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Chapter 02 - Science - Matter - and Energy

True / False

1. Because scientific theories are tentative explanations, they should not be taken seriously.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: False
DIFFICULTY: BLOOM’S: Remember
REFERENCES: 2.1 What Do Scientists Do?
QUESTION TYPE: True / False
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ENVS.MLSP.16.2.1.4 - Distinguish between scientific theories and laws.

2. Once scientists have analyzed data from an experiment, they may propose a testable hypothesis to explain
those data.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True
DIFFICULTY: BLOOM’S: Remember
REFERENCES: 2.1 What Do Scientists Do?
QUESTION TYPE: True / False
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ENVS.MLSP.16.2.1.1 - Outline the nine necessary steps to develop a scientific theory.

3. When a natural system gets locked into a positive feedback loop, it can reach an ecological tipping point.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True
DIFFICULTY: BLOOM’S: Remember
REFERENCES: 2.4 What Are Systems and How Do They Respond To Change?
QUESTION TYPE: True / False
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ENVS.MLSP.16.2.4 - Describe how various systems respond to change.

4. Carbon is an element.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True
DIFFICULTY: BLOOM’S: Remember
REFERENCES: 2.2 What Is Matter and What Happens When It Undergoes Change?
QUESTION TYPE: True / False
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ENVS.MLSP.16.2.2.1 - Distinguish between the two chemical forms of matter.

5. Logic and critical thinking are more important tools in science than imagination and creativity.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: False
DIFFICULTY: BLOOM’S: Understand
REFERENCES: 2.1 What Do Scientists Do?
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Page 1
Chapter 02 - Science - Matter - and Energy

QUESTION TYPE: True / False

LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ENVS.MLSP.16.2.1.1 - Outline the nine necessary steps to develop a scientific theory.

6. When matter undergoes physical changes, the chemical composition also changes.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: False
DIFFICULTY: BLOOM’S: Remember
REFERENCES: 2.2 What Is Matter and What Happens When It Undergoes Change?
QUESTION TYPE: True / False
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ENVS.MLSP.16.2.2 - Explain what matter is made of and the law governing changes in
matter.

7. Hydrocarbons are organic compounds.

a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True
DIFFICULTY: BLOOM’S: Remember
REFERENCES: 2.2 What Is Matter and What Happens When It Undergoes Change?
QUESTION TYPE: True / False
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ENVS.MLSP.16.2.2.3 - Distinguish the organic compounds based on their chemical formula.

8. Peer review involves scientists openly publishing details of the methods they used, the results of
their experiments, and the reasoning behind their hypotheses for other scientists working in the same
field to evaluate.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True
DIFFICULTY: BLOOM’S: Remember
REFERENCES: 2.1 What Do Scientists Do?
QUESTION TYPE: True / False
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ENVS.MLSP.16.2.1 - Determine how science attempts to answer questions about nature.

9. A positive feedback loop causes a system to change in the opposite direction from which it is moving.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: False
DIFFICULTY: BLOOM’S: Remember
REFERENCES: 2.4 What Are Systems and How Do They Respond To Change?
QUESTION TYPE: True / False
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ENVS.MLSP.16.2.4 - Describe how various systems respond to change.

10. When energy changes from one form to another, it always goes from a more useful to a less useful form.
a. True
b. False
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Chapter 02 - Science - Matter - and Energy

ANSWER: True
DIFFICULTY: BLOOM’S: Remember
REFERENCES: 2.3 What Is Energy and What Happens When It Undergoes Change?
QUESTION TYPE: True / False
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ENVS.MLSP.16.2.3.3 - Explain the two scientific laws of thermodynamics.

11. The idea that all elements are made up of molecules is called the atomic theory.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: False
DIFFICULTY: BLOOM’S: Remember
REFERENCES: 2.2 What Is Matter and What Happens When It Undergoes Change?
QUESTION TYPE: True / False
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ENVS.MLSP.16.2.2 - Explain what matter is made of and the law governing changes in
matter.

12. Two or more different elements can combine to form isotopes.

a. True
b. False
ANSWER: False
DIFFICULTY: BLOOM’S: Remember
REFERENCES: 2.2 What Is Matter and What Happens When It Undergoes Change?
QUESTION TYPE: True / False
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ENVS.MLSP.16.2.2 - Explain what matter is made of and the law governing changes in
matter.

13. Thousands of genes make up a single chromosome.

a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True
DIFFICULTY: BLOOM’S: Remember
REFERENCES: 2.2 What Is Matter and What Happens When It Undergoes Change?
QUESTION TYPE: True / False
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ENVS.MLSP.16.2.2.4 - Describe the relationships among cells, genes, and chromosomes.

14. Radioactive decay occurs when the nuclei of unstable isotopes spontaneously emit fast-moving chunks of
matter (alpha particles or beta particles), high-energy radiation (gamma rays), or both at a fixed rate.
a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True
DIFFICULTY: BLOOM’S: Understand
REFERENCES: 2.2 What Is Matter and What Happens When It Undergoes Change?
QUESTION TYPE: True / False
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ENVS.MLSP.16.2.2 - Explain what matter is made of and the law governing changes in
matter.
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Chapter 02 - Science - Matter - and Energy

15. A scientific hypothesis must be testable.

a. True
b. False
ANSWER: True
DIFFICULTY: BLOOM’S: Remember
REFERENCES: 2.1 What Do Scientists Do?
QUESTION TYPE: True / False
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ENVS.MLSP.16.2.1 - Determine how science attempts to answer questions about nature.

Multiple Choice

16. Recall the Bormann-Likens controlled experiment in the forested valleys of New Hampshire. Which
statement best describes the effects of water flowing out of deforested areas into undisturbed areas?
a. The amount of water flowing out of the deforested valley following rain increased by 30-40%, and
soil erosion increased.
b. The amount of water flowing out of the deforested valley decreased by 10-20%, and soil
erosion decreased.
c. The flow of water did not change, but soil erosion increased.
d. Other types of plants took the place of the trees, preventing deforestation from affecting the flow
of water.
e. Eroding soil dammed up the river, preventing the flow of water.
ANSWER: a
DIFFICULTY: BLOOM’S: Understand
REFERENCES: Core Case Study: How Do Scientists Learn about Nature? Experimenting with a Forest
QUESTION TYPE: Multiple Choice
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ENVS.MLSP.16.2.1 - Determine how science attempts to answer questions about nature.

17. The Bormann-Likens study in the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest in New Hampshire can be described
as .
a. a comparison of a control site with an experimental site in nature
b. a study using computer model simulations of a complex natural system
c. an experiment in which too many factors were varied to draw a conclusion from the results
d. missing a baseline for comparison, making it difficult to draw a conclusion from the results
e. an observational study that attempted not to interfere with a natural system
ANSWER: a
DIFFICULTY: BLOOM’S: Understand
REFERENCES: Core Case Study: How Do Scientists Learn about Nature? Experimenting with a Forest
QUESTION TYPE: Multiple Choice
LEARNING OBJECTIVES: ENVS.MLSP.16.2.1 - Determine how science attempts to answer questions about nature.

