Habits and men, with remnants of record touching the makers of both

by Dr. Doran

ODD FASHIONS.

“Avec ceci finit la comédie; allez-vous-en, gens de la noce, et dites du bien de l’auteur.”—Crispin à la Foire.

The fashion of tattooing has a singular origin. We are indebted for our knowledge thereof to Clearchus, who tells us that the women of Scythia, having seized upon some Thracian women who dwelt in their vicinity, traced on their bodies, by means of needles, certain marks, which the latter could not contemplate without being made very angry. The lady who went down Regent-street the other day with the shop-ticket affixed to her new shawl, and which contained the announcement, “Very chaste, £1. 5s.,” was not half so ridiculous as these poor Thracian ladies, with the etchings about them drawn by their dear Scythian cousins. It does not seem ever to have entered the heads of the victims that they might have concealed their annoyance beneath a garment. They did not wear garments at that time. They however hit upon a device not unworthy of that page of the Duke de Vendôme who, losing his shoulder-knot of ribbons, on being pursued as he was leaving the boudoir of a maid of honour, hurried to the room where his fellow-pages were sleeping and cut the knots off from every laced coat in the apartment, and so escaped detection.

The Thracian women fixed upon as happy an expedient. They so mixed up the tattooed marks with other designs, that the original drawings were entirely lost in the embellishments, like Handel’s airs in a certain lady’s cadences. By this means the characteristic sign of their shame and ignominy was no longer discernible, and the mode of tattooing became a mode indeed in Thrace. A young lady there could not have had a greater compliment paid to her at a ball than to be told that, front and back, her tattooing was in the true style of the Thracian improvement on the Scythian design. The dear creature might blush, but she would feel happily sure that she had made a conquest, and would make all her young friends savage by telling them the secret.

Among the odd dressers of the last century was the celebrated French philosopher and poet, Monsieur de la Condamine. Like George Selwyn, he was an indefatigable attendant at executions. He of course did not forget that of Damiens, the most horrible butchery ever enacted on the Grève, and at which French ladies were present with opera glasses, the better to enjoy the spectacle. Even so wits, philosophers, and “females” honoured the Mannings with their presence, in front of Horsemonger-lane gaol.

Condamine went for ever in search of truth, like Diogenes looking for a man. At the execution of Damiens, he pushed his way close to the dread officers of the law, and there, with his trumpet fastened to his ear (for he was “as deaf as a post”), and his pencil and tablets in his hands, he watched and recorded progress. At each tearing of the flesh by the pincers, or at each blow dealt by the bar which crushed the limbs on which it fell, Condamine exclaimed, “What does he say now? what does he say now?” The satellites of Charlot, the hangman, wished to drive him away as a troublesome fellow, but the executioner civilly remarked that “the gentleman was an amateur, and might stay if he liked.” With all this, De la Condamine was a simple-minded and humane man. In our London streets he produced a great effect; there he walked, dressed as laxly as Sir Simon Slack, and carrying with him a huge umbrella, almost as huge an ear-trumpet, a telescope, a compass, and a map of London permanently unfolded. He questioned everybody he met, but as he did this in English, as he thought, of which he did not comprehend a word, he was exceedingly like a metaphysician, who necessarily does not understand either what he says or what is said to him. His singular appearance in the streets speedily brought a counterfeit presentment of him on the stage, and, from King downwards, all the English actors who played Frenchmen dressed them after the pattern of M. De la Condamine.

As I have above noticed the Paris executioner,—“Monsieur de Paris,” as he used to be called,—I may further remark that the personage who filled that office some twenty years ago was one of the best-dressed and best-informed men I ever met with. He might have been taken for a reverend abbé, who did not deem that the dignity of priest was hurt by uniting with it the joviality of man. He was a man indeed of bloody hands, but he had gentle affections too; and he loved his children, ay, reader, as well as thou lovest thine own.

