UP-TO-DATE MISOGYNY

“Of sa great faith and charitie,With mutuall love and amitie:That I wat an mair heavenly life,Was never betweene man and wife.”

It was doubtless with Master Merrill as with the subject of an encomium of Charles Lamb’s. “Though bred a Presbyterian,” says Lamb of Joseph Paice,“and brought up a merchant, he was the finest gentleman of his time.”

In May, 1767, when this sharer of humble fortune lay down to rest, the Stamp Act had been repealed but fourteen months. The eyes of the world were upon Pitt and Burke and Townshend—and Franklin whose memorable examination before the House of Commons was then circulating as a news pamphlet. The social gossip of the day—as Lady Sarah Lennox’s wit recounts—had no more recognition of the villagers than George the Fourth.

But American sinews and muscles such as these hidden on the Litchfield Hills were growing in daily strength by helpful, human exercise, and their “well-lined braine” was reasoning upon the Declaratory Act that “Parliament had power to bind the colonies in all cases whatsoever.”

Another stone a few paces away has quite another story:

“Here lies the body of Mr. Stephen Kelsey, whodied April 2, 1745, in ye71 year of his ageas you are so was weas we are you must be”

The peculiarities of this inscription were doubtless the stone-cutter’s; and peradventure it was in the following way that the rhymes—already centuries old in 1745 when Stephen Kelsey died—came to be upon his headstone.

The carver of the memorial was undeniably a neighbor and fellow-husbandman to the children of Mr. Stephen Kelsey. Money-earning opportunities were narrow and silver hard to come by in the pioneering of the Litchfield Hills, and only after scrupulous saving had the Kelsey family the cost of the headstone at last in hand. It was then that they met to consider an epitaph.

Their neighbor bespoken to work the stone was at the meeting, and to open the way and clear his memory hescratched the date of death upon a tablet or shingle his own hand had riven.

“Friend Stephen’s death,” he began, “calleth to mind a verse often sculptured in the old church-yard in Leicestershire, a verse satisfying the soul with the vanity of this life, and turning our eyes to the call from God which is to come. It toucheth not the vexations of the world which it were vain to deny are ever present. You carry it in your memory mayhap, Mistress Remembrance?” the stone-master interrupting himself asked, suddenly appealing to a sister of Master Kelsey.

Mistress Remembrance, an elderly spinster whose lover having in their youth taken the great journey to New York, and crossed the Devil’s Stepping-Stones—which before the memory of man some netherworld force laid an entry of Manhattan Island—had never again returned to the Litchfield Hills—Mistress Remembrance recalled theverses, and also her brother, Master Stephen’s, sonorous repetition of them.

In this way it came about that the mourning family determined they should be engraven. And there the lines stand to-day in the hills’ beautiful air—far more than a century since the hour when Mistress Remembrance and the stone-cutter joined the celestial choir in which Master Stephen was that very evening singing.

But another headstone—

“With uncouth rhymes and shapeless sculpture decked”—

quite outdoes Master Kelsey’s in strange English phrase. It reads:

“Michel son of John Spencerdied Jan ye 24th1756 in ye10thyear of his age.Death Conquers AllBoth young and OldTho’ ne’er so wiseDiscreet and BoldIn helth and Strengththis youth did Diein a moment without one Cry.”

And still another perpetuates the record of the same family:

In Memory ofMr John Spencer WhoDied June ye24th1780 in the 70thYear of his AgeIn Memory of SubmitSpencer Daughter of MrJohn and Mrs MarySpencer Who DiedNovbrye21th1755 in ye1stYear of her AgeOh Cruel Death to fill thisNarrow space In yonderHouse Made a vast emty place

Was the child called “Submit” because born a woman! Or did the parents embody in the name their own spiritual history of resignation to the eternal powers?—“to fill this narrow space, in yonder house made a vast empty place.”

Farther up the slope of this God’sAcre a shaft standing high in the soft light mourns the hazards of our passage through the world.

In Memory of Mr.Jeduthun Goodwin whoDied Feb 13th1809 Aged40 YearsAlso Mrs. Eunice hisWife who died August 6th1802 Aged 33 YearsDangers stand thickthrough all the GroundTo Push us to the TombAnd fierce diseasesWait aroundTo hurry Mortals home

Every village has its tragedy, alas! and that recounted in this following inscription is at least one faithful record of terrifying disaster. Again it seems at variance with the moral order of the world that these quiet fields should witness the terror this tiny memorial hints at. The stone is quite out of plumb andmoss-covered, but underneath the lichen it reads:

“Phebe, wife of Ezekiel Markham Died Jyly 14,1806 Ae 49Also their 3 Sons Bela, Ciba, and Brainad wasburnt to Death in Oct 1793”“In the midst of life we are dead”

The mother lived nearly thirteen years after. There is no neighboring record of the father. Perhaps the two migrated after the fearful holocaust, and he only returned to place his wife’s body beside the disfigured remains of her little ungrown men. Bela, Ciba, and Brainard rested lonesomely doubtless those thirteen waiting years, and many a night must their little ghosts have sat among the windflowers and hepaticas of spring, or wandered midst the drifted needles of the pines in the clear moonlight of summer, athirst for the mother’s soul of comfort and courage.

Again in this intaglio “spelt by th’unlettered Muse” rises the question of the stone-cutter’s knowledge of his mother tongue. The church of the dead villagers still abides. But nowhere are seen the remains of a school-house. Descendants of the cutter of Master Kelsey’s headstone haply had many orders.

The sun of Indian summer upon the fallen leaves brings out their pungent sweetness. Except the blossoms of the subtle witch-hazel all the flowers are gone. The last fringed gentian fed by the oozing spring down the hill-side closed its blue cup a score of days ago. Every living thing rests. The scene is filled with a strange sense of waiting. And above is the silence of the sky.

With such influences supervening upon their lives, these people of the early village—undisturbed as they were by any world call, and gifted with a fervid and patient faith—must daily have grown in consciousness of a homelyPresence ever reaching under their mortality the Everlasting Arm.

This potency abides, its very feeling is in the air above these graves—that some good, some divine is impendent—that the soul of the world is outstretching a kindred hand.

In the calm and other-worldliness of their hill-top the eternal moralities of the Deuteronomy and of Sophocles stand clearer to human vision—the good that is mighty and never grows gray,—μέγας ἐν τούτοις θεὸς, οὐδὲ γηράσχει.

The comings and goings, the daily labors, the hopes and interests of these early dwellers make an unspeakable appeal—their graves in the church-yard, the ruined foundations of their domestic life beyond—that their output of lives and years of struggle bore no more lasting local fruit, however their seed may now be scattered to the upbuilding of our South and West, the conversion of China, and our ordering of the Philippines.