18. Science is .
a. a field in which observations are rarely tested
b. never investigated using statistical tools and models

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Another document from Scribd.com that is
random and unrelated content:
In the passivity of women, no less than in their refined duplicity, did this
acute observer recognize the secret strength of sex.
A vastly different counsellor of youth was Mrs. West, who wrote a
volume of “Letters to a Young Lady” (the young lady was Miss
Maunsell, and she died after reading them), which were held to embody
the soundest morality of the day. Mrs. West is as dull as Dr. Gregory is
penetrating, as verbose as he is laconic, as obvious as he is individual.
She devotes many agitated pages to theology, and many more to
irrefutable, though one hopes unnecessary, arguments in behalf of female
virtue. But she also advises a careful submission, a belittling insincerity,
as woman’s best safeguards in life. It is not only a wife’s duty to tolerate
her husband’s follies, but it is the part of wisdom to conceal from him
any knowledge of his derelictions. Bad he may be; but it is necessary to
his comfort to believe that his wife thinks him good. “The lordly nature
of man so strongly revolts from the suspicion of inferiority,” explains
this excellent monitress, “that a susceptible husband can never feel easy
in the society of his wife when he knows that she is acquainted with his
vices, though he is well assured that her prudence, generosity, and
affection will prevent her from being a severe accuser.” One is reminded
of the old French gentleman who said he was aware that he cheated at
cards, but he disliked any allusion to the subject.
To be “easy” in a wife’s society, to relax spiritually as well as mentally,
and to be immune from criticism;—these were the privileges which men
demanded, and which well-trained women were ready to accord. In 1808
the “Belle Assemblée” printed a model letter, which purported to come
from a young wife whose husband had deserted her and her child for the
more lively society of his mistress. It expressed in pathetic language the
sentiments then deemed correct,—sentiments which embodied the
patience of Griselda, without her acquiescence in fate. The wife tells her
husband that she has retired to the country for economy, and to avoid
scandalous gossip; that by careful management she is able to live on the
pittance he has given her; that “little Emily” is working a pair of ruffles
for him; that his presence would make their poor cottage seem a palace.
“Pardon my interrupting you,” she winds up with ostentatious meekness.
“I mean to give you satisfaction. Though I am deeply wronged by your
error, I am not resentful. I wish you all the happiness of which you are
capable, and am your once loved and still affectionate, Emilia.”
That last sentence is not without dignity, and certainly not without its
sting. One doubts whether Emilia’s husband, for all her promises and
protestations, could ever again have felt perfectly “easy” in his wife’s
society. He probably therefore stayed away, and soothed his soul
elsewhere. “We can with tranquillity forgive in ourselves the sins of
which no one accuses us.”
 THE PIETIST
They go the fairest way to Heaven that would serve God without a Hell.
—Religio Medici.
“H cutting it is to be the means of bringing children into the world to
be the subjects of the Kingdom of Darkness, to dwell with Divils and
Damned Spirits.”
In this temper of pardonable regret the mother of William Godwin wrote
to her erring son; and while the maternal point of view deserves
consideration (no parent could be expected to relish such a prospect), the
letter is noteworthy as being one of the few written to Godwin, or about
Godwin, which forces us to sympathize with the philosopher. The boy
who was reproved for picking up the family cat on Sunday—“demeaning
myself with such profaneness on the Lord’s day”—was little likely to
find his religion “all pure profit.” His account of the books he read as a
child, and of his precocious and unctuous piety, is probably over-
emphasized for the sake of colour; but the Evangelical literature of his
day, whether designed for young people or for adults, was of a
melancholy and discouraging character. The “Pious Deaths of Many
Godly Children” (sad monitor of the Godwin nursery) appears to have
been read off the face of the earth; but there have descended to us sundry
volumes of a like character, which even now stab us with pity for the
little readers long since laid in their graves. The most frivolous
occupation of the good boy in these old story-books is searching the
Bible, “with mamma’s permission,” for texts in which David “praises
God for the weather.” More serious-minded children weep floods of tears
because they are “lost sinners.” In a book of “Sermons for the Very
Young,” published by the Vicar of Walthamstow in the beginning of the
last century, we find the fall of Sodom and Gomorrah selected as an
appropriate theme for infancy, and its lessons driven home with all the
force of a direct personal application. “Think, little child, of the fearful
story. The wrath of God is upon them. Do they now repent of their sins?
It is all too late. Do they cry for mercy? There is none to hear them....
Your heart, little child, is full of sin. You think of what is not right, and
then you wish it, and that is sin.... Ah, what shall sinners do when the last
day comes upon them? What will they think when God shall punish them
forever?”
Children brought up on these lines passed swiftly from one form of
hysteria to another, from self-exaltation and the assurance of grace to
fears which had no easement. There is nothing more terrible in literature
than Borrow’s account of the Welsh preacher who believed that when he
was a child of seven he had committed the unpardonable sin, and whose
whole life was shadowed by fear. At the same time that little William
Godwin was composing beautiful death-bed speeches for the possible
edification of his parents and neighbours, we find Miss Elizabeth Carter
writing to Mrs. Montagu about her own nephew, who realized, at seven
years of age, how much he and all creatures stood in need of pardon; and
who, being ill, pitifully entreated his father to pray that his sins might be
forgiven. Commenting upon which incident, the reverent Montagu
Pennington, who edited Miss Carter’s letters, bids us remember that it
reflects more credit on the parents who brought their child up with so
just a sense of religion than it does on the poor infant himself.
“Innocence,” says the inflexible Mr. Stanley, in “Cœlebs in Search of a
Wife,” “can never be pleaded as a ground of acceptance, because the
thing does not exist.”
With the dawning of the nineteenth century came the controversial
novel; and to understand its popularity we have but to glance at the
books which preceded it, and compared to which it presented an
animated and contentious aspect. One must needs have read “Elements
of Morality” at ten, and “Strictures on Female Education” at fifteen, to
be able to relish “Father Clement” at twenty. Sedate young women,
whose lightest available literature was “Cœlebs,” or “Hints towards
forming the Character of a Princess,” and who had been presented on
successive birthdays with Mrs. Chapone’s “Letters on the Improvement
of the Mind,” and Mrs. West’s “Letters to a Young Lady,” and Miss
Hamilton’s “Letters to the Daughter of a Nobleman,” found a natural
relief in studying the dangers of dissent, or the secret machinations of the
Jesuits. Many a dull hour was quickened into pleasurable apprehension
of Jesuitical intrigues, from the days when Sarah, Duchess of
Marlborough, stoutly refused to take cinchona—a form of quinine—
because it was then known as Jesuit’s bark, and might be trusted to
poison a British constitution, to the days when Sir William Pepys wrote
in all seriousness to Hannah More: “You surprise me by saying that your
good Archbishop has been in danger from the Jesuits; but I believe they