The Earl of Ferrers, who murdered his steward in 1760, was condemned to be executed for his crime. He had been originally married in a suit of white kerseymere and silver; and he chose to be hung in the same suit, it being as appropriate to one occasion, he said, as the other. Walpole, discerning the effect this might have on fashion, remarks, “I suppose every highwayman will preserve the blue handkerchief he has about his neck when he is married, that he may die like a lord.”

The Earl dated his misfortunes from the day on which he married the sister of Sir William Meredith. He accused the lady of having met him drunk at an assembly, and having kept him so till the ceremony was over. Had he charged her with making him drunk, the lady, who was a faithful wife, might have been more to blame; and as for keeping him drunk afterwards, he was seldom subsequently sober, and had only himself to blame.

This coroneted brute, who was remarkable for his taste in dress, was at once fond and faithless. He kept his Countess in continual fear of her life, beating her by day and threatening to shoot her at night. They were separated; and it was because Johnson, his steward, advanced her some portion of her allowance without the knowledge of the Earl, that the latter shot him at three o’clock in the afternoon, and continued tormenting him till one in the morning, rejoicing to kill him slowly!

After being sentenced by a unanimous vote of the House of Lords, he passed his time in the Tower in playing picquet with the warders; and, like Jerome Cardan, he would not play for pastime, but for money. He drank as much wine as he could get, and then took to beer, for want of something better.

In the procession, which moved from the Tower to Tyburn, this doomed man, in his wedding clothes, was the only person who did not appear affected. His coachman blubbered and the officials looked grave, but the indifferent Lord made comments on the crowd, alluded now and then to the purpose in hand, and had the condescension to acknowledge that he did believe in a God.

As connected with fashion, it may be noticed that the Earl was the first man who suffered by the “new drop.” To travel to the other world by the “Ferrers’ Stage,” of course had its popular and peculiar signification. Let me add, that while he was hanging in white, the sheriffs, in mourning and robes of office, were coolly standing on the scaffold, eating and drinking, and helping up their friends to drink with them. The executioners fought for the rope, and he who lost it cried; “but,” says Walpole, who was not there to see, “the universal crowd behaved with great decency and admiration.”

There is another act to this tragedy. Lady Ferrers subsequently married Lord Frederick Campbell, brother of the Duke of Argyle, at whose seat, Combe Bank, Kent, she was unfortunately burnt to death.

There was about this time another celebrated personage remarkable for her style of dress. We have all heard of “Sappho’s diamonds on her dirty smock,” and Pope’s line does not seem overcharged. “I have seen Lady Mary Wortley Montague,” writes Walpole in 1762; “I think her avarice, her dirt, and her vivacity are all increased. Her dress, like her languages, is a galimatias of several countries; the ground-work rags, and the embroidery nastiness. She needs no cap, no handkerchief, no gown, no petticoat, no shoes. An old black-lace hood represents the first; the fur of a horseman’s coat, which replaces the third, serves for the second; a dimity petticoat is deputy, and officiates for the fourth; and slippers act the part of the last. When I was at Florence, and she was expected there, we drew Sortes Virgilianas for her; we literally drew

‘Insanam vatem aspicies.’

It would have been a stronger prophecy now even than it was then.”

I think it was said of Lady Mary, that, on being once at the French Opera, some one remarked to her, “Mon dieu, Miladi, que vous avez les mains sales!” “Ah!” exclaimed the dirty lady with a conscious pride, “si vous voyiez mes pieds!” This story however is something apocryphal.

The worst feature in Lady Mary was that she was not only dirty as an elderly woman, but had been so as a young one. Two-and-twenty years before Walpole wrote the above account of her, he thus photographed the nymph whom Pope had transiently adored. Walpole met her at Florence in 1740, and there, he says, she was “laughed at by the whole town. Her dress, her avarice, and her impudence must amaze any one that never heard her name. She wears a foul mob that does not cover her greasy black locks, that hang loose, never combed or curled; an old mazarine blue wrapper, that gapes open and discovers a canvas petticoat. Her face swelled violently on one side, with the remains of a ⸺ partly covered with a plaister, and partly with white paint, which, for cheapness, she has bought so coarse, that you would not use it to wash a chimney.”