And yet, although their habitations are fallen, they—such men and women as they—still live. Their hearts, hands, and heads are in all institutions of ours that are free. A great immortality, surely! If such men and women had been less severe, less honest, less gifted for conditions barren of luxuries, less elevated with an enthusiasm for justice, less clear in their vision of the eternal moralities, less simple and direct, less worthy inheritors of the great idea of liberty which inflamed generations of their ancestors, it is not possible that we should be here to-day doing our work to keep what they won and carry their winnings further. Their unswerving independence in thought and action and their conviction that the finger of God pointed their way—their theocratic faith, their lifted sense of God-leading—made possible the abiding of their spirit long after their material body lay spent.

So it is that upon the level top of the Litchfield Hills—what with the decay of the material things of life and the divine permanence of the spiritual—there is a resting-place of the Blessed—an Island of the Blessed as the old Greeks used to say—an abode of heroes fallen after strong fighting and enjoying rest forever.

He is the half part of a blessed manLeft to be finished by such a she;And she a fair divided excellence,Whose fulness of perfection lies in him.Shakespeare

If a man recognise in woman any quality which transcends the qualities demanded in a plaything or handmaid—if he recognise in her the existence of an intellectual life not essentially dissimilar to his own, he must, by plainest logic, admit that life to express itself in all its spontaneous forms of activity.George Eliot

Hard the task: your prison-chamberWidens not for lifted latchTill the giant thews and sinewsMeet their Godlike overmatch.George Meredith

“I hate every woman!” cries Euripides, in keen iambics in a citation of the Florilegium of Stobæus. The sentiment was not new with Euripides—unfortunately. Before him there was bucolic Hesiod with his precepts on wife-choosing. There was Simonides of Amorgos, who in outcrying the degradation of the Ionian women told the degradation of the Ionian men. There was Hipponax, who fiercely sang “two days on which a woman gives a man most pleasure—the day he marries her and the day he buries her.”

And along with Euripides was Aristophanes, the radiant laughter-lover, the titanic juggler with the heavens above and earth and men below—Aristophanes who flouted the women ofAthens in his “Ecclesiazusæ,” and in the “Clouds” and his “Thesmophoriazusæ.” Thucydides before them had named but one woman in his whole great narrative, and had avoided the mention of women and their part in the history he relates.

“Woman is a curse!” cried Susarion. The Jews had said it before, when they told the story of Eve—

“Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruitOf that forbidden tree whose mortal tasteBrought death into the world, and all our woe.”

Down through many centuries our forebears cast to and fro the same sentiment—in spite of the introduction into life and literature of the love of men for women and women for men; in spite of the growth of romantic love. You find misogynous expression among the Latins. In early “Church Fathers,” such as St. John Chrysostom, you come upon it in grossest form. Woman is“a necessary ill,” cried the Golden Mouthed, “a natural temptation, a wished-for calamity, a household danger, a deadly fascination, a bepainted evil.”

You see the sentiment in the laws of church and of kingdom. You sight its miasm in the gloaming and murk of the Middle Ages, amid the excesses which in shame for it chivalry affected and exalted. You read it by the light of the awful fires that burnt women accessory to the husband’s crime—for which their husbands were merely hanged. You see it in Martin Luther’s injunction to Catherine von Bora that it ill became his wife to fasten her waist in front—because independence in women is unseemly, their dress should need an assistant for its donning. You chance upon it in old prayers written by men, and once publicly said by men for English queens to a God “which for the offence of the first woman hast threatenedunto all women a common, sharp, and inevitable malediction.”

You find the sentiment in Boileau’s satire and in Pope’s “Characters.” You open the pages of the Wizard of the North, who did for his own generations what Heliodorus and his chaste Chariclea accomplished for the fourth century, and you come upon Walter Scott singing in one of his exquisite songs—

“Woman’s faith, and woman’s trust,Write the characters in dust.”

All such sad evidences, it should be borne in mind, are but the reverse of the fair picture with which men have regarded women. But because there is a reverse side, and its view has entered and still enters largely into human life, human estimates, and human fate, it should be spoken about openly. Women and men inexperienced in the outer world of affairs do not realize its still potent force.

As for the subject of these gibes, for ages they were silent. During many generations, in the privacy of their apartments, the women must have made mute protests to one another. “These things are false,” their souls cried. But they took the readiest defence of physical weakness, and they loved harmony. It was better to be silent than to rise in bold proof of an untruth and meet rude force.

Iteration and dogmatic statement of women’s moral inferiority, coupled as it often was with quoted text and priestly authority, had their inevitable effect upon more sensitive and introspective characters; it humiliated and unquestionably deprived many a woman of self-respect. Still, all along there must have been a less sensitive, sturdier, womanhood possessed of the perversive faith of Mrs. Poyser, that “heaven made ’em to match the men,” that—“Together, dwarfed or godlike, bond or free,”—men and women rise or sink; that, in fact, the interests of the two are inseparable and wholly identical. To broad vision misogynous expression seems to set in antagonism forces united by all the mighty powers of human evolution throughout millions of years, and the whole plan of God back of that soul-unfolding.

The misogynous song and story of our forebears with momentous fall descended and became the coarse newspaper quip which a generation ago whetted its sting upon women—“Susan B. Anthonys”—outspoken and seeking more freedom than social prejudices of their day allowed. An annoying gnat, it has in these days been almost exterminated by diffusion of the oil of fairness and better knowledge.

But even yet periodicals at times give mouth to the old misogyny. Such an expression, nay, two, are published in otherwise admirable pages, and withthese we have to do. They are from the pen of a man of temperament, energy, vigorous learning, and an “esurient Genie” for books—professor of Latin in one of our great universities, where misogynous sentiment has found expression in lectures in course and also in more public delivery.

The first reverse phrase is of “the neurotic caterwauling of an hysterical woman.” Cicero’s invective and pathos are said to be perilously near that perturbance.

Now specialists in nervous difficulties have not yet determined there is marked variation between neurotic caterwauling of hysterical women and neurotic caterwauling of hysterical men. Cicero’s shrieks—for Cicero was what is to-day called “virile,” “manly,” “strenuous,” “vital”—Cicero’s would naturally approximate the men’s.

To normally tuned ears caterwaulings are as unagreeable as misogynouswhoops—waulings of men as cacophonous as waulings of women. Take an instance in times foregone. In what is the megalomaniac whine of Marie Bashkirtseff’s “Journal” more unagreeable than the egotistical vanity of Lord Byron’s wails? Each of these pen people may be viewed from another point. More generously any record—even an academic misogyny—is of interest and value because expressing the idiosyncratic development or human feeling of the world.