are concealed in places where they are less likely to be found than in
Ireland.”
Just what they were going to do to the good Archbishop does not appear,
for Sir William at this point abruptly abandons the prelate to tell the story
of a Norwich butcher, who for some mysterious and unexplained reason
was hiding from the inquisitors of Lisbon. No dignitary was too high, no
orphan child too low to be the objects of a Popish plot. Miss Carter
writes to Mrs. Montagu, in 1775, about a little foundling whom Mrs.
Chapone had placed at service with some country neighbours.
“She behaves very prettily, and with great affection to the people with
whom she is living,” says Miss Carter. “One of the reasons she assigns
for her fondness is that they give her enough food, which she represents
as a deficient article in the workhouse; and says that on Fridays
particularly she never had any dinner. Surely the parish officers have not
made a Papist the mistress! If this is not the case, the loss of one dinner
in a week is of no great consequence.”
To the poor hungry child it was probably of much greater consequence
than the theological bias of the matron. Nor does a dinnerless Friday
appear the surest way to win youthful converts to the fold. But devout
ladies who had read Canon Seward’s celebrated tract on the
“Comparison between Paganism and Popery” (in which he found little to
choose between them) were well on their guard against the insidious
advances of Rome. “When I had no religion at all,” confesses Cowper to
Lady Hesketh, “I had yet a terrible dread of the Pope.” The worst to be
apprehended from Methodists was their lamentable tendency to
enthusiasm, and their ill-advised meddling with the poor. It is true that a
farmer of Cheddar told Miss Patty More that a Methodist minister had
once preached under his mother’s best apple tree, and that the sensitive
tree had never borne another apple; but this was an extreme case. The
Cheddar vestry resolved to protect their orchards from blight by stoning
the next preacher who invaded the parish, and their example was
followed with more or less fervour throughout England. In a quiet letter
written from Margate (1768), by the Rev. John Lyon, we find this casual
allusion to the process:—
“We had a Methodist preacher hold forth last night. I came home just as
he had finished. I believe the poor man fared badly, for I saw, as I
passed, eggs, stones, etc., fly pretty thick.”
It was all in the day’s work. The Rev. Lyon, who was a scholar and an
antiquarian, and who wrote an exhaustive history of Dover, had no
further interest in matters obviously aloof from his consideration.
This simple and robust treatment, so quieting to the nerves of the
practitioners, was unserviceable for Papists, who did not preach in the
open; and a great deal of suppressed irritation found no better outlet than
print. It appears to have been a difficult matter in those days to write
upon any subject without reverting sooner or later to the misdeeds of
Rome. Miss Seward pauses in her praise of Blair’s sermons to lament the
“boastful egotism” of St. Gregory of Nazianzus, who seems tolerably
remote; and Mr. John Dyer, when wrapped in peaceful contemplation of
the British wool-market, suddenly and fervently denounces the “black
clouds” of bigotry, and the “fiery bolts of superstition,” which lay
desolate “Papal realms.” In vain Mr. Edgeworth, stooping from his high
estate, counselled serenity of mind, and that calm tolerance born of a
godlike certitude; in vain he urged the benignant attitude of infallibility.
“The absurdities of Popery are so manifest,” he wrote, “that to be hated
they need but to be seen. But for the peace and prosperity of this country,
the misguided Catholic should not be rendered odious; he should rather
be pointed out as an object of compassion. His ignorance should not be
imputed to him as a crime; nor should it be presupposed that his life
cannot be right, whose tenets are erroneous. Thank God that I am a
Protestant! should be a mental thanksgiving, not a public taunt.”
Mr. Edgeworth was nearly seventy when the famous “Protestant’s
Manual; or, Papacy Unveiled” (endeared forever to our hearts by its
association with Mrs. Varden and Miggs), bowled over these pleasant
and peaceful arguments. There was no mawkish charity about the
“Manual,” which made its way into every corner of England, stood for
twenty years on thousands of British book-shelves, and was given as a
reward to children so unfortunate as to be meritorious. It sold for a
shilling (nine shillings a dozen when purchased for distribution), so Mrs.
Varden’s two post-octavo volumes must have been a special edition.
Reviewers recommended it earnestly to parents and teachers; and it was
deemed indispensable to all who desired “to preserve the rising
generation from the wiles of Papacy and the snares of priestcraft. They
will be rendered sensible of the evils and probable consequences of
Catholic emancipation; and be confirmed in those opinions, civil,
political, and religious, which have hitherto constituted the happiness
and formed the strength of their native country.”
This was a strong appeal. A universal uneasiness prevailed, manifesting
itself in hostility to innovations, however innocent and orthodox. Miss
Hannah More’s Sunday Schools were stoutly opposed, as savouring of
Methodism (a religion she disliked), and of radicalism, for which she had
all the natural horror of a well-to-do, middle-class Christian. Even Mrs.
West, an oppressively pious writer, misdoubted the influence of Sunday
Schools, for the simple reason that it was difficult to keep the lower
orders from learning more than was good for them. “Hard toil and
humble diligence are indispensably needful to the community,” said this
excellent lady. “Writing and accounts appear superfluous instructions in
the humblest walks of life; and, when imparted to servants, have the
general effect of making them ambitious, and disgusted with the servile
offices which they are required to perform.”
Humility was a virtue consecrated to the poor, to the rural poor
especially; and what with Methodism on the one hand, and the jarring
echoes of the French Revolution on the other, the British ploughman was
obviously growing less humble every day. Crabbe, who cherished no
illusions, painted him in colours grim enough to fill the reader with
despair; but Miss More entertained a feminine conviction that Bibles and
flannel waistcoats fulfilled his earthly needs. In all her stories and tracts
the villagers are as artificial as the happy peasantry of an old-fashioned
opera. They group themselves deferentially around the squire and the
rector; they wear costumes of uncompromising rusticity; and they sing a
chorus of praise to the kind young ladies who have brought them a bowl
of soup. It is curious to turn from this atmosphere of abasement, from
perpetual curtsies and the lowliest of lowly virtues, to the journal of the
painter Haydon, who was a sincerely pious man, yet who cannot restrain
his wonder and admiration at seeing the Duke of Wellington behave
respectfully in church. That a person so august should stand when the
congregation stood, and kneel when the congregation knelt, seemed to
Haydon an immense condescension. “Here was the greatest hero in the
world,” he writes ecstatically, “who had conquered the greatest genius,
prostrating his heart and being before his God in his venerable age, and
praying for His mercy.”
It is the most naïve impression on record. That the Duke and the Duke’s
scullion might perchance stand equidistant from the Almighty was an
idea which failed to present itself to Haydon’s ardent mind.
The pious fiction put forward in the interest of dissent was more
impressive, more emotional, more belligerent, and, in some odd way,
more human than “Cœlebs,” or “The Shepherd of Salisbury Plain.” Miss
Grace Kennedy’s stories are as absurd as Miss More’s, and—though the
thing may sound incredible—much duller; but they give one an