Spence, who saw this clever and eccentric lady during the following year at Rome, describes her as brilliant, irregular, and erratic as a comet; at once wise and imprudent, “the loveliest, most disagreeable, best-natured, cruellest woman in the world; all things by turns, and nothing long.”

Three foreign travellers in England have pleasantly remarked upon an old custom which would now be considered more honoured in the breach than the observance. The custom alluded to is that of kissing. Chalcondyles, the Greek, who visited our respected ancestors between four and five centuries ago, was highly surprised, delighted, and edified with this novel mode. He says of it:—“As for English females and children, their customs are liberal in the extreme. For instance, when a visitor calls at a friend’s house, his first act is to kiss his friend’s wife; he is then a duly installed guest. Persons meeting in the street follow the same custom, and no one sees anything improper in the action.” Nicander Nucius, another Greek traveller, of a century later, also adverts to this oscillatory fashion. “The English,” he says, “manifest much simplicity and lack of jealousy in their habits and customs as regards females; for not only do members of the same family and household kiss them on the lips with complimentary salutations and enfolding of the arms round the waist, but even strangers when introduced follow the same mode; and it is one which does not appear to them in any degree unbecoming.”

The third commentator is Erasmus, and it is astonishing how lively the Dutchman becomes when expatiating on this ticklish subject. Writing from England to Andrelinus in 1499, he says unctuously:—“They have a custom too which can never be sufficiently commended. On your arrival, you are welcomed with kisses. On your departure, you are sent off with kisses. If you return, the embraces are repeated. Do you receive a visit, your first entertainment is of kisses. Do your guests depart, you distribute kisses amongst them. Wherever you meet them they greet you with a kiss. In short, whichever way you turn, there is nothing but kissing. Ah! Faustus, if you had once tasted the tenderness, the fragrance of these kisses, you would wish to stay in England, not for a ten years’ voyage, like Solon’s, but as long as you lived.”

I leave to the bachelors to pronounce upon the merits of this custom—which must have had its disadvantages too;—a qualified remark which I the more feel bound to make, as, were I to join in the ecstatic laudation of the grave Dutchman,—why, to use Hood’s words,

“I have my fears about my ears, I’m not a single man!”

Let us now turn from English fashions to French incidents. Some years ago, the summer evening habitués of the Champs Elysées used to find amusement in listening to an open-air entertainment of some singularity. A pale, thin, fragile, but bright-eyed and intellectual-looking girl of perhaps ten or twelve years of age used to appear in the most crowded part of the walk, an hour or so before sunset, attended by an old woman who carried a violin, a tin cup, and a carpet. While the girl stood apart for a moment, with something of a rapt look, the old woman spread the carpet, put down the cup at one corner, and scraped a preliminary air upon the violin. The air was not always appropriate to the drama that was to follow, for the favourite overture of the performer was “Ma’m’selle Pinson est une blonde!”—and that was like making “Yankee Doodle” or “Nancy Dawson” pass as introductory symphonies to ‘Hamlet’ or ‘Macbeth.’

However, the orchestra having terminated the prelude, the girl stepped on to the carpet, with the air of a little tragedy queen, and recited long tirades from Racine and Corneille. But then she recited them superbly; and despite her air of suffering and her exceedingly poor attire, she produced such an effect upon her hearers that while she rested, the audience were never weary of filling the cup carried round by the old woman, with sous and half-franc pieces, in order to encourage her to new efforts. The collection was always a large one; and when the delicate-looking child retired, all palpitating and with a flush upon her cheek, of which it were difficult to say whether it were the flush of her own triumph or that of death destined to triumph over her, the acclamations and cordial compliments of her hearers greeted her as she passed.

Well, a winter had gone, and a summer had come, but with it did not come to the loiterers in the Elysian fields the Tragic Muse whom they were disposed and eager to welcome. But during the year a marvellous child appeared on the stage of the Gymnase Dramatique. She came like a meteor and so departed. The truth was, that her friends saw at once that she was too good for that stage, and she was withdrawn, in order to appear on one more classical. Well do I remember that we loiterers in the shady avenues that lead to Neuilly used to dispute, and we youths the loudest of all, as to whether the débutante of the Gymnase was or was not the inspired nymph that used in the public highway to create as much delight as Duchesnois herself before the critical pit of the “Français.”

