the coast, and his fetish men, and his tribe,
and his chief town, and the same story may be
told.

                   A GRUMBLE.

ONLY the other day, being in London, I went
into a shop in Holborn, and asked for a
boot-jack.

"They are almost quite gone out, sir," said
the man; "since these short boots with the
elastic sides came in, we are never asked for the
article; don't sell one a year, sir."

"Good Heavens! To think," says Ralph Winterston,
of Winterston Hall, in the county of
Suffolk (who was with me), " that I should live
to see a generation subsisting without boot-jacks!
Take my word for it, men who begin by leaving
off boot-jacks will not stop there. There is no
limit, sir, to the innovations of a speculative
age."

There was a time when ladies at court
drank ale, and ate beef and sturgeon for breakfast.
Why? Because it was healthy? No,
because it was the custom; and custom, rational
or not, must be obeyed. A reign or two later,
they took to draughts of a Chinese leaf soaked
in hot water. It is true the new beverage was
found to injure the nerves, and produce diseases
hitherto unknown, such as " indigestion," the
"vapours," "nervous affections," &c. Tea had
been adopted without thought, its effects, therefore,
were unthought of. It may, or may not
have effected a change in the constitution of
our English race. Doctors of the present day
find that their patients cannot be bled as their
ancestors were. They have less blood; they
make less blood; they sink if too much of
it is taken from them. There are people
who lay all this to tea. Calmly, what is tea?
We soak a brown leaf, brought from China, in
hot water, and drink a pint of it, almost boiling,
morning and evening. On the stomach exhausted
and torpid with eight hours fast, and on the
stomach filled with a hearty dinner, we pour pints
of hot water, and yet men who study physical
training almost forbid any hot liquid. Must all
customs go on for ever because they have once
begun? The robust vigorous people of Elizabeth's
time, who wrote robust verse, and saved
England, and worried Spain, and defied the
Pope, all in a sturdy way, did not drink tea,
but ale and sherry. I must admit that they
were scrofulous, scorbutic, and grey when quite
young; I do not say that they were more
vigorous because they did not drink tea, but I
throw it out.

Students have written eloquently on tea. They
describe its influence as rising to the brain in a
calming, balmy way; quieting, clearing. I am,
however, suspicious of a beverage that has
such rapid influences on the brain. It may
have after results too, may it not? As for ale,
we all know what that does; it fills, fattens, and
cheers, in an open straightforward way.

Nervous and brain diseases are now the
predominant diseases, thanks to railway travelling,
the fretting cares of money-making, and social
ambition. In the time of the Georges, when
the stomach was worked more than the brain,
and every London club could boast its cluster
of six bottle men— in the days of gout-producing
port and gross eating— gastric disease was
more prevalent. Take a gallery of old portraits,
and you will at once pick out the men of the
gastric age, small eyes, red cheeks, three chins,
short necks, stocky beefy men, of the Admiral
Keppel, Alderman Beckford, Charles James Fox
type. Now, I ask any one did those drinkers
of port think of the gout, or consider whether
Portuguese wine, plus the brandy, was healthy?
No. They bowed to tyrannous King Custom
in a fine stupid old obstinate way, and left the
gout and their estates to their punier children.

In the old times, when Scotland traded more
directly with her old friend France, every
well-to-do body in the Lowlands drank claret. When
a Bordeaux vessel came into a Scotch port, the
town crier went round with a cask of wine in a
cart and sold stoups of it at the door to any one
who hailed him. Now, claret is a rarity, and
the small lairds drink endless toddy. Can that
great change in diet have taken place without
some corresponding changes in the national
constitution. No, I say again; yet who heeds
a change so vital? Did not Spain go down
when she took to chocolate? Have not the
Russians grown tame on tea and tobacco?
Their political system can have nothing to do
with it. Very well, then— and yet they call me
testy when I complain of the folly of blindly
and unthinkingly following new fashions.

New fashions in dress produce new diseases.
Diphtheria, that infectious form of sore-throat,
is said to have originated in the modern custom
of wearing low, turn-down collars, instead of
the old stiff white walls, which now mark so
conspicuously the middle-aged man. The national
throat, guarded for so many centuries by ropes
of muslin, black velvet solitaires, lace collars,
and other knick-knacks, was suddenly stripped
of all its defences, and thrown open to all the
rude winds of the English year. The result
blossoms out in the disagreeable form of
diphtheria, nature's terrible warning of the danger,
and simultaneous correction of the folly. To
be sure, I have heard that the fashion of high
shirt-collars had something to do with hiding
marks of disease in the neck and face. But I
don't believe it.

There is one comfort, that if new diseases
come in, old diseases die out. Where is the
leprosy of the middle ages, now we wear linen
shirts? Where is the plague of London?
Where the sweating-sickness, and the black
death, and the " stop-gallant"? Even the ague
is on its last legs, and I trust the time may
come when, mackintosh getting cheaper and
more durable, an English labourer may grow old
without being bent double by rheumatism, or
tortured and twisted and cramped till his legs
get as thin as German flutes.

It is rather a humiliating fact that