the age prove that it was not unknown. The game might be
concealed from every one if it was desisted from at the moment of the
sermon, and in many cases the clergyman was a pitiful, obsequious
wretch who knew better than to find fault with the gentlefolks "up at
the house." It was not often that a convenient flash of lightning came
in the middle of service to kill the impious gamester in his pew, as
happened, to the immense scandal and solemnization of everybody, at
Withycombe, in Devonshire.

On the whole, it is amusing to find that the same faults and the same
dangers which occupy our satirists to-day were pronounced imminent for
women two hundred years ago. The ladies of Charles II's reign were a
little coarser, a little primmer, a good deal more ignorant than those
of our age. Their manners were on great occasions much better, and on
small occasions much worse, than those of their descendants of 1895;
but the same human nature prevailed. The author of _The Ladies'
Calling_ considered that the greatest danger of his congregation lay
in the fact that "the female Sex is eminent for its pungency in the
sensible passion of love"; and, although we take other modes of saying
it, that is true now.

_Edmund Gosse._

STEELE'S LETTERS

On the 19th of May, 1708, Her Majesty Queen Anne being then upon the
throne of Great Britain and Ireland, a coach with two horses, gaudy
rather than neat in its appointments, drew up at the door of my Lord
Sunderland's office in Whitehall. It contained a lady about thirty, of
considerable personal attractions, and dressed richly in cinnamon
satin. She was a brunette, with a rather high forehead, the height of
which was ingeniously broken by two short locks upon the temples.
Moreover, she had distinctly fine eyes, and a mouth which, in its
normal state, must have been arch and pretty, but was now drawn down
at the corners under the influence of some temporary irritation. As
the coach stopped, a provincial-looking servant promptly alighted,
pulled out from the box-seat a large case of the kind used for
preserving the voluminous periwigs of the period, and subsequently
extracted from the same receptacle a pair of shining new shoes with
square toes and silver buckles. These, with the case, he carried
carefully into the house, returning shortly afterwards. Then ensued
what, upon the stage, would be called "an interval" during which time
the high forehead of the lady began to cloud vi