The dispute was not to be determined by us, and in the meantime we spoke of our absent delight as of a lost Pleiad, and so the year wore away. And then came the eventful night on which a girl, of whom no one had previously heard by the name which she now wore, glided on to the stage of the Théâtre Français, and in a moment awoke French Tragedy out of the shroud in which she had been decently enveloped since Duchesnois had laid her down to die. The name of the girl was Rachel; and so pale and unearthly was she, yet so inspired in her look, so commanding, so irresistible, that every one was not only ready to acknowledge the new sovereign of the tragic throne, but all Paris declared that the Rachel who was now famous for ever was no other than the poor girl who used to stand on a carpet in the Champs Elysées and recite Racine for sous and half-franc pieces.

The lady most concerned maintained a discreet silence, and various were opinions as to the identity. In course of time, however, she seems herself to have cleared up the mystery by one of the prettiest possible and most practical of confessions. As this is a question of evidence, I think it better to let my witness speak rather than myself condense the testimony, and here is the deposition—ce dont il s’agit. I have only first to premise that it is given by Madame Colmache in one of those pleasant Paris letters which used to appear in the ‘Atlas,’ to the great amusement and edification of the readers. The following is a portion of a letter which appeared in February, 1851.

“Rachel’s hôtel in the Rue Trudon is gradually growing into the most exquisite little palace in the world. The long-talked of fête, which was to have been given by the Tragedian upon the occasion of the Mardi Gras, and to which all Paris was intriguing and disputing to get invited, has been postponed sine die, and a literary and poetical festival was offered to her friends instead, on Sunday last. The inauguration of the hôtel took place under the most brilliant auspices. The vast number of rooms contained in the hôtel excited some surprise; the more so as it is formally announced that the fair owner intends for the future to reside entirely alone. ‘By whom will all these apartments be occupied?’ said Alexandre Dumas to Viennet, as they strolled through the long suite of saloons and boudoirs. ‘By the owner’s souvenirs, of course,’ replied the latter. ‘Oh! then I fear they will be terribly crowded,’ replied Alexandre laughing. To those who complain of the sadness of the times and of the sad neglect of art manifested by the public of our own day, a walk through that exquisitely adorned temple, which certainly may rival, both in elegance and richness, the dwelling of Aspasia and the villa of Lais, would be productive of an immediate change of opinion. No expense has been spared upon the decoration of the hôtel; some of the artists who stand highest have not disdained to furnish some of the designs for the moulding; the ceilings are all painted by the greatest masters; and the rich draperies which conceal the walls have all been taught to hang, according to the strictest rules of symmetry, by the great master hand.”

The fête, says the writer, was concluded by an epilogue of great interest; and it is this epilogue which connects the Tragédienne of the “Français,” with the little Thespian of the Champs Elysées. The epilogue is truly described as one displaying a strange and singular aspect of the human heart.

“The soirée had been accepted as one of a purely literary character, and every celebrity appertaining to every branch of literature came, of course. The fair hostess recited in costume every one of her principal tirades, from all the great tragedies wherein she has acquired undying fame, and then withdrew amid the hearty applause and unfeigned expressions of delight of the whole company. Presently she returned before them in a new character to them, but of an old one to herself,—that of a street-singer, her head bound by a Madras handkerchief, her shoulders enveloped in an old Tartan shawl, a cotton petticoat descending just below the knee, and an old guitar slung across her bosom. Her appearance caused an almost painful interest. There was poetry in the whole scene—in the very clatter of her sabots as she passed up the splendid gallery, all hung with looking-glass, and adorned with gilt tripods—in the wooden bowl with the sou at the bottom, which she rattled as she stepped forward with a melancholy smile. She walked straight to the head of the gallery, and standing motionless for a moment, began the ballad which she had sung the last of all before she was summoned from the street to the stage, from rags and poverty, to glory, influence, and riches. By a singular coincidence, this ballad happened to be the same formerly sung in ‘Fanchon la Veilleuse,’—‘Elle a quitté,’—relating how Fanchon had left her humble home for wealth and grandeur, and how she was gradually pining amidst the splendour of her lot for the love and liberty she had once enjoyed. The voice of the singer, perhaps from fatigue, perhaps from emotion, was low and faltering, and produced an effect such as not the most powerful of her tirades from Racine or Corneille has ever been able to produce,—tears from her audience. This incident will long be remembered by those who witnessed it.”

