fine, strong, handsome animals, costing £50
apiece, and are all imported from Holland and
Belgium. They are all entire horses, no mares
are ever used in the trade, and their breeding—
for what reason we know not—is never
attempted in this country. They are mostly of a
dull blue-black colour, but they vary in hue
according to their age, and, as their personal
appearance is always closely scanned by
bystanders, they are the recipients of constant
care; a grey patch is quickly painted out; and
when time has thinned any of the flowing locks
of mane or tail, a false plait, taken from a
deceased comrade, is quickly interwoven. They
are for the most part gentle and docile, but
very powerful, and often have to drag their
heavy burdens a long distance. The black
job-masters manufacture their own hearses at a cost
of forty-five pounds each, but mourning coaches
are never built expressly for their dreary work.
They are nearly all old fashionable chariots,
which, at their birth, were the pride of Long-acre,
and in their heyday the glory of the Park;
but which, when used up, are bright for the
black-job business, and covered with japan,
varnish, and black cloth; are re-lined with the
same sad colour; and thus, at an expense
not exceeding thirty-five pounds, including the
cost, are changed into mourning coaches, likely
to be serviceable in their new business for many
years.

Among other items of information, I learned
that Saturday is looked upon as the aristocratic
day for funerals, while poor people are mostly
buried on Sunday; that there is a very general
wish among undertakers that cemeteries
should be closed on Sunday; that very
frequently no hearse is employed, the coffin being
placed crossway—under the coachman's seat,
and hidden by the hammercloth; that in cheap
funerals one horse has often to convey from
eight to twelve passengers; and that, after the
ceremony is over, the most effectual thing to
stanch the flow of mourners' grief is often found
to be a game of skittles at the nearest public-
house, accompanied by copious libations of
beer.

LITERARY FRENCH WOMEN.

IN the old feudal times, which it pleases many
of our more imaginative young people to
believe were as far superior to these days of
modern degeneracy, as real heroes are superior to
carpet knights, one or two little points of
morality, which we are accustomed to think rather
seriously of, were on a very unsatisfactory
footing. Not the least unsatisfactory of them
all was the condition of women in those grim
baronial halls, where romancers and pre-Raphaelites
would have us believe they passed their
time in the perpetual reception of incense going
up from the knights and warriors assembled,
and were held in the same high honour as now.
We could not make a greater mistake. In
those old feudal times, when wives were divorced
without scruple or offence, handed about from
baron to baron, as a man would now hand over
his hunter or his racer—for a consideration—
marriage had neither sanctity nor surety; it was
mere personal possession and legalised brutality;
when mothers were regarded only as the
appointed nourishers of their sons, like any other
form of lacteal creature; maternity had no
holiness, and brought with it no respect; when
maidens were the prey of the strongest, and the
prize of the most daring, wooed, worn, and cast
off without love, without regard, and without
regret, maiden honour was a fable, and virgin
modesty a dream; while as for love—what there
was of it in woman's nature grew only round her
own heart in sorrowful dreams and pensive longing
for an impossible ideal—not a fibre of it
went to that hairy brute who drank and gamed
and swore and fought in the hall, and held his
lady in her bower as no better, and not so
pleasant, as his " gentle tapel" on its perch, or
his horse within its stall. No; the womanhood
of the feudal times sat in darkness and
humiliation, possessed and despised; and it was from
this degraded condition, with all its savage
instincts and traditions, that chivalry came, like
a new Perseus, to rescue the helpless Andromeda
of the human world. Chivalry gave
women the two things denied in their feudal
marriage — respect and love; it gave them
poetry and purity in place of passion and
possession, and allowed them their choice of a
knight—the friend who was to defend them,
honour, celebrate, and love—as some consolation
against the husband who held them like any
other of his baronial fiefs and chattels; and with
as little regard.

This chivalric custom of the adoption of a
knight or friend, freely chosen and publicly
maintained, who was to be all, and to do all that
his lady desired or demanded, was, as a recent
writer justly says, the moral protest of woman
against the humiliation of their legal condition.
Very solemn was that choice; hallowed by the
most sacred forms used in the holiest ceremonies
of the times, and blessed by priest or bishop as
a contract binding on their souls, and of
heavenly value in their lives. Never lightly dealt
with, nor losing itself in dishonouring familiarity
or the stain of sense, it was woman's badge of
loving purity, and her first attempt to set herself
on an equality with man. Her knight devoted
himself to redress her wrongs, as he devoted
himself to redress the wrongs of all the
oppressed—consecrated to that office by the
Church which preached celibacy as one of the
gateways to heaven, and granted the San Graal
only to the pure in heart and the chaste in life;
and it would have been impossible, according to
the morality of the times, that his love should
have had any unseemly meaning or culmination..
The most solemn as well as the most passionate
pledge of that love was the kiss the lady
gave him, when, kneeling before her, his hands
clasped between hers, he devoted himself to her