Page:All the Year Round - Series 2 - Volume 1.djvu/278

268[February 20, 1869] handsome, brightly intelligent, presumably poor, and socially insignificant, or he would not be her silly brother's secretary. Her attention had been directed to him at first, because she felt a compassionate curiosity about the person whom circumstances had oppressed so cruelly as to oblige him to purvey ideas, and language in which to express them, for Lord Hetherington. Curiosity and compassion had been replaced, within a few minutes, by admiration; which the difference between the manners and bearing of Walter, and those of the men with whom she was accustomed to associate, rather tended to increase. There was no awkwardness about Walter, but neither was there the slightest pretence. He was at ease in the unaccustomed company he found himself among, but he did not affect to be other than an observant stranger in it.

"He has an intellect, and a heart," said Lady Caroline, half aloud, as she rose from her seat by the fireside, and brought her reverie to a conclusion, "and why should I care for the world's opinion? It could not make me happy, if I conciliated it; but I think he could, if I defied it for his sake."

is scarcely credible what time and trouble have been expended, on the invention of even the least of the appliances of modern comfort. There is not a single object among the many we daily use, without asking whence or how they came to us, which has not passed through an infinity of stages before arriving at its state of present perfection. And when we reflect on the slowness of the march of progress, and on the toughness of the struggle that new inventions are condemned to make before being adopted by the public, we cannot help looking back with a feeling of thoughtful pity upon what are called the "good old times," and wonder how our forefathers could find their lives endurable, with so little of ease and pleasure to enliven them.

Is it easy to believe, for instance, that the world groped on to the thirteenth century, without discovering such a simple thing as a tallow candle? Yet so it is. We use no metaphor when we say that, during the early ages, mankind was plunged in darkness. The expression is true in every sense.

The first light known was obtained from branches of resinous wood, employed as torches. But the invention of lamps followed very closely upon this primitive discovery. As soon as men found out the inflammable properties of fat, they turned it to account by sticking a rush into a vessel filled with lard; and this spitting, sputtering, and flickering contrivance was handed down, from father to son, as the sole dispeller of darkness, until it occurred to some fanciful spirit to invent oil. Of course this new liquid was at once substituted for fat, by all who could afford it. And it is probable that it was about the same time, that flaxen and hempen wicks were first used instead of rushes, by the same class of well-to-do people. All the antiquities that we possess prove, beyond doubt, that the Indians, the Assyrians, the Egyptians, the Israelites, the Greeks, and the Romans, to say nothing of a great many other people of whom we know next to nothing, were acquainted with the use of oil lamps. Admirable specimens of lamps, in bronze, stone, and brass, have been found in the pyramids, in the ancient temples of Hindustan, and on the sites of Jewish cities. As regards the lamps of Greece and Rome, we have ample means of judging what they were, from the excavations made at Pompeii. Gold, silver, marble, precious stones; nothing was thought too expensive to ornament these vessels. The greater number of them are marvels of artistic workmanship, and even the humblest terra-cotta specimens that were used by the poor in cottages, have a gracefulness of shape, and an elegance of finish, that no craft of modern times could surpass.

But it must not be supposed, for all their beauty and all the expense bestowed on their fashioning, that these antique lamps were of any great use for practical purposes. An eighteen-penny lantern with its tin reflector, and its bull's-eye of third-rate glass, diffuses a better light than did any of the costly apparatus of Rome or Egypt. The ancients knew no method of refining oil. As a great luxury they mixed it with perfumes, such as essence of rose and sandal-wood; but this rather detracted from, than added to, the burning properties of the liquid; and all that was obtained by the process was an increase of fragrance and a diminution of light. The dwellings of wealthy men like Verres, Mecænas, and Lucullus, who expended extravagant sums upon scented oils, would not have borne comparison in point of lighting, with the grimiest tap-room of a gaslit public-house. The gold and silver lamps, hung by slender well-wrought chains to marble pilasters, only yielded at their best, a lurid tapering flame that gave out an enormous deal of smoke, fluttered in the slightest breeze, and went out altogether at a gust of wind. Neither was it possible to steady the light, by closing the apertures through which the air came; for, had Roman or Grecian houses been possessed of glass windows, they would soon have become uninhabitable. The fresco paintings of Pompeian villas, the delicate colours on the walls of urban palaces, would in less than a month have been hopelessly coated with lamp soot. At the end of an hour's conference, of an evening, a party of noble Romans would have resembled a congregation of chimney-sweeps. A tunic dyed in Syrian purple would have acquired a mourning hue in no time.

From Rome, the oil lamp passed successively into Lower Germany, Gaul, and Britain; in all