No doubt; and the writer might have added a closing incident which is said to have followed the song, namely, that the singer, or reciter, for even her songs were recited, as every one will remember who has witnessed her ‘Lycisca’ in the high-coloured tragedy of ‘Valeria,’—having terminated her song, carried round the little cup or bowl, as of yore, only this time intimating to those to whom her trembling hand extended it—“It is for the poor!” But to revert to older, as well as odder fashions.

The consequences of the treaty which the Colophonians made with the Lydians, will serve to show that alliances are not necessarily advantageous to the weaker party. The Colophonians were an austere people. They were the Quakers of antiquity, and Mr. Bright himself might admire them. But no sooner were they united with the Lydians than Colophon became full of Lydian milliners, tailors, jewellers, and hairdressers, and the reign of simplicity was over for ever. Prior to this a Colophonian woman no more thought about her dress than did Maria Theresa, who, on being told that she was a grandmother, rushed into the neighbouring Opera-house, in her flannel nightdress and huge nightcap, in which she looked like Mrs. Gamp, and announced to the ecstatic audience that an heir was born to the greatness of Hapsburg Lorraine.

The Colophonians were once as careless of appearances, but now, men and women, they all adopted Lydian fashions. In one day, a thousand of the former, who had never known what a mantle was before, were seen on the public place, as proud of their jaunty purple cloaks as Rubini of his ‘Almaviva.’ Men and women alike had a gold ornament at the end of every lock of hair; and as for perfume, it was used to such an extent that for miles round the air was full of it, and the Lydian Atkinsons toiled in vain to meet the demand by supply.

Extravagance in dress has brought many a family to two-and-sixpence in the pound, but it ruined Miletus outright. The rich people there not only impoverished themselves by their incredible extravagance in finery, worse than our ancestors at the Field of the Cloth of Gold, who wore whole estates upon their backs, but they despised the poor, who were offensive to them for their homely fashions and rough tongues. Well, these extravagant persons became insolent and helpless, or what we should now call so; and the poor then sued them after the fashion of men who knew not of Bankruptcy Courts. They expelled the old oppressors, but they seized their children; and confining them in different granges, caused them to be trodden to death by the oxen used for treading out the corn. The rich however returned in strength, and seizing the poor men, women, and children, they covered them with pitch and put light to them,—so leaving them to perish. The sacred olive-tree in the Temple was so disgusted at both parties that it set fire to itself, and died of spontaneous combustion. The colour of its crackling leaves became a favourite one with religious persons; and a “robe feuille-morte” was as much in vogue in the district as it more recently was in Paris and the provinces.

There are some very odd “habits” about some of the swarthy potentates of torrid Africa. Of these I can however mention but the following:—The territory of Damagram, in Central Africa, is inhabited by the wildest of the African races. The method of supplying the slave-market there is truly nefarious. If the Sultan of Zinder wants goar nuts for his dessert, or calico to make what the good King Dagobert had so much difficulty in adjusting to his royal person, and if he has no money to purchase them, he sends his officials to a neighbouring village, in open day, to steal two or three families and bring them to the Sultan. These families are immediately exchanged for the goar nuts or the calico, and the swarthy tailor who makes up the royal suit perhaps reflects, as he sews, that the stuff has cost two or three living cousins, whose fate it is to be sent beyond the Atlantic to raise more cotton, that shall find its way again to the African tailors’ hands, after it has been paid for with more human flesh. It is not all the African chiefs that care to be dressed in calico. The Marghi, for instance, give little employment for tailors: their dress consists of a simple band of leather passed between their loins and fixed round their girdle. When this and a profusion of neatly-made rings of iron and ivory are fixed on the arms and legs, the Marghi gentlemen are dressed for the day.