But, exactly and scientifically speaking, neurotic and hysteric are contradictory terms. Neurotic men and women are described by physicians as self-forgetting sensitives—zealous, executive; while the hysterics of both sexes are supreme egotists, selfish, vain, and vague, uncomfortable both in personal and literary contact—just like wit at their expense. “If we knew all,” said George Eliot, who was never hysterical,“we would not judge.” And Paul of Tarsus wrote wisely to those of Rome, “Therefore thou art inexcusable, O man, whosoever thou art, that judgest.”

Science nowadays declares that the man who wears a shirt-collar cannot be well, and equally the same analytic spirit may some day make evident that neurosis and hysteria are legacies of a foredone generation, who found the world out of joint and preyed upon its strength and calmness of nerve to set things right. Humaneness and fair estimate are remedies to-day’s dwellers upon the earth can offer, whether the neurosis and hysteria be Latin or Saxon, men’s or indeed women’s.

The second of the phrases to which we adverted tells of “the unauthoritative young women who make dictionaries at so much a mile.” It has the smack of the wit of the eighteenth century—of Pope’s studied and never-ceasinggibes at Lady Mary Wortley Montagu after she had given him the mitten; of Dr. Johnson’s “female day” and his rumbling thunder over “the freaks and humors and spleen and vanity of women”—he of all men who indulge in freaks and humors and spleen and vanity!—whose devotion to his bepainted and bedizened old wife was the talk of their literary London.

We are apt to believe the slurs that Pope, Johnson, and their self-applauding colaborers cast upon what they commonly termed “females” as deterrent to their fairness, favor, and fame. The high-noted laugh which sounded from Euphelia’s morning toilet and helped the self-gratulation of those old beaux not infrequently grates upon our twentieth century altruistic, neurotic sensibilities.

But to return to our lamb. An unauthoritative young woman, we suppose, is one who is not authoritative, who hasnot authority. But what confers authority? Assumption of it? Very rarely anything else—even in the case of a college professor. We have in our blessed democracy no Academy, no Sanhedrim, no keeper of the seal of authority—and while we have not we keep life, strength, freedom in our veins. The young woman “who makes dictionaries at so much a mile” may be—sometimes is—as fitted for authority and the exercise of it as her brother. Academic as well as popular prejudices, both springing mainly from the masculine mind, make him a college professor, and her a nameless drudge exercising the qualities women have gained from centuries of women’s life—sympathetic service with belittling recognition of their work, self-sacrifice, and infinite care and patience for detail.

Too many of our day, both of men and women, still believe with old John Knox—to glance back even beyond Johnsonand Pope—and his sixteenth century “First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women”—a fine example of hysterical shrieking in men, by the way. With the loving estimate of Knox’s contemporary, Mr. John Davidson, we heartily agree when he sings—

“For weill I wait that Scotland never bure,In Scottis leid ane man mair Eloquent,Into perswading also I am sure,Was nane in Europe that was mair potent.In Greik and Hebrew he was excellent,And als in Latine toung his propernes,Was tryit trym quhen scollers wer present.Bot thir wer nathing till his uprichtnes.”

We admire Knox’s magnificent moral courage and the fruits of that courage which the Scots have long enjoyed, and yet anent the “cursed Jesabel of England,” the “cruell monstre Marie,” Knox cries: “To promote a Woman to beare rule, superiorite, dominion, orempire ... is repugnant to Nature, contumelie to God, a thing most contrarious to his revealed will and approved ordinance”—just as if he, John Knox, knew all about God’s will and Nature’s designs. What pretence, John! But John took it upon himself to say he did. Heassumed; and time and events have proved that it was sheer assumption on John’s part. I doubt, were he now here, if he would let a modest, bread-earning woman even make dictionaries at so much a mile—nothing beyond type-writing, surely. He would probably assume authority and shriek hysterically that anything beyond the finger-play of type-writing is repugnant to Nature and contrarious to God.

There was a Mrs. John Knox; there were two in fact—ribs.

“That servent faithfull servand of the Lord” took the first slip of a girl when near his fiftieth year, long after he had left the celibate priesthood; and thesecond, a lass of sixteen, when he was fifty-nine. They took care of John, a mother-in-law helping, and with service and money gave him leisure to write. The opinions of the dames do not appear in their husband’s hysteria. “I use the help of my left hand,” dictated Knox when one of these girl-wives was writing for him a letter.

With the young women we are considering there is this eternal variation from John Knox and his hysterical kin, Celt, Saxon, or Latin—she does not assume authority. Consequently she makes dictionaries at so much a mile. Such word-spinning was at one time done by drudge men—men who had failed mayhap in the church, or in law, or had distaste for material developments or shame for manual work. Now, with women fortified by the learning their colleges afford, it is oftenest done by drudge women. The law of commerce prevails—women gain the taskbecause they will take much less a mile than men. Men offer them less than they would dare offer a man similarly equipped.

But why should our brothers who teach sophomores at so much a year fleer? even if the woman has got the job! Does not this arrangement afford opportunity for a man to affix his name to her work? In unnumbered—and concealed—instances. We all remember how in the making of the —— dictionary the unauthoritative woman did the work, and the unauthoritative man wrote the introduction, and the authoritative man affixed his name to it. We all remember that, surely. Then there is the — — —; and the — —. We do not fear to mention names, we merely pity and do not—and we nurse pity because with Aristotle we believe that it purifies the heart. With small knowledge of the publishing world, I can count five such make-ups as I here indicate. In one case an authoritativewoman did her part of the work under the explicit agreement that her name should be upon the title-page. In the end, by a trick, in order to advertise the man’s, it appeared only in the first edition. Yet this injustice in nowise deprived her of a heart of oak.

The commercial book-building world, as it at present stands—the place where they write dictionaries and world’s literatures at so much a mile—is apt to think a woman is out in its turmoil for her health, or for sheer amusement; not for the practical reasons men are. An eminent opinion declared the other day that they were there “to get a trousseau or get somebody to get it for ’em.” Another exalted judgment asserted, “The first thing they look round the office and see who there is to marry.”

This same world exploits her labor; it pays her a small fraction of what it pays a man engaged in the identical work; it seizes, appropriates, and sometimesgrows rich upon her ideas. It never thinks of advancing her to large duties because of her efficiency in small. She is “only a woman,” and with Ibsen’s great Pillar of Society the business world thinks she should be “content to occupy a modest and becoming position.” The capacities of women being varied, would not large positions rightly appear modest and becoming to large capacities?

For so many centuries men have estimated a woman’s service of no money value that it is hard, at the opening of the twentieth, to believe it equal to even a small part of a man’s who is doing the same work. In one late instance a woman at the identical task of editing was paid less than one-fortieth the sum given her colaborer, a man, whose products were at times submitted to her for revision and correction. In such cases the men are virtually devouring the women—not quite so openly, yet astruly, as the Tierra del Fuegians of whom Darwin tells: when pressed in winter by hunger they choke their women with smoke and eat them. In our instance just cited the feeding upon was less patent, but the choking with smoke equally unconcealed.