impression of painful earnestness, and of that heavy atmosphere
engendered by too close a contemplation of Hell. A pious Christian lady,
with local standards, a narrow intelligence, and a comprehensive
ignorance of life, is not by election a novelist. Neither do polemics lend
themselves with elasticity to the varying demands of fiction. There are,
in fact, few things less calculated to instruct the intellect or to enlarge the
heart than the perusal of controversial novels.
But Miss Kennedy had at least the striking quality of temerity. She was
not afraid of being ridiculous. She was undaunted in her ignorance. And
she was on fire with all the bitter ardour of the separatist. Miss More, on
the contrary, entertained a judicial mistrust for fervour, fanaticism, the
rush of ardent hopes and fears and transports, for all those vehement
emotions which are apt to be disconcerting to ladies of settled views and
incomes. Her model Christian, Candidus, “avoids enthusiasm as
naturally as a wise man avoids folly, or as a sober man shuns
extravagance. He laments when he encounters a real enthusiast, because
he knows that, even if honest, he is pernicious.” In the same guarded
spirit, Mrs. Montagu praises the benevolence of Lady Bab Montagu and
Mrs. Scott, who had the village girls taught plain sewing and the
catechism. “These good works are often performed by the Methodist
ladies in the heat of enthusiasm; but, thank God! my sister’s is a calm
and rational piety.” “Surtout point de zèle,” was the dignified motto of
the day.
There is none of this chill sobriety about Miss Kennedy’s Bible
Christians, who, a hundred years ago, preached to a listening world.
They are aflame with a zeal which knows no doubts and recognizes no
forbearance. Their methods are akin to those of the irrepressible Miss J
——, who undertook, Bible in hand, the conversion of that pious
gentleman, the Duke of Wellington; or of Miss Lewis, who went to
Constantinople to convert that equally pious gentleman, the Sultan. Miss
Kennedy’s heroes and heroines stand ready to convert the world. They
would delight in expounding the Scriptures to the Pope and the Patriarch
of Constantinople. Controversy affords their only conversation. Dogma
of the most unrelenting kind is their only food for thought. Piety
provides their only avenue for emotions. Elderly bankers weep profusely
over their beloved pastor’s eloquence, and fashionable ladies melt into
tears at the inspiring sight of a village Sunday School. Young gentlemen,
when off on a holiday, take with them “no companion but a Bible”; and
the lowest reach of worldliness is laid bare when an unconverted mother
asks her daughter if she can sing something more cheerful than a hymn.
Conformity to the Church of England is denounced with unsparing
warmth; and the Church of Rome is honoured by having a whole novel,
the once famous “Father Clement,” devoted to its permanent downfall.
Dr. Greenhill, who has written a sympathetic notice of Miss Kennedy in
the “Dictionary of National Biography,” considers that “Father Clement”
was composed “with an evident wish to state fairly the doctrines and
practices of the Roman Catholic Church, even while the authoress
strongly disapproves of them”;—a point of view which compels us to
believe that the biographer spared himself (and who shall blame him?)
the reading of this melancholy tale. That George Eliot, who spared
herself nothing, was well acquainted with its context, is evidenced by the
conversation of the ladies who, in “Janet’s Repentance,” meet to cover
and label the books of the Paddiford Lending Library. Miss Pratt, the
autocrat of the circle, observes that the story of “Father Clement” is, in
itself, a library on the errors of Romanism, whereupon old Mrs. Linnet
very sensibly replies: “One ’ud think there didn’t want much to drive
people away from a religion as makes ’em walk barefoot over stone
floors, like that girl in ‘Father Clement,’ sending the blood up to the head
frightful. Anybody might see that was an unnat’ral creed.”
So they might; and a more unnatural creed than Father Clement’s
Catholicism was never devised for the extinction of man’s flickering
reason. Only the mental debility of the Clarenham family can account for
their holding such views long enough to admit of their being converted
from them by the Montagus. Only the militant spirit of the Clarenham
chaplain and the Montagu chaplain makes possible several hundred
pages of polemics. Montagu Bibles run the blockade, are discovered in
the hands of truth-seeking Clarenhams, and are hurled back upon the
spiritual assailants. The determination of Father Dennis that the
Scriptures shall be quoted in Latin only (a practice which is scholarly but
inconvenient), and the determination of Edward Montagu “not to speak
Latin in the presence of ladies,” embarrass social intercourse. Catherine
Clarenham, the young person who walks barefooted over stone floors,
has been so blighted by this pious exercise that she cannot, at twenty,
translate the Pater Noster or Ave Maria into English, and remains a
melancholy illustration of Latinity. When young Basil Clarenham shows
symptoms of yielding to Montagu arguments, and begins to want a Bible
of his own, he is spirited away to Rome, and confined in a monastery of
the Inquisition, where he spends his time reading “books forbidden by
the Inquisitors,” and especially “a New Testament with the prohibitory
mark of the Holy Office upon it,” which the weak-minded monks have
amiably placed at his disposal. Indeed, the monastery library, to which
the captive is made kindly welcome, seems to have been well stocked
with interdicted literature; and, after browsing in these pastures for
several tranquil months, Basil tells his astonished hosts that their books
have taught him that “the Romish Church is the most corrupt of all
churches professing Christianity.” Having accomplished this unexpected
but happy result, the Inquisition exacts from him a solemn vow that he
will never reveal its secrets, and sends him back to England, where he
loses no time in becoming an excellent Protestant. His sister Maria
follows his example (her virtues have pointed steadfastly to this
conclusion); but Catherine enters a convent, full of stone floors and
idolatrous images, where she becomes a “tool” of the Jesuits, and says
her prayers in Latin until she dies.
No wonder “Father Clement” went through twelve editions, and made its
authoress as famous in her day as the authoress of “Elsie Dinsmore” is in
ours. No wonder the Paddiford Lending Library revered its sterling
worth. And no wonder it provoked from Catholics reprisals which Dr.
Greenhill stigmatizes as “flippant.” To-day it lives by virtue of half a
dozen mocking lines in George Eliot’s least-read story: but for a hundred
years its progeny has infested the earth,—a crooked progeny, like Peer
Gynt’s, which can never be straightened into sincerity, or softened into
good-will. “For first the Church of Rome condemneth us, we likewise
them,” observes Sir Thomas Browne with equanimity; “and thus we go
to Heaven against each others’ wills, conceits, and opinions.”
 THE ACCURSED ANNUAL
Why, by dabbling in those accursed Annuals, I have become a
by-word of infamy all over the kingdom.—C L .
T great dividing line between books that are made to be read and
books that are made to be bought is not the purely modern thing it seems.
We can trace it, if we try, back to the first printing-presses, which catered
indulgently to hungry scholars and to noble patrons; and we can see it in
another generation separating “Waverley” and “The Corsair,” which
everybody knew by heart, from the gorgeous “Annual” (bound in Lord
Palmerston’s cast-off waistcoats, hinted Thackeray), which formed a
decorative feature of well-appointed English drawing-rooms. The
perfectly natural thing to do with an unreadable book is to give it away;
and the publication, for more than a quarter of a century, of volumes
which fulfilled this one purpose and no other is a pleasant proof, if proof