The oddest of fashions or dresses was one which was once adopted by the rich but parsimonious Fountayn Wilson, the wealthy but thrifty landowner of Yorkshire. When loyal gentlemen were raising militia companies during the late war, Mr. Wilson not only followed the fashion, but he bought, at a low rate, a quantity of grey cloth, in the expectation that Government would purchase it at an advanced price, and so put a profit into Fountayn’s pocket. He was disappointed, but he consoled himself by wearing nothing for years but dresses made out of this coarse militia grey. But London once saw him in a stranger dress than this.

Mr. Wilson, having accepted an invitation to dinner on a day whereon he had to attend as member of a committee of the House of Commons, ordered his servant to bring down to the house at six o’clock, a change of dress, and a hackney coach, in which he said he would effect the change as he rode in it. Ablution he did not think about; but if his old black coat would do to dine in, he felt bound to change his nether garment. He had just reached the Horse Guards, and he had just taken off his trousers, and was about to put his legs into the other pair, when crack! went the axle-tree, and down came the coach! An officious mob assembled to lend help; but when they beheld an embarrassed gentleman with two pairs of trousers, and neither of them on, great was their astonishment, and loudly did they publish the fact. Poor Fountayn sat helpless and victimized, till a good-natured officer who was passing, and knew the eccentric M.P., released him, by claiming him as a relative; and as he led him covered with a cloak through the shrieking crowd, he calmed the laughers into silence by significantly pointing with his finger to his forehead,—which seemed to imply that they ought to have compassion on the infirmity of an imbecile gentleman, so well provided with garments and so apparently indifferent as to their use.

If Oliver Goldsmith went up in red plush breeches to be ordained by a bishop, the celebrated Daniel Webster once appeared in as singular a costume, considering the occasion on which he wore it. The time had come when he was required to leave his old home at Elms Farm, to visit Dartmouth College, for the purpose of being matriculated. A neighbour, in honest zeal for his credit, made for him a complete new suit of clothes,—all of homespun cloth,—the colour “deeply, darkly, beautifully blue.” Thus attired, he set off on horseback; and he had not got far on his way when a storm suddenly overtook him, to which he was exposed for many hours. The river in his way became swollen, the bridge was destroyed by the freshet, and he was obliged to ride many miles round ere he could again strike into a direct path. The rain descended in ceaseless torrents during the whole time. The homespun suit was not made of fast colour. The rain sank into the cloth, and the indigo-blue, politely making way for it, soaked off into the shirt and skin of the young student. His features too partook of the general hue, and when the scholar reached Hanover, he was dyed blue from head to foot. Like Essex, when he came travel-soiled from Ireland, and proceeded to an interview with Queen Elizabeth, he went straight before the college authorities; without wiping—indeed he could not wipe the now fixed cerulean from his face, neck, and hands. Every shade of blue, and all moist, could be seen upon his clothes, the darker deposit upon his flesh. “Who is he?” asked one. “At home,” said he, laughing, “they call me black Dan; here I appear as blue Dan!—and trouble enough have I had to arrive among you; but you see me as I am, in a condition which, if it does not entitle me to your approbation, should at least secure for me your sympathy.” Daniel suffered no disparagement by appearing before his grave seniors like a man who had been dyeing all his life. He passed the dreaded ordeal with honour, and the wits said that he had no reason to be discontented with the storm which blew him into a port where honour and welcome attended him; at the same time they advised him not to stick to the colour, and proposed to him a thesis, which should have for its device, “Nimium ne fide colori.” “Ne fide colori!” I hear re-echoed by my readers; “‘Ne fide nimium patientiæ,’ Sirrah; do not super-abuse our patience.” Be it so, ever-courteous Public. Pauca verba, as Pistol has it, is a good maxim, particularly when one has nothing more to say. I will conclude, not only with the sentiment I promised, but also with something more valuable,—a recipe to keep you from ever getting wet through. A barrister was once bewailing to Mr. Cresswell, when the latter was also at the Bar, that on going down to Salisbury, outside the mail, he had got his clothes completely wet through. “That calamity need never befall a man, however exposed,” said Mr. Cresswell. “Why,” said the other, “what is he to do?” “Do!” exclaimed the elder practitioner, “why, he has nothing in the world to do but to take off his clothes and sit upon them!”