The very work of these so-called unauthoritative women passes in the eyes of the world uninstructed in the present artfulness of book-making as the work of so-called authoritative men. It is therefore authoritative.

Not in this way did the king-critic get together his dictionary. Johnson’s work evidences his hand on every page and almost in every paragraph. But things are changed from the good old times of individual action. We now have literary trusts and literary monopolies. Nowadays the duties of an editor-in-chief may be to oversee each day’s labor, to keep a sharp eye upon the “authoritative” men and “unauthoritative”women whose work he bargained for at so much a mile, and, when they finish the task, to indite his name as chief worker.

Would it be reasonable to suppose that—suffering such school-child discipline and effacement—those twentieth century writers nourished the estimate of “booksellers” with which Michael Drayton in the seventeenth century enlivened a letter to Drummond of Hawthornden?—“They are a company of base knives whom I both scorn and kick at.”

It is under such conditions as that just cited that we hear a book spoken of as if it were a piece of iron, not a product of thought and feeling carefully proportioned and measured; as if it were the fruit of a day and not of prolonged thought and application; as if it could be easily reproduced by the application of a mechanical screw; as if it were a bar of lead instead of far-reaching wings to minister good; as if it were a thingto step upon rather than a thing to reach to; as if it could be cut, slashed, twisted, distorted, instead of its really forming an organic whole with the Aristotelian breath of unity, and the cutting or hampering of it would be performing a surgical operation which might entirely let out its breath of life.

Until honor is stronger among human beings—that is, until the business world is something other than a maelstrom of hell—it is unmanly and unwomanly to gibe at the “unauthoritative” young woman writing at so much a mile. She may be bearing heavy burdens of debt incurred by another. She may be supporting a decrepit father or an idle brother. She is bread-earning. Oftenest she is gentle, and, like the strapped dog which licks the hand that lays bare his brain, she does not strike back. But she has an inherent sense of honesty and dishonesty, and she knows what justice is. Her knowledge of life, the residuumof her unauthoritative literary experience, shows her the rare insight and truth of Mr. Howells when he wrote, “There isnohappy life for a woman—except as she is happy in suffering for those she loves, and in sacrificing herself to their pleasure, their pride, and ambition. The advantage that the world offers her—and it does not always offer her that—is her choice in self-sacrifice.”

Ten to one—a hundred to one—the young woman is “unauthoritative” because she is not peremptory, is not dictatorial, assumes no airs of authority such as swelling chest and overbearing manners, is sympathetic with another’s egotism, is altruistic, is not egotistical with the egotism that is unwilling to cast forth its work for the instructing and furthering of human kind unless it is accompanied by the writer’s name—a “signed article.” She is not selfish and guarding the ego. Individual fame seems to her view an ephemeral thing,but the aggregate good of mankind for which she works, eternal.

The beaux of that century of Dr. Johnson’s were great in spite of their sneers and taunts at the Clarindas and Euphelias and Fidelias, not on account of them. We have no publication which is to our time as the “Rambler” was to London in 1753, or the “Spectator,” “Tatler,” and “Englishman” to Queen Anne’s earlier day. But in what we have let us not deface any page with misogynous phrase and sentence—jeers or expression of evil against one-half of humanity. Unsympathetic words about women who by some individual fortune have become literary drudges fit ill American lips—which should sing the nobility of any work that truly helps our kind. These women go about in wind and rain; they sit in the foul air of offices; they overcome repugnance to coarse and familiar address; they sometimes stint their food; they are at all times practising aclose economy; with aching flesh and nerves they often draw their Saturday evening stipend. They are of the sanest and most human of our kind—laborers daily for their meed of wage, knowing the sweetness of bread well earned, of work well done, and rest well won.

Even from the diseased view of a veritable hater of their sex they have a vast educational influence in the world at large, whether their work is “authoritative” or “unauthoritative,” according to pronunciamento of some one who assumes authority to call them “unauthoritative.” It must not be forgotten—to repeat for clearness’ sake—that men laboring in these very duties met and disputed every step the women took even in “unauthoritative” work, using ridicule, caste distinction, and all the means of intimidation which a power long dominant naturally possesses. To work for lower wages alone allowed the women to gain employment.

“You harshly blame my strengthlessness and the woman-delicacy of my body,” exclaims the Antigone of Euripides, according to another citation of the “Florilegium,” of Stobæus named at the beginning, “but if I am of understanding mind—that is better than a strong arm.”

Defendants whose case would otherwise go by default need this brief plea, which their own modesty forbids their uttering, their modesty, their busy hands and heads, and their Antigone-like love and ἀσθένεια. They know sympathy is really as large as the world, and that room is here for other women than those who make dictionaries at so much a mile as well as for themselves; and for other men than neurotic caterwaulers and hysterical shriekers like our ancient friend Knox, assuming that the masculine is the only form of expression, that women have no right to utter the human voice, and that certain menhave up wire connections with omniscient knowledge and Nature’s designs and God’s will, and, standing on this pretence, are the dispensers of authority.

“If the greatest poems have not been written by women,” said our Edgar Poe, with a clearer accent of the American spirit toward women, “it is because, as yet, the greatest poems have not been written at all.” The measure is large between the purple-faced zeal of John Knox and the vivid atavism of our brilliant professor and that luminous vision of Poe.

Cookery is become an art, a noble science; cooks are gentlemen.Robert Burton

Sir Anthony Absolute.—It is not to be wondered at, ma’am—all this is the natural consequence of teaching girls to read. Had I a thousand daughters, by Heaven! I’d as soon have them taught the black art as their alphabet!Richard Brinsley Sheridan

The cook-book is not a modern product. The Iliad is the hungriest book on earth, and it is the first of our cook-books aside from half-sacred, half-sanitary directions to the early Aryans and Jews. It is that acme of poetry, that most picturesque of pictures, that most historical of histories, that most musical and delicious verse, the Iliad, which was the first popularly to teach the cooking art—the art in its simplicity, and not a mere handmaid to sanitation, jurisprudence, or theology. Through the pages of that great poem blow not only the salt winds of the Ægean Sea, but also the savor of tender kid and succulent pig, not to mention whole hectacombs,which delighted the blessed gods above and strengthened hungry heroes below. To this very day—its realism is so perfect—we catch the scent of the cooking and see the appetiteful people eat. The book is half-human, half-divine; and in its human part the pleasures and the economic values of wholesome fare are not left out.

No, cook-books are not modern products. They were in Greece later than Homer. When the Greek states came to the fore in their wonderful art and literature and the distinction of a free democracy, plain living characterized nearly all the peoples. The Athenians were noted for their simple diet. The Spartans were temperate to a proverb, and their συσσίτια (public meals), later called φειδίτια (spare meals), guarded against indulgence in eating. To be a good cook was to be banished from Sparta.