were needed, of the business principles which underlay the enlightened
activity of publishers.
The wave of sentimentality which submerged England when the clear-
headed, hard-hearted eighteenth century had done its appointed work,
and lay a-dying, the prodigious advance in gentility from the days of
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu to the days of the Countess of Blessington,
found their natural expression in letters. It was a period of emotions
which were not too deep for words, and of decorum which measured
goodness by conventionalities. Turn where we will, we see a tear in
every eye, or a simper of self-complacency on every lip. Moore wept
when he beheld a balloon ascension at Tivoli, because he had not seen a
balloon since he was a little boy. The excellent Mr. Hall explained in his
“Memories of a Long Life” that, owing to Lady Blessington’s anomalous
position with Count D’Orsay, “Mrs. Hall never accompanied me to her
evenings, though she was a frequent day caller.” Criticism was controlled
by politics, and sweetened by gallantry. The Whig and Tory reviewers
supported their respective candidates to fame, and softened their
masculine sternness to affability when Mrs. Hemans or Miss Landon,
“the Sappho of the age,” contributed their glowing numbers to the world.
Miss Landon having breathed a poetic sigh in the “Amulet” for 1832, a
reviewer in “Fraser’s” magnanimously observed: “This gentle and fair
young lady, so undeservedly neglected by critics, we mean to take under
our special protection.” Could it ever have lain within the power of any
woman, even a poetess, to merit such condescension as this?
Of a society so organized, the Christmas annual was an appropriate and
ornamental feature. It was costly,—a guinea or a guinea and a half being
the usual subscription. It was richly bound in crimson silk or pea-green
levant; Solomon in all his glory was less magnificent. It was as free from
stimulus as eau sucrée. It was always genteel, and not infrequently
aristocratic,—having been known to rise in happy years to the schoolboy
verses of a royal duke. It was made, like Peter Pindar’s razors, to sell,
and it was bought to be given away; at which point its career of
usefulness was closed. Its languishing steel engravings of Corfu, Ayesha,
The Suliote Mother, and The Wounded Brigand, may have beguiled a
few heavy moments after dinner; and perhaps little children in frilled
pantalets and laced slippers peeped between the gorgeous covers, to
marvel at the Sultana’s pearls, or ask in innocence who was the dying
Haidee. Death, we may remark, was always a prominent feature of
annuals. Their artists and poets vied with one another in the selection of
mortuary subjects. Charles Lamb was first “hooked into the ‘Gem’” with
some lines on the editor’s dead infant. From a partial list, extending over
a dozen years, I cull this funeral wreath:—
The Dying Child. Poem.
The Orphans. Steel engraving.
The Orphan’s Tears. Poem.
The Gypsy’s Grave. Steel engraving.
The Lonely Grave. Poem.
On a Child’s Grave. Poem.
The Dying Mother to her Infant. Poem.
Blithesome reading for the Christmas-tide!
The annual was as orthodox as it was aristocratic. “The Shepherd of
Salisbury Plain” was not more edifying. “The Washerwoman of Finchley
Common” was less conspicuously virtuous. Here in “The Winter’s
Wreath” is a long poem in blank verse, by a nameless clergyman, on
“The Efficacy of Religion.” Here in the “Amulet,” Mrs. Hemans,
“leading the way as she deserves to do” (I quote from the “Monthly
Review”), “clothes in her own pure and fascinating language the
invitations which angels whisper into mortal ears.” And here in the
“Forget-Me-Not,” Leontine hurls mild defiance at the spirit of doubt:—
 Thou sceptic of the hardened brow,
Attend to Nature’s cry!
Her sacred essence breathes the glow
O’er that thou wouldst deny;
—an argument which would have carried conviction to Huxley’s soul,
had he been more than eight years old when it was written. Poor
Coleridge, always in need of a guinea or two, was bidden to write some
descriptive lines for the “Keepsake,” on an engraving by Parris of the
Garden of Boccaccio; a delightful picture of nine ladies and three
gentlemen picnicking in a park, with arcades as tall as aqueducts, a
fountain as vast as Niagara, and butterflies twice the size of the rabbits.
Coleridge, exempt by nature from an unserviceable sense of humour,
executed this commission in three pages of painstaking verse, and was
severely censured for mentioning “in terms not sufficiently guarded, one
of the most impure and mischievous books that could find its way into
the hands of an innocent female.”
The system of first securing an illustration, and then ordering a poem to
match it, seemed right and reasonable to the editor of the annual, who
paid a great deal for his engravings, and little or nothing for his poetry.
Sometimes the poet was not even granted a sight of the picture he was
expected to describe. We find Lady Blessington writing to Dr. William
Beattie,—the best-natured man of his day,—requesting “three or four
stanzas” for an annual called “Buds and Blossoms,” which was to
contain portraits of the children of noble families. The particular “buds”
whose unfolding he was asked to immortalize were the three sons of the
Duke of Buccleuch; and it was gently hinted that “an allusion to the
family would add interest to the subject”;—in plain words, that a little
well-timed flattery might be trusted to expand the sales. Another year the
same unblushing petitioner was even more hardy in her demand.
“Will you write me a page of verse for the portrait of Miss Forester? The
young lady is seated with a little dog on her lap, which she looks at
rather pensively. She is fair, with light hair, and is in mourning.”
Here is an inspiration for a poet. A picture, which he has not seen, of a
young lady in mourning looking pensively at a little dog! And poor
Beattie was never paid a cent for these effusions. His sole rewards were a
few words of thanks, and Lady Blessington’s cards for parties he was too
ill to attend.
More business-like poets made a specialty of fitting pictures with verses,
as a tailor fits customers with coats. A certain Mr. Harvey, otherwise lost
to fame, was held to be unrivalled in this art. For many years his “chaste
and classic pen” supplied the annuals with flowing stanzas, equally
adapted to the timorous taste of editors, and to the limitations of the
“innocent females” for whom the volumes were predestined. “Mr.
Harvey embodies in two or three lines the expression of a whole
picture,” says an enthusiastic reviewer, “and at the same time turns his
inscription into a little gem of poetry.” As a specimen gem, I quote one
of four verses accompanying an engraving called Morning Dreams,—a
young woman reclining on a couch, and simpering vapidly at the
curtains:—
She has been dreaming, and her thoughts are still
On their far journey in the land of dreams;
The forms we call—but may not chase—at will,
And sweet low voices, soft as distant streams.
This is a fair sample of the verse supplied for Christmas annuals, which,
however “chaste and classic,” was surely never intended to be read. It is
only right, however, to remember that Thackeray’s “Piscator and
Piscatrix” was written at Lady Blessington’s behest, to accompany
Wattier’s engraving of The Happy Anglers; and that Thackeray told
Locker he was so much pleased with this picture, and so engrossed with
his own poem, that he forgot to shave for the two whole days he was
working at it. To write “good occasional verse,” by which he meant verse
begged or ordered for some such desperate emergency as Lady
Blessington’s, was, in his eyes, an intellectual feat. It represented
difficulties overcome, like those wonderful old Italian frescoes fitted so
harmoniously into unaccommodating spaces. Nothing can be more
charming than “Piscator and Piscatrix,” and nothing can be more insipid
than the engraving which inspired the lively rhymes:

As on this pictured page I look,

This pretty tale of line and hook,
As though it were a novel-book,
Amuses and engages:
I know them both, the boy and girl,
She is the daughter of an Earl,
The lad (that has his hair in curl)
My lord the County’s page is.
 A pleasant place for such a pair!
The fields lie basking in the glare;
No breath of wind the heavy air
Of lazy summer quickens.
Hard by you see the castle tall,
The village nestles round the wall,
As round about the hen, its small
Young progeny of chickens.

The verses may be read in any edition of Thackeray’s ballads; but when
we have hunted up the “pictured page” in a mouldy old “Keepsake,” and
see an expressionless girl, a featureless boy, an indistinguishable castle,
and no village, we are tempted to agree with Charles Lamb, who swore
that he liked poems to explain pictures, and not pictures to illustrate
poems. “Your woodcut is a rueful lignum mortis.”
There was a not unnatural ambition on the part of publishers and editors
to secure for their annuals one or two names of repute, with which to
leaven the mass of mediocrity. It mattered little if the distinguished
writer conscientiously contributed the feeblest offspring of his pen; that
was a reasonable reckoning,—distinguished writers do the same to-day;
but it mattered a great deal if, as too often happened, he broke his word,
and failed to contribute anything. Then the unhappy editor was
compelled to publish some such apologetic note as this, from the
“Amulet” of 1833. “The first sheet of the ‘Amulet’ was reserved for my
friend Mr. Bulwer, who had kindly tendered me his assistance; but, in
consequence of various unavoidable circumstances” (a pleasure trip on
the Rhine), “he has been compelled to postpone his aid until next year.”
On such occasions, the “reserved” pages were filled by some veteran
annualist, like Mr. Alaric Attila Watts, editor of the “Literary Souvenir”;
or perhaps Mr. Thomas Haynes Bailey, he who wrote “I’d be a
Butterfly,” and “Gaily the Troubadour,” was persuaded to warble some
such appropriate sentiment as this in the “Forget-Me-Not”:—
It is a book we christen thus,
Less fleeting than the flower;
And ’twill recall the past to us
With talismanic power;
which was a true word spoken in rhyme. Nothing recalls that faded past,
with its simpering sentimentality, its reposeful ethics, its shut-in
standards, and its differentiation of the masculine and feminine intellects,
like the yellow pages of an annual.
Tom Moore, favourite of gods and men, was singled out by publishers as
the lode-star of their destinies, as the poet who could be best trusted to
impart to the “Amethyst” or the “Talisman” (how like Pullman cars they
sound!) that “elegant lightness” which befitted its mission in life. His
accounts of the repeated attacks made on his virtue, and the repeated
repulses he administered, fill by no means the least amusing pages of his
journal. The first attempt was made by Orne, who, in 1826, proposed that
Moore should edit a new annual on the plan of the “Souvenir”; and who
assured the poet—always as deep in difficulties as Micawber—that, if
the enterprise proved successful, it would yield him from five hundred to
a thousand pounds a year. Moore, dazzled but not duped, declined the
task; and the following summer, the engraver Heath made him a similar
proposition, but on more assured terms. Heath was then preparing to
launch upon the world of fashion his gorgeous “Keepsake”—“the toy-
shop of literature,” Lockhart called it; and he offered Moore, first five
hundred, and then seven hundred pounds a year, if he would accept the
editorship. Seven hundred pounds loomed large in the poet’s fancy, but
pride forbade the bargain. The author of “Lalla Rookh” could not
consent to bow his laurelled head, and pilot the feeble Fatimas and
Zelicas, the noble infants in coral necklets, and the still nobler ladies
with pearl pendants on their brows, into the safe harbour of boudoir and
drawing-room. He made this clear to Heath, who, nothing daunted, set
off at once for Abbotsford, and laid his proposals at the feet of Sir Walter
Scott, adding to his bribe another hundred pounds.
Scott, the last man in Christendom to have undertaken such an office, or
to have succeeded in it, softened his refusal with a good-natured promise
to contribute to the “Keepsake” when it was launched. He was not
nervous about his literary standing, and he had no sensitive fear of
lowering it by journeyman’s work. “I have neither the right nor the
wish,” he wrote once to Murray, “to be considered above a common
labourer in the trenches.” Moore, however, was far from sharing this
modest unconcern. When Reynolds, on whom the editorship of the
“Keepsake” finally devolved, asked him for some verses, he
peremptorily declined. Then began a system of pursuit and escape, of
assault and repulse, which casts the temptations of St. Anthony into the
shade. “By day and night,” so Moore declares, Reynolds was “after”
him, always increasing the magnitude of his bribe. At last he forced a
check for a hundred pounds into the poet’s empty pocket (for all the
world like a scene in Caran d’Ache’s “Histoire d’un Chèque”), imploring
in return a hundred lines of verse. But Moore’s virtue—or his vanity—
was impregnable. “The task was but light, and the money would have
been convenient,” he confesses; “but I forced it back on him again. The
fact is, it is my name brings these offers, and my name would suffer by
accepting them.”
One might suppose that the baffled tempter would now have
permanently withdrawn, save that the strength of tempters lies in their
never knowing when they are beaten. Three years later, Heath renewed
the attack, proposing that Moore should furnish all the letter-press, prose
and verse, of the “Keepsake” for 1832, receiving in payment the
generous sum of one thousand pounds. Strange to say, Moore took rather
kindly to this appalling suggestion, admitted he liked it better than its
predecessors, and consented to think the matter over for a fortnight. In
the end, however, he adhered to his original determination to hold
himself virgin of annuals; and refused the thousand pounds, which would
have paid all his debts, only to fall, as fall men must, a victim to female
blandishments. He was cajoled into writing some lines for the “Casket,”
edited by Mrs. Blencoe; and had afterwards the pleasure of discovering
that the astute lady had added to her list of attractions another old poem
of his, which, to avoid sameness, she obligingly credited to Lord Byron;
—enough to make that ill-used poet turn uneasily in his grave.
Charles Lamb’s detestation of annuals dates naturally enough from the
hour he was first seduced into becoming a contributor; and every time he
lapsed from virtue, his rage blazed out afresh. When his ill-timed
sympathy for a bereaved parent—and that parent an editor—landed him
in the pages of the “Gem,” he wrote to Barton in an access of ill-humour
which could find no phrases sharp enough to feed it.
“I hate the paper, the type, the gloss, the dandy plates, the names of
contributors poked up into your eyes in the first page, and whistled
through all the covers of magazines, the bare-faced sort of emulation, the
immodest candidateship, brought into so little space; in short I detest to
appear in an annual.... Don’t think I set up for being proud on this point;
I like a bit of flattery tickling my vanity as well as any one. But these
pompous masquerades without masks (naked names or faces) I hate. So
there’s a bit of my mind.”
“Frippery,” “frumpery,” “show and emptiness,” are the mildest epithets
at Lamb’s command, as often as he laments his repeated falls from grace;
and a few years before his death, when that “dumb soporifical good-for-
nothingness” (curse of the Enfield lanes) weighted his pen, and dulled
the lively processes of his brain, he writes with poignant melancholy:—
“I cannot scribble a long letter. I am, when not on foot, very desolate,
and take no interest in anything, scarce hate anything but annuals.” It is
the last expression of a just antipathy, an instinctive clinging to
something which can be reasonably hated to the end.
The most pretentious and the most aristocratic of the annuals was the