And now for the sentiment, in which my readers will find a value greater than that which attaches to the recipe for keeping a suit dry. Hear what Cowper says:—

“We sacrifice to dress, till household joys

And comforts cease. Dress drains our cellars dry,

And keeps our larder bare; puts out our fires,

And introduces hunger, frost, and woe,

Where peace and hospitality might reign.”

Well, I will not moralize upon this truth. I should become more unwelcome than Joseph Surface himself; but I will say this, that Cowper’s lines are as applicable now as they were of old, and in that they are so do I distinguish the cause why on many careers joyously begun, there descends so dismal and so dreary a

FINIS.

JOHN EDWARD TAYLOR, PRINTER,
LITTLE QUEEN STREET, LINCOLN’S INN FIELDS.

NEW AND CHEAP PUBLICATIONS.

The Volumes now Ready are:

I.

SAM SLICK, THE CLOCKMAKER. 1 Vol. Price 5s.

II.

SAM SLICK, THE ATTACHÉ. 1 Vol. Price 5s.

III.

SAM SLICK’S LETTER-BAG OF THE GREAT WESTERN. 1 Vol. Price 2s. 6d.

IV.

CAPTAIN MARRYAT’S MONSIEUR VIOLET. 1 Vol. Price 3s. 6d.

V.

CAPTAIN MARRYAT’S OLLA PODRIDA. 1 Vol. Price 3s. 6d.

VI.

MRS. TROLLOPE’S DOMESTIC MANNERS OF AMERICA. 1 Vol. Price 3s. 6d.

VII.

PADDIANA; OR, IRISH LIFE. 1 Vol. Price 3s. 6d.

VIII.

SALAD FOR THE SOLITARY. By an Epicure. 1 Vol. Price 3s. 6d.

IX.

ROBERT CHAMBERS’S HISTORY OF SCOTLAND. 1 Vol. Price 3s. 6d.

X.

SMITH’S TRADITIONS OF THE STREETS OF LONDON. 1 Vol. Price 3s. 6d.

XI.

MAXWELL’S WILD SPORTS OF THE WEST. 1 Vol. Price 3s. 6d.

XII.

COL. CUNYNGHAME’S SERVICE IN CHINA. 1 Vol. Price 5s.

XIII.

FAIRHOLT’S ECCENTRIC CHARACTERS. 1 Vol. Price 2s. 6d.

XIV.

MAXWELL’S CZAR, HIS COURT, AND PEOPLE. 1 Vol. Price 2s. 6d.

XV.

MEMOIRS OF THEODORE HOOK. 1 Vol. Price 5s.

XVI.

HON. MRS. NORTON’S UNDYING ONE. 1 Vol. Price 2s. 6d.

XVII.

CHALMERIANA; OR, COLLOQUIES WITH DR. CHALMERS. By J. J. Gurney. 1 Vol. Price 2s. 6d.

XVIII.

BRACE’S HOME LIFE IN GERMANY. 1 Vol. Price 5s.

XIX.

HISTORY OF CHINA. 1 Vol. Price 5s.

XX.

MRS. SINNETT’S BYEWAYS OF HISTORY. 1 Vol. Price 5s.

XXI.

DR. DORAN’S TABLE TRAITS, WITH SOMETHING ON THEM. 1 Vol. Price 6s.

XXII.

RADCLIFFE’S FIENDS, GHOSTS, AND SPRITES. 1 Vol. Price 3s. 6d.

RICHARD BENTLEY, NEW BURLINGTON STREET.