But with the Western Greeks, theGreeks of Sicily and Southern Italy, it was different—those people who left behind them little record of the spirit. In Sybaris the cook who distinguished himself in preparing a public feast—such festivals being not uncommon—received a crown of gold and the freedom of the games. It was a citizen of that luxury-loving town who averred, when he tasted the famous black soup, that it was no longer a wonder the Spartans were fearless in battle, for any one would readily die rather than live on such a diet. Among the later Greeks the best cooks, and the best-paid cooks, came from Sicily; and that little island grew in fame for its gluttons.

There is a Greek book—the Deipnosophistæ—Supper of the “Wise Men—written by Athenæus—which holds for us much information about the food and feasting of those old Hellenes. The wise men at their supposed banquet quote, touching food and cooking, from countlessGreek authors whose works are now lost, but were still preserved in the time of Athenæus. This, for instance, is from a poem by Philoxenus of Cythera, who wittily and gluttonously lived at the court of Dionysius of Syracuse, and wished for a throat three cubits long that the delight of tasting might be drawn out.3

“And then two slaves brought in a well-rubb’d table..... Then came a platter.... with dainty sword-fish fraught,And then fat cuttle-fish, and the savoury tribesOf the long hairy polypus. After thisAnother orb appear’d upon the table,Rival of that just brought from off the fire,Fragrant with spicy odour. And on thatAgain were famous cuttle-fish, and thoseFair maids the honey’d squills, and dainty cakes,Sweet to the palate, and large buns of wheat,Large as a partridge, sweet and round, which youDo know the taste of well. And if you askWhat more was there, I’d speak of luscious chine,And loin of pork, and head of boar, all hot;Cutlets of kid, and well-boil’d pettitoes,And ribs of beef, and heads, and snouts and tails,Then kid again, and lamb, and hares, and poultry,Partridges and the bird from Phasis’ stream.And golden honey, and clotted cream was there,And cheese which I did join with all in callingMost tender fare.”

The Greeks used many of the meats and vegetables we enjoy; and others we disclaim; for instance, cranes. Even mushrooms were known to their cooks, and Athenæus suggests how the wholesome may be distinguished from the poisonous, and what antidotes serve best in case the bad are eaten. But with further directions of his our tastes would not agree. He recommends seasoning the mushrooms with vinegar, or honey and vinegar, or honey, or salt—forby these means their choking properties are taken away.

The writings of Athenæus have, however, a certain literary and, for his time as well as our own, an historic and archæologic flavor. The only ancient cook-book pure and simple—bent on instruction in the excellent art—which has come down to us is that of Apicius, in ten short books, or chapters. And which Apicius? Probably the second of the name, the one who lectured on cooking in Rome during the reign of Augustus. He gave some very simple directions which hold good to the present day; for instance—

“UT CARNEM SALSAM DULCEM FACIAS

“Carnem salsam dulcem facies, si prius in lacte coquas, et postea in aqua.”

But again his compounds are nauseating even in print. He was famous for many dishes, and Pliny, in his Natural History, says he discovered the wayof increasing the size of the liver of the pig—just as the liver of the Strasbourg geese is enlarged for pâté de foie gras, and as our own Southern people used to induce pathological conditions in their turkeys.

The method of Apicius was to cram the pig with dried figs, and, when it was fat enough, drench it with wine mixed with honey. “There is,” continues Pliny, “no other animal that affords so great a variety to the palate; all others have their taste, but the pig fifty different flavors. From this tastiness of the meat it came about that the censors made whole pages of regulations about serving at banquets the belly and the jowls and other dainty parts. But in spite of their rules the poet Publius, author of the Mimes, when he ceased to be a slave, is said never to have given an entertainment without a dish of pig’s belly which he called ‘sumen.’”

“Cook Apicius showed a remarkableingenuity in developing luxury,” the old Roman says at another time, “and thought it a most excellent plan to let a mullet die in the pickle known as ‘garum.’” It was ingenuity of cruelty as well as of luxury. “They killed the fish in sauces and pickled them alive at the banquet,” says Seneca, “feeding the eye before the gullet, for they took pleasure in seeing their mullets change several colors while dying.” The unthinkable garum was made, according to Pliny, from the intestines of fish macerated with salt, and other ingredients were added before the mixture was set in the sun to putrefy and came to the right point for serving. It also had popularity as a household remedy for dog-bites, etc.; and in burns, when care was necessary in its application not to mention it by name—so delicately timid was its healing spirit. Its use as a dish was widespread, and perhaps we see in the well-known hankerings of the royalGeorge of England a reversion to the palate of Italian ancestors.

But garum was only one of strange dishes. The Romans seasoned much with rue and asafetida!—a taste kept to this day in India, where “Kim” eats “good curry cakes all warm and well-scented with hing (asafetida).” Cabbages they highly estimated; “of all garden vegetables they thought them best,” says Pliny. The same author notes that Apicius rejected Brussels sprouts, and in this was followed by Drusus Cæsar, who was censured for over-nicety by his father, the Emperor Tiberius of Capreæ villas fame.

Upon cooks and the Roman estimate of their value in his day Pliny also casts light. “Asinius Celer, a man of consular rank and noted for his expenditure on mullet, bought one at Rome during the reign of Gaius Caligula for eight thousand sesterces. Reflection on this fact,” continues Pliny, “will recall thecomplaints uttered against luxury and the lament that a single cook costs more than a horse. At the present day a cook is only to be had for the price of a triumph, and a mullet only to be had for what was once the price of a cook! Of a fact there is now hardly any living being held in higher esteem than the man who knows how to get rid of his master’s belongings in the most scientific fashion!”

Much has been written of the luxury and enervation of Romans after the republic, how they feasted scented with perfumes, reclining and listening to music, “nudis puellis ministrantibus.” The story is old of how Vedius Pollio “hung with ecstasy over lampreys fattened on human flesh;” how Tiberius spent two days and two nights in one bout; how Claudius dissolved pearls for his food; how Vitellius delighted in the brains of pheasants and tongues of nightingales and the roe of fish difficultto take; how the favorite supper of Heliogabalus was the brains of six hundred thrushes. At the time these gluttonies went on in the houses of government officials, the mass of the people, the great workers who supported the great idlers, fed healthfully on a mess of pottage. The many to support the super-abundant luxury of a few is still one of the mysteries of the people.

But in the old Rome the law of right and honest strength at last prevailed, and monsters gave way to the cleaner and hardier chiefs of the north. The mastery of the world necessarily passed to others;—it has never lain with slaves of the stomach.