ever famous “Book of Beauty,” edited for many years by the Countess of
Blessington. Resting on a solid foundation of personal vanity (a
superstructure never known to fail), it reached a heroic measure of
success, and yielded an income which permitted the charming woman
who conducted it to live as far beyond her means as any leader of the
fashionable world in London. It was estimated that Lady Blessington
earned by the “gorgeous inanities” she edited, and by the vapid tales she
wrote, an income of from two thousand to three thousand pounds; but
she would never have been paid so well for her work had she not
supported her social position by an expenditure of twice that sum.
Charles Greville, who spares no scorn he can heap upon her editorial
methods, declares that she attained her ends “by puffing and stuffing, and
untiring industry, by practising on the vanity of some and the good-
nature of others. And though I never met with any one who had read her
books, except the ‘Conversations with Byron,’ which are too good to be
hers, they are unquestionably a source of considerable profit, and she
takes her place confidently and complacently as one of the literary
celebrities of her day.”
Greville’s instinctive unkindness leaves him often wide of the mark, but
on this occasion we can only say that he might have spoken his truths
more humanely. If Lady Blessington helped to create the demand which
she supplied, if she turned her friendships to account, and made of
hospitality a means to an end (a line of conduct not unknown to-day), she
worked with unsparing diligence, and with a sort of desperate courage
for over twenty years. Rival Books of Beauty were launched upon a
surfeited market, but she maintained her precedence. For ten years she
edited the “Keepsake,” and made it a source of revenue, until the
unhappy bankruptcy and death of Heath. In her annuals we breathe the
pure air of ducal households, and consort with the peeresses of England,
turning condescendingly now and then to contemplate a rusticity so
obviously artificial, it can be trusted never to offend. That her standard of
art (she had no standard of letters) was acceptable to the British public is
proved by the rapturous praise of critics and reviewers. Thackeray,
indeed, professed to think the sumptuous ladies, who loll and languish in
the pages of the year-book, underclad and indecorous; but this was in the
spirit of hypercriticism. Hear rather how a writer in “Fraser’s Magazine”
describes in a voice trembling with emotion the opulent charms of one of
the Countess of Blessington’s “Beauties”:—
“There leans the tall and imperial form of the enchantress, with raven
tresses surmounted by the cachemire of sparkling red; while her ringlets
flow in exuberant waves over the full-formed neck; and barbaric pearls,
each one worth a king’s ransom, rest in marvellous contrast with her dark
and mysterious loveliness.”
“Here’s richness!” to quote our friend Mr. Squeers. Here’s something of
which it is hard to think a public could ever tire. Yet sixteen years later,
when the Countess of Blessington died in poverty and exile, but full of
courage to the end, the “Examiner” tepidly observed that the probable
extinction of the year-book “would be the least of the sad regrets
attending her loss.”
For between 1823 and 1850 three hundred annuals had been published in
England, and the end was very near. Exhausted nature was crying for
release. It is terrible to find an able and honest writer like Miss Mitford
editing a preposterous volume called the “Iris,” of inhuman bulk and
superhuman inanity; a book which she well knew could never, under any
press of circumstances, be read by mortal man or woman. There were
annuals to meet every demand, and to please every class of purchaser.
Comic annuals for those who hoped to laugh; a “Botanic Annual” for
girls who took country walks with their governess; an “Oriental Annual”
for readers of Byron and Moore; a “Landscape Annual” for lovers of
nature; “The Christian Keepsake” for ladies of serious minds; and “The
Protestant Annual” for those who feared that Christianity might possibly
embrace the Romish Church. There were five annuals for English
children; from one of which, “The Juvenile Keepsake,” I quote these
lines, so admirably adapted to the childish mind. Newton is supposed to
speak them in his study:—
Pure and ethereal essence, fairest light,
Come hither, and before my watchful eyes
 Disclose thy hidden nature, and unbind
Thy mystic, fine-attenuated parts;
That so, intently marking, I the source
May learn of colours, Nature’s matchless gifts.
There are three pages of this poem, all in the same simple language, from
which it is fair to infer that the child’s annual, like its grown-up
neighbour, was made to be bought, not read.
 OUR ACCOMPLISHED GREAT-
GRANDMOTHER
Next to mere idleness, I think knotting is to be reckoned in the scale of
insignificance.—D . J .
R of Dickens (which ought to mean all men and women who have
mastered the English alphabet) will remember how that estimable
schoolmistress, Miss Monflathers, elucidated Dr. Watts’s masterpiece,
which had been quoted somewhat rashly by a teacher. “‘The little busy
bee,’” said Miss Monflathers, drawing herself up, “is applicable only to
genteel children.
In books, or work, or healthful play,
is quite right as far as they are concerned; and the work means painting
on velvet, fancy needlework, or embroidery.”
It also meant, in the good Miss Monflathers’s day, making filigree
baskets that would not hold anything, Ionic temples of Bristol-board,
shell flowers, and paper landscapes. It meant pricking pictures with pins,
taking “impressions” of butterflies’ wings on sheets of gummed paper,
and messing with strange, mysterious compounds called diaphanie and
potichomanie, by means of which a harmless glass tumbler or a
respectable window-pane could be turned into an object of desolation.
Indeed, when the genteel young ladies of this period were not reading
“Merit opposed to Fascination; exemplified in the story of Eugenio,” or
“An Essay on the Refined Felicity which may arise from the Marriage
Contract,” they were cultivating what were then called “ornamental
arts,” but which later on became known as “accomplishments.” “It is
amazing to me,” says that most amiable of sub-heroes, Mr. Bingley,
“how young ladies can have patience to be so very accomplished as they
all are. They paint tables, cover screens, and net purses. I scarcely know
any one who cannot do all this; and I am sure I never heard a young lady
spoken of for the first time, without being informed that she was very
accomplished.”
We leave the unamiable Mr. Darcy snorting at his friend’s remark, to
consider the paucity of Mr. Bingley’s list. Tables, screens, and purses
represent but the first beginnings of that misdirected energy which for
the best part of a century embellished English homes. The truly
accomplished young lady in Miss More’s “Cœlebs” paints flowers and
shells, draws ruins, gilds and varnishes wood, is an adept in Japan work,
and stands ready to begin modelling, etching, and engraving. The great
principle of ornamental art was the reproduction of an object—of any
object—in an alien material. The less adapted this material was to its
purpose, the greater the difficulties it presented to the artist, the more
precious became the monstrous masterpiece. To take a plain sheet of
paper and draw a design upon it was ignominious in its simplicity; but to
construct the same design out of paper spirals, rolling up some five
hundred slips with uniform tightness, setting them on end, side by side,
and painting or gilding the tops,—that was a feat of which any young
lady might be proud. It was so uncommonly hard to do, it ought to have
been impossible. Cutting paper with fine sharp scissors and a knife was
taught in schools (probably in Miss Monflathers’s school, though
Dickens does not mention it) as a fashionable pastime. The “white
design”—animals, landscape, or marine—was printed on a black
background, which was cut away with great dexterity, the spaces being
small and intricate. When all the black paper had been removed, the
flimsy tracery was pasted on a piece of coloured paper, thus presenting—
