At that time an open fireplace was seldom seen in Munich, whilst carpets were practically unknown. In the house which my father took there was not even a drugget in any of the rooms, though in other respects they were quite elegantly furnished. The whole life of the place was quaint and old-fashioned—a certain amount of state and magnificence being pervaded by a homely simplicity which would arouse amusement in these more luxurious days. In the early morning or as late as noon, for instance, all of us used to go with my father to the market, where he himself would choose and buy vegetables, fruit, and game, some of which he would stuff into his pockets, whilst the main portion was placed in an enormous basket which two of us would carry, and so would we perambulate the principal streets back to our palace. After a great “chasse” of the king’s a good deal of the spoils used to be put up for public sale, and on these occasions my father would add a man-servant to our marketing party, in order to assist in carrying home, as if in triumph, the roebuck which it was his usual custom to purchase.

Well do I remember the extremely meagre provision which in those days was made on the Continent for the performance of the ordinary ablutions, but even at home in England things were not very much better. Very few country houses had bathrooms, and even where they did exist the hot water had generally to be brought up in cans. Baths, indeed, were considered more as luxuries than as anything else, whilst children, owing to the water being generally cold or at best lukewarm, regarded their weekly tub with dread rather than affection.

That Saturday tubbing of my youth is now, I suppose, in these days of almost universal bathrooms, quite a forgotten function. Modern mechanical arrangements provide a more or less constant supply of hot and cold water, and children are very rightly brought up to regard a daily bath as one of the necessities of life, which was, of course, not the case in the days when can after can of hot water had to be laboriously carried all over the house from the kitchen. Saturday night tubbing was, indeed, a sort of regular English institution, dating, I believe, from the reign of King Henry VIII., who is declared to have performed certain partial ablutions on occasional Saturday evenings, on which occasions His Majesty’s barber, John Penne or Penn, was expected to be in attendance. This John Penn was an ancestor of the famous Quaker who bore the same name, and was a man of some importance in his day.

In the famous picture by Holbein of Henry VIII. delivering a charter to the barbers and surgeons on the occasion of their amalgamation into one body, John Penn stands out as a prominent figure. There is a story, indeed, which, I fancy, rests upon no solid foundation, that the first Sir Robert Peel always expressed the greatest admiration for this painting on account of the fine portrait of the royal barber, and once actually offered the Barbers’ Corporation £2000 to allow him to have it cut out after a copy had been made to put in its place. An even more fantastic legend used to declare that Sir Robert had often expressed an intense desire to be allowed to have a bed made up upon the dining-table of the Barbers’ Company, in order that on awakening in the morning his eyes might rest upon his favourite Penn. The table in question, as a matter of fact, is an ancient dissecting table on which, previous to 1745, the bodies of criminals and malefactors were laid—the executions at Tyburn furnishing the Barber Surgeons’ Company with a constant supply of anatomical specimens.

BATHS AND BATHING

Up to comparatively recent years the country houses, as I have said, which could boast a bathroom were very few in number, whilst in the ’forties and ’fifties, and even later, such conveniences were practically unknown. In some houses, indeed, there were no big baths at all, guests being expected to perform their ablutions in the so-called foot-baths, which were a sort of cross between a wine cooler and a soup tureen. At the same time it must be added that people were probably not so very much dirtier than they are to-day, for the modern practice of lying in hot water need not necessarily be any more cleansing than the vigorous rubbing of a soaped flannel which, in old days, children were taught to apply. I remember going to stay at a country house, shortly after my marriage, where there were no baths at all. However, I determined not to be beaten; I sent to the laundry for a large wooden wash-tub, which was brought up into my bedroom, and answered its purpose uncommonly well.

Some people there were who declared baths to be dangerous, as inducing a tendency to catch constant chills. Untidiness in dress and the like were, on the whole, I think, regarded with more tolerance than is the case to-day—to go even farther back, the beautiful costumes of the eighteenth century, there is reason to believe, in many cases covered people none too careful about their personal toilet. The travelling of the past, when comparatively little luggage could be taken, was rather apt to promote careless habits of dress, and several great travellers were quite notorious for this sort of thing, their economy of linen being regarded with considerable lenience.

I recall to mind a story which used to be told of a celebrated traveller who, almost alone, had made several wonderful journeys into the Far East, and wandered over many strange and wild places on the earth’s surface, in the course of which wanderings he was declared to have contracted a supreme contempt for some of the ordinary ways of civilised society. Careless to a degree, the changing of his shirts appeared to him as nothing but an irksome usage, and, consequently, it was by no means often that a snowy expanse of shirt front graced his breast. On one occasion, when about to visit a country house at which he was to be the lion of the party, his wife, who was not accompanying him, determined that this once at least he should do her honour. The visit was to last three days, and so carefully packing three spotless shirts in his bag, she bade him at their adieu to take particular care to don one of these shirts regularly every evening. The three days passed and her husband returned. “I hope you did as I told you,” said she. “Of course I did, my dear,” was the reply. “I put on a clean shirt every evening, so with the one I started in, that makes four I am wearing at the present moment.”

TRAVELLING IN OLD DAYS

When travelling on the Continent in old days we drove most of the way in our own carriages, which, when we came across the few railways which then existed, were hoisted up on to trucks. This practice was not very agreeable, for one was exposed to many discomforts, and I had always supposed that it had long been totally extinct. This, however, appears not to be the case, for such a mode of railway travelling has been seen in England as recently as the summer of 1889, when, I am informed, the nieces of the late Archdeacon Hindes Groome (the friend of Edward FitzGerald, and a most delightful character, who remembered the rejoicings after Waterloo), saw at Bournemouth Station a large open barouche standing on an ordinary truck at the end of a train which had just arrived. In the carriage sat—quite at their ease with their sunshades up—two elderly ladies. A coachman and footman met the train; the carriage was drawn on to the platform with the ladies still in it, and from thence it was hauled outside the station, where, a pair of horses being quickly harnessed, the whole party, with the addition of a maid who had travelled in a second-class compartment, drove off.