The early folk of Britain—those Cæesar found in the land from which we sprang—ate the milk and flesh of their flocks. They made bread by picking the grains from the ear and pounding them to paste in a mortar. Their Roman conquerors doubtless brought to their midsta more elaborated table order. Barbarous Saxons, fighters and freebooters, next settling on the rich island and restraining themselves little for sowing and reaping, must in their incursions have been flesh-eaters, expeditiously roasting and broiling directly over coals like our early pioneers.

This mode of living also would seem true of the later-coming Danes, who after their settlement introduced, says Holinshed, another habit. “The Danes,” says that delightful chronicler, “had their dwelling ... among the Englishmen, whereby came great harme; for whereas the Danes by nature were great drinkers, the Englishmen by continuall conversation with them learned the same vice. King Edgar, to reforme in part such excessive quaffing as then began to grow in use, caused by the procurement of Dunstane [the then Archbishop of Canterbury] nailes to be set in cups of a certeine measure, marked for the purpose,that none should drinke more than was assigned by such measured cups. Englishmen also learned of the Saxons, Flemings, and other strangers, their peculiar kinds of vices, as of the Saxons a disordered fierceness of mind, of the Flemings a feeble tendernesse of bodie; where before they rejoiced in their owne simplicitie and esteemed not the lewd and unprofitable manners of strangers.”

But refinement was growing in the mixture of races which was to make modern Englishmen, and in the time of Hardicanute, much given to the pleasures of the table and at last dying from too copious a draught of wine,—“he fell downe suddenlie,” says Holinshed, “with the pot in his hand”—there was aim at niceness and variety and hospitable cheer.

The Black Book of a royal household which Warner quotes in his “AntiquitatesCulinariæ”4is evidence of this:

“Domus Eegis Hardeknoute may be called a fader noreshoure of familiaritie, which used for his own table, never to be served with ony like metes of one meale in another, and that chaunge and diversitie was dayly in greate habundance, and that same after to be ministred to his alms-dishe, he caused cunyng cooks in curiositie; also, he was the furst that began four meales stablyshed in oon day, opynly to be holden for worshuppfull and honest peopull resortingto his courte; and no more melis, nor brekefast, nor chambyr, but for his children in householde; for which four melys he ordeyned four marshalls, to kepe the honor of his halle in recevyng and dyrecting strangers, as well as of his householdemen in theyre fitting, and for services and ther precepts to be obeyd in. And for the halle, with all diligence of officers thereto assigned from his furst inception, tyll the day of his dethe, his house stode after one unyformitie.”

Of Hardicanute, “it hath,” says Holinshed, “beene commonlie told, that Englishmen learned of him their excessive gourmandizing and unmeasurable filling of their panches with meates and drinkes, whereby they forgat the vertuous use of sobrietie, so much necessarie to all estates and degrees, so profitable for all commonwealthes, and so commendable both in the sight of God, and all good men.”

Not only to the Danes, but also to the later conquerors, the Normans, the old chronicler attributes corruption of early English frugality and simplicity. “The Normans, misliking the gormandise of Canutus, ordeined after their arrivall that no table should be covered above once in the day.... But in the end, either waxing wearie of their owne frugalitie or suffering the cockle of old custome to overgrow the good corne of their new constitution, they fell to such libertie that in often feeding they surmounted Canutus surnamed the hardie.... They brought in also the custome of long and statelie sitting at meat.”

A fellow-Londoner with Holinshed, John Stow, says of the reign of William Rufus, the second Norman king of England, “The courtiers devoured the substance of the husbandmen, their tenants.”

And Stow’s “Annales” still further tell of a banquet served in far-off Italyto the duke of Clarence, son of Edward III., when, some three hundred years after the Norman settlement, the lad Leonell went to marry Violentis, daughter of the duke of Milan. It should not be forgotten that in the reign of Edward II. of England, grandfather of the duke, proclamation had been issued against the “outrageous and excessive multitude of meats and dishes” served by the nobles in their castles, as well by “persons of inferior rank imitating their example, beyond what their station required and their circumstances could afford.”

“At the comming of Leonell”, says Stow, “such aboundance of treasure was in most bounteous maner spent, in making most sumptuous feasts, setting forth stately fightes, and honouring with rare gifts above two hundred Englishmen, which accompanied his [the duke of Milan’s] son-in-law, as it seemed to surpasse the greatnesse of most wealthyPrinces; for in the banquet whereat Francis Petrarch was present, amongst the chiefest guestes, there were above thirtie courses of service at the table, and betwixt every course, as many presents of wonderous price intermixed, all which John Galeasius, chiefe of the choice youth, bringing to the table, did offer to Leonell ... And such was the sumptuousnesse of that banquet, that the meats which were brought from the table, would sufficiently have served ten thousand men.”

The first cook-book we have in our ample English tongue is of date about 1390. Its forme, says the preface to the table of contents, this “forme of cury [cookery] was compiled of the chef maistes cokes of kyng Richard the Secunde kyng of nglond aftir the conquest; the which was accounted the best and ryallest vyand [nice eater] of alle csten ynges [Christian kings]; and it was compiled by assent and avysement ofmaisters and [of] phisik and of philosophie that dwellid in his court. First it techith a man for to make commune pottages and commune meetis for howshold, as they shold be made, craftly and holsomly. Aftirward it techith for to make curious potages, and meetes, and sotiltees, for alle maner of states, bothe hye and lowe. And the techyng of the forme of making of potages, and of meetes, bothe of flesh, and of fissh, buth [are] y sette here by noumbre and by ordre. Sso this little table here fewyng [following] wole teche a man with oute taryyng, to fynde what meete that hym lust for to have.”

The “potages” and “meetis” and “sotiltees” it techith a man for to make would be hardly more endurable to the modern stomach than some old Greek and Roman seasonings we have referred to. There is no essential difference between these and the directions of a rival cook-book written some forty orfifty years later and divided into three parts—Kalendare de Potages dyvers, Kalendare de Leche Metys, Dyverse bake metis. Or of another compiled about 1450. Let us see how they would make a meat.

“Stwed Beeff. Take faire Ribbes of ffresh beef, And (if thou wilt) roste hit til hit be nygh ynowe; then put hit in a faire possenet; caste therto parcely and oynons mynced, reysons of corauns, powder peper, canel, clowes, saundres, safferon, and salt; then caste thereto wyn and a litull vynegre; sette a lyd on the potte, and lete hit boile sokingly on a faire charcole til hit be ynogh; then lay the fflessh, in disshes, and the sirippe thereuppon, And serve it forth.”

And for sweet apple fritters:

“Freetours. Take yolkes of egges, drawe hem thorgh a streynour, caste thereto faire floure, berme and ale; stere it togidre till hit be thik. Take pared appelles, cut hem thyn like obleies[wafers of the eucharist], ley hem in the batur; then put hem into a ffrying pan, and fry hem in faire grece or buttur til thei ben browne yelowe; then put hem in disshes; and strawe Sugur on hem ynogh, And serve hem forthe.”

