secured at the old Brevoort
House in New York. He may actually have invented this recipe himself,
for he was a great lover of the pleasures of the table. If so, it was
his masterpiece. An egg is poached on the tender heart of an
artichoke, and garnished with a peculiar yellow sauce, topped with a
truffle. Around all four sides are laid little bunches of fresh
asparagus tips. What is _Tosca_ compared to this?

Then, of course, there was Mr. Baldwin. Who was Mr. Baldwin? The
people of Wilmington, Mass., know, because there is a monument to the
original tree in that town. But we don't know, any more than we know
who Mr. Bartlett was, when we eat one of his pears, or Mr. Logan,
father of the wine-red berry. In this case the Scripture is indeed
verified, that by their fruits shall ye know them.

Two or three times a year my wife gets certain clothes of mine from
the closet and combs them for moths, hangs them flapping in the breeze
for a while, and puts them back. Among the lot is a garment once much
worn by congressmen, church ushers and wedding guests, known to the
fashion editors as "frock coats", and to normal human beings as Prince
Alberts. Doubtless, in the flux of styles (like a pendulum, styles
swing forth and back again), the Prince Albert will once more be
correct, and my wife's labor will not have been in vain, while the
estimable consort of England's haircloth sofa and black-walnut bureau
queen will continue to be remembered of posterity by this outlandish
garment. Poor man, after all, he achieved little else to be remembered
by!

And as for the queen herself, she will be remembered by a state of
mind. Already "mid-Victorian" has little or nothing to do with
Victoria, and is losing its suggestion, even, of a time-period. It is
coming to stand for a mental and moral attitude--in fact, for
priggishness and moral timidity. Queen Victoria was a great and good
lady, and her home life was, as the two women so clearly pointed out
when they left the theatre, totally different from that of Cleopatra.
But she is going to give her name to a mental attitude, just the same,
even as the Philisti