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."

                LIGHTING.

IT 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 gas-lit
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