Still other cook-books followed—the men of that day served hem forthe—among which we notice “A noble Boke off Cookry ffor a prynce houssolde or eny other estately houssolde,” ascribed to about the year 1465.

To the monasteries the art of cooking is doubtless much indebted, just as even at the present day is the art of making liqueurs. Their vast wealth, the leisure of the in-dwellers, and the gross sensualism and materialism of the time they were at their height would naturally lead to care for the table and its viands. Within their thick stone walls, which the religious devotion of the populace had reared, the master of the kitchen, magister coquinæ or magnus coquus,was not the man of least importance. Some old author whose name and book do not come promptly to memory refers to the disinclination of plump capons, or round-breasted duck, to meet ecclesiastical eyes—a facetiousness repeated in our day when the Uncle Remuses of Dixie say they see yellow-legged chickens run and hide if a preacher drives up to supper.

Moreover, the monasteries were the inns of that day where travellers put up, and in many instances were served free—no price, that is, was put upon their entertainment, the abbot, or the establishment, receiving whatever gift the one sheltered and fed felt able or moved to pay.

Contemporary accounts of, or references to, the cooking and feasting in religious houses are many—those of the Vision of Long Will concerning Piers the Plowman, those of “Dan Chaucer, the first warbler,” of Alexander Barclay,and Skelton, great satirist of times of Henry VIII., and of other authors not so well remembered. Now and then a racy anecdote has come down like that which Thomas Fuller saves from lip tradition in his “History of Abbeys in England.” It happened, says Worthy Fuller, that Harry VIII., “hunting in Windsor Forest, either casually lost, or (more probable) wilfully losing himself, struck down about dinner-time to the abbey of Reading; where, disguising himself (much for delight, more for discovery, to see unseen), he was invited to the abbot’s table, and passed for one of the king’s guard, a place to which the proportion of his person might properly entitle him. A sirloin of beef was set before him (so knighted saith tradition, by this King Henry), on which the king laid on lustily, not disgracing one of that place for whom he was mistaken.

“‘Well fare thy heart!’ quoth the abbot; ‘and here in a cup of sack I rememberthe health of his grace your master. I would give an hundred pounds on the condition I could feed so heartily on beef as you do. Alas! my weak and squeazy stomach will badly digest the wing of a small rabbit or chicken.’

“The king pleasantly pledged him, and, heartily thanking him for his good cheer, after dinner departed as undiscovered as he came thither.

“Some weeks after, the abbot was sent for by a pursuivant, brought up to London, clapped in the Tower, kept close prisoner, fed for a short time with bread and water; yet not so empty his body of food, as his mind was filled with fears, creating many suspicions to himself when and how he had incurred the king’s displeasure. At last a sirloin of beef was set before him, on which the abbot fed as the farmer of his grange, and verified the proverb, that ‘Two hungry meals make the third a glutton.’

“In springs King Henry out of a private lobby, where he had placed himself, the invisible spectator of the abbot’s behavior. ‘My lord,’ quoth the king, ‘presently deposit your hundred pounds in gold, or else no going hence all the days of your life. I have been your physician to cure you of your squeazy stomach; and here, as I deserve, I demand my fee for the same!’

“The abbot down with his dust; and, glad he had escaped so, returned to Reading, as somewhat lighter in purse, so much more merrier in heart than when he came thence.”

The “squeazy” abbot stood alone in proclamation of his disorder. Archbishop Cranmer, according to John Leland, king’s antiquary to Henry VIII., found it necessary in 1541 to regulate the expenses of the tables of bishops and clergy by a constitution—an instrument which throws much light on the then conditions, and which ran as follows:

“In the yeare of our Lord MDXLI it was agreed and condescended upon, as wel by the common consent of both tharchbishops and most part of the bishops within this realme of Englande, as also of divers grave men at that tyme, both deanes and archdeacons, the fare at their tables to be thus moderated.

“First, that tharchbishop should never exceede six divers kindes of fleshe, or six of fishe, on the fishe days; the bishop not to exceede five, the deane and archdeacon not above four, and al other under that degree not above three; provided also that tharchbishop myght have of second dishes four, the bishop three, and al others under the degree of a bishop but two. As custard, tart, fritter, cheese or apples, peares, or two of other kindes of fruites. Provided also, that if any of the inferior degree dyd receave at their table, any archbishop, bishop, deane, or archdeacon, or any of the laitie of lyke degree, viz. duke, marques,earle, viscount, baron, lorde, knyght, they myght have such provision as were mete and requisite for their degrees. Provided alway that no rate was limited in the receavying of any ambassadour. It was also provided that of the greater fyshes or fowles, there should be but one in a dishe, as crane, swan, turkey cocke, hadocke, pyke, tench; and of lesse sortes but two, viz. capons two, pheasantes two, conies two, and woodcockes two. Of lesse sortes, as of patriches, the archbishop three, the bishop and other degrees under hym two. Of blackburdes, the archbishop six, the bishop four, the other degrees three. Of larkes and snytes (snipes) and of that sort but twelve. It was also provided, that whatsoever is spared by the cutting of, of the olde superfluitie, shoulde yet be provided and spent in playne meates for the relievyng of the poore.Memorandum, that this order was kept for two or three monethes, tyll by the disusyng of certainewylful persons it came to the olde excesse.”

Still one more tale bearing upon a member of the clergy who would set out more “blackburdes” than “tharchbishop” is told by Holinshed. It has within it somewhat of the flavor of the odium theologicum, but an added interest also, since it turns upon a dish esteemed in Italy since the time of the imperial Romans—peacock, often served even nowadays encased in its most wonderful plumage. The Pope Julius III., whose luxurious entertainment and comport shocked the proprieties even of that day, and who died in Rome while the chronicler was busy in London, is the chief actor.

“At an other time,” writes Holinshed, “he sitting at dinner, pointing to a peacocke upon his table, which he had not touched; Keepe (said he) this cold peacocke for me against supper, and let me sup in the garden, for I shall haveghests. So when supper came, and amongst other hot peacockes, he saw not his cold peacocke brought to his table; the pope after his wonted manner, most horriblie blaspheming God, fell into an extreame rage, &c. Whereupon one of his cardinals sitting by, desired him saieng: Let not your holinesse, I praie you, be so mooved with a matter of so small weight. Then this Julius the pope answeringe againe: What (saith he) if God was so angrie for one apple, that he cast our first parents out of paradise for the same, whie maie not I being his vicar, be angrie then for a peacocke, sithens a peacocke is a greater matter than an apple.”

In England at this time controlling the laity were sumptuary laws, habits of living resulting from those laws, and great inequalities in the distribution of wealth. On these points Holinshed again brings us light:

“In number of dishes and change ofmeat,” he writes, “the nobilitie of England (whose cookes are for the most part musicall-headed Frenchmen and strangers) do most exceed, sith there is no daie in maner that passeth over their heads, wherein they have not onelie beefe, mutton, veale, lambe, kid, porke, conie, capon, pig, or so manie of these as the season yeeldeth; but also some portion of the red or fallow deere, beside great varietie of fish and wild foule, and thereto sundrie other delicates wherein the sweet hand of the seasoning Portingale is not wanting; so that for a man to dine with one of them, and to taste of everie dish that standeth before him ... is rather to yeeld unto a conspiracie with a great deale of meat for the speedie suppression of naturall health, then the use of a necessarie meane to satisfie himselfe with a competent repast, to susteine his bodie withall. But as this large feeding is not seene in their gests, no more is it in their ownepersons, for sith they have dailie much resort unto their tables ... and thereto reteine great numbers of servants, it is verie requisit and expedient for them to be somewhat plentifull in this behalfe.

“The chiefe part likewise of their dailie provision is brought before them ... and placed on their tables, whereof when they have taken what it pleaseth them, the rest is reserved and afterwards sent downe to their serving men and waiters, who feed thereon in like sort with convenient moderation, their reversion also being bestowed upon the poore, which lie readie at their gates in great numbers to receive the same.

“The gentlemen and merchants keepe much about one rate, and each of them contenteth himselfe with foure, five or six dishes, when they have but small resort, or peradventure with one, or two, or three at the most, when they have no strangers to accompanie them at their tables. And yet their servants havetheir ordinarie diet assigned, beside such as is left at their masters’ boordes, and not appointed to be brought thither the second time, which neverthelesse is often seene generallie in venison, lambe, or some especiall dish, whereon the merchant man himselfe liketh to feed when it is cold.”

“At such times as the merchants doo make their ordinarie or voluntarie feasts, it is a world to see what great provision is made of all maner of delicat meats, from everie quarter of the countrie.... They will seldome regard anie thing that the butcher usuallie killeth, but reject the same as not worthie to come in place. In such cases all gelisses of all coleurs mixed with a varitie in the representation of sundrie floures, herbs, trees, formes of beasts, fish, foules and fruits, and there unto marchpaine wrought with no small curiositie, tarts of diverse hewes and sundrie denominations, conserves of old fruitsforen and homebred, suckets, codinacs, marmilats, marchpaine, sugerbread, gingerbread, florentines, wild foule, venison of all sorts, and sundrie outlandish confections altogither seasoned with sugar ... doo generalie beare the swaie, beside infinit devises of our owne not possible for me to remember. Of the potato and such venerous roots as are brought out of Spaine, Portingale, and the Indies to furnish our bankets, I speake not.”

“The artificer and husbandman make greatest accompt of such meat as they may soonest come by, and have it quickliest readie.... Their food also consisteth principallie in beefe and such meat as the butcher selleth, that is to saie, mutton, veale, lambe, porke, etc., ... beside souse, brawne, bacon, fruit, pies of fruit, foules of sundrie sorts, cheese, butter, eggs, etc.... To conclude, both the artificer and the husbandman are sufficientlie liberall and verie friendlie at their tables, andwhen they meet they are so merie without malice and plaine, without inward Italian or French craft and subtiltie, that it would doo a man good to be in companie among them.

“With us the nobilitie, gentrie and students doo ordinarilie go to dinner at eleven before noone, and to supper at five, or betweene five and six at after-noone. The merchants dine and sup seldome before twelve at noone, and six at night, especiallie in London. The husbandmen dine also at high noone as they call it, and sup at seven or eight.... As for the poorest sort they generallie dine and sup when they may, so that to talke of their order of repast it were but a needlesse matter.”

“The bread through out the land,” continues Holinshed, “is made of such graine as the soil yeeldeth, neverthelesse the gentilitie commonlie provide themselves sufficientlie of wheat for theirowne tables, whilst their houshold and poore neighbours in some shires are inforced to content themselves with rie, or baricie, yea and in time of dearth manie with bread made either of beans, or peason, or otes, or of altogether and some acornes among.... There be much more ground eared now almost in everie place than hath beene of late yeares, yet such a price of come continueth in each towne and market without any just cause (except it be that landlords doo get licenses to carie come out of the land onelie to keepe up the prices for their owne private games and ruine of the commonwealth), that the artificer and poore laboring man is not able to reach unto it, but is driven to content himselfe with horsse corne—I mean beanes, peason, otes, tarres, and lintels.”

Books had been written for women and their tasks within—the “BabeesBooke,” Tusser’s5“Hundrethe Good Pointes of Huswifry,” “The Good Husive’s Handmaid”—the last two in the sixteenth century; these and others of their kidney. A woman who thought, spoke, and wrote in several tongues was greatly filling the throne of England in those later times.

Cook- and receipt-books in the following century, that is in the seventeenth, continued to discover women, and to realize moreover that to them division of labor had delegated the household and its businesses. There were “Jewels” and “Closets of Delights” before we find an odd little volume putting out in 1655 a second edition. It shows upon its title-page the survival from earlier conditions of the confusion of duties of physician and cook—a fact made apparentin the preface copied in the foregoing “forme of cury” of King Richard—and perhaps intimates the housewife should perform the services of both. It makes, as well, a distinct appeal to women as readers and users of books. Again it evidences the growth of the Commons. In full it introduces itself in this wise:

“The Ladies Cabinet enlarged and opened: containing Many Rare Secrets and Rich Ornaments, of several kindes, and different uses. Comprized under three general Heads, viz. of 1 Preserving, Conserving, Candying, etc. 2 Physick and Chirurgery. 3 Cooking and Housewifery. Whereunto is added Sundry Experiments and choice Extractions of Waters, Oyls, etc. Collected and practised by the late Right Honorable and Learned Chymist, the Lord Ruthuen.”

The preface, after an inscription “To the Industrious improvers of Nature byArt; especially the vertuous Ladies and Gentlewomen of the Land,” begins:

“Courteous Ladies, etc. The first Edition of this—(cal it what you please) having received a kind entertainment from your Ladiships hands, for reasons best known to yourselves, notwithstanding the disorderly and confused jumbling together of things of different kinds, hath made me (who am not a little concerned therein) to bethink myself of some way, how to encourage and requite your Ladiships Pains and Patience (vertues, indeed, of absolute necessity in such brave employments; there being nothing excellent that is not withal difficult) in the profitable spending of your vacant minutes.” This labored and high-flying mode of address continues to the preface’s end.... “I shall thus leave you at liberty as Lovers in Gardens, to follow your own fancies. Take what you like, and delight in your choice, and leave what you list to him,whose labour is not lost if anything please.”

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