after hours of patient labour—much the same appearance that it had in
the beginning. It was then glassed, framed, and presented to appreciative
parents, as a proof of their daughter’s industry and taste.
The most famous work of art ever made out of paper was probably the
celebrated “herbal” of Mrs. Delany,—Mrs. Delany whom Burke
pronounced “the model of an accomplished gentlewoman.” She acquired
her accomplishments at an age when most people seek to relinquish
theirs,—having learned to draw when she was thirty, to paint when she
was forty, and to write verse when she was eighty-two. She also
“excelled in embroidery and shell-work”; and when Miss Burney made
her first visit to St. James’s Place, she found Mrs. Delany’s walls covered
with “ornaments of her own execution of striking elegance, in cuttings
and variegated stained papers.” The herbal, however, was the crowning
achievement of her life. It contained nearly a thousand plants, made of
thin strips of coloured paper, pasted layer over layer with the utmost
nicety upon a black background, and producing an effect “richer than
painting.”
Cold Winter views amid his realms of snow
Delany’s vegetable statues blow;
 Smoothes his stern brow, delays his hoary wing,
And eyes with wonder all the blooms of Spring.
The flowers were copied accurately from nature, and florists all over the
kingdom vied with one another in sending Mrs. Delany rare and
beautiful specimens. The Queen ardently admired this herbal, and the
King, who regarded it with veneration not untinged by awe, expressed
his feelings by giving its creator a house at Windsor, and settling upon
her an annuity of three hundred pounds. Yet Miss Seward complained
that although England “teemed with genius,” George III was “no Cæsar
Augustus,” to encourage and patronize the arts. To the best of his ability,
he did. His conception of genius and art may not have tallied with that of
Augustus; but when an old lady made paper flowers to perfection, he
gave her a royal reward.
Mrs. Delany’s example was followed in court circles, and in the humbler
walks of life. Shell-work, which was one of her accomplishments,
became the rage. Her illustrious friend, the Duchess of Portland, “made
shell frames and feather designs, adorned grottoes, and collected endless
objects in the animal and vegetable kingdom.” Young ladies of taste
made flowers out of shells, dyeing the white ones with Brazil wood, and
varnishing them with gum arabic. A rose of red shells, with a heart of
knotted yellow silk, was almost as much admired as a picture of birds
with their feathers pasted on the paper. This last triumph of realism
presented a host of difficulties to the perpetrator. When the bill and legs
of the bird had been painted in water colours on heavy Bristol-board, the
space for its body was covered with a paste of gum arabic as thick as a
shilling. This paste was kept “tacky or clammy” to hold the feathers,
which were stripped off the poor little dead bird, and stuck on the
prepared surface, the quills being cut down with a knife. Weights were
used to keep the feathers in place, the result being that most of them
adhered to the lead instead of to the Bristol-board, and came off
discouragingly when the work was nearly done. As a combination of art
and nature, the bird picture had no rival except the butterfly picture,
where the clipped wings of butterflies were laid between two sheets of
gummed paper, and the “impressions” thus taken, reinforced with a little
gilding, were attached to a painted body. It may be observed that the
quality of mercy was then a good deal strained. Mrs. Montagu’s famous
“feather-room,” in her house on Portman Square, was ornamented with
hangings made by herself from the plumage of hundreds of birds, every
attainable variety being represented; yet no one of her friends, not even
the sainted Hannah More, ever breathed a sigh of regret over the merry
little lives that were wasted for its meretricious decorations.
Much time and ingenuity were devoted by industrious young people to
the making of baskets, and no material, however unexpected, came amiss
to their patient hands. Allspice berries, steeped in brandy to soften them
and strung on wire, were very popular; and rice baskets had a chaste
simplicity of their own. These last were made of pasteboard, lined with
silk or paper, the grains of rice being gummed on in solid diamond-
shaped designs. If the decoration appeared a trifle monotonous, as well it
might, it was diversified with coloured glass beads. Indeed, we are
assured that “baskets of this description may be very elegantly
ornamented with groups of small shells, little artificial bouquets, crystals,
and the fine feathers from the heads of birds of beautiful plumage”;—
with anything, in short, that could be pasted on and persuaded to stick.
When the supply of glue gave out, wafer baskets—wafers required only
moistening—or alum baskets (made of wire wrapped round with
worsted, and steeped in a solution of alum, which was coloured yellow
with saffron or purple with logwood) were held in the highest estimation.
The modern mind, with its puny resources, is bewildered by the
multiplicity of materials which seem to have lain scattered around the
domestic hearth a hundred years ago. There is a famous old receipt for
“silvering paper without silver,” a process designed to be economical,
but which requires so many messy and alien ingredients, like “Indian
glue,” and “Muscovy talc,” and “Venice turpentine,” and “Japan size,”
and “Chinese varnish,” that mere silver seems by comparison a cheap
and common thing. Young ladies whose thrift equalled their ingenuity
made their own varnish by boiling isinglass in a quart of brandy,—a
lamentable waste of supplies.
Genteel parcels were always wrapped in silver paper. We remember how
Miss Edgeworth’s Rosamond tries in vain to make one sheet cover the
famous “filigree basket,” which was her birthday present to her Cousin
Bell, and which pointed its own moral by falling to pieces before it was
presented. Rosamond’s father derides this basket because he is implored
not to grasp it by its myrtle-wreathed handle. “But what is the use of the
handle,” he asks, in the conclusive, irritating fashion of the
Edgeworthian parent, “if we are not to take hold of it? And pray is this
the thing you have been about all week? I have seen you dabbling with
paste and rags, and could not conceive what you were doing.”
Rosamond’s half-guinea—her godmother’s gift—is spent buying filigree
paper, and medallions, and a “frost ground” for this basket, and she is
ruthlessly shamed by its unstable character; whereas Laura, who gives
her money secretly to a little lace-maker, has her generosity revealed at
exactly the proper moment, and is admired and praised by all the
company. Apart from Miss Edgeworth’s conception of life, as made up
of well-adjusted punishments and rewards, a half-guinea does seem a
good deal to spend on filigree paper; but then a single sheet of gold paper
cost six shillings, unless gilded at home, after the following process,
which was highly commended for economy:—
“Take yellow ochre, grind it with rain-water, and lay a ground with it all
over the paper, which should be fine wove. When dry, take the white of
an egg and about a quarter of an ounce of sugar candy, and beat them
together until the sugar candy is dissolved. Then strike it all over the
ground with a varnish brush, and immediately lay on the gold leaf,
pressing it down with a piece of fine cotton. When dry, polish it with a
dog’s tooth or agate. A sheet of this paper may be prepared for eighteen
pence.”
No wonder little Rosamond was unequal to such labour, and her half-
guinea was squandered in extravagant purchases. Miss Edgeworth,
trained in her father’s theory that children should be always occupied,
was a good deal distressed by the fruits of their industry. The “chatting
girls cutting up silk and gold paper,” whom Miss Austen watched with
unconcern, would have fretted Miss Edgeworth’s soul, unless she knew
that sensible needle-cases, pin-cushions, and work-bags were in process
of construction. Yet the celebrated “rational toy-shop,” with its hand-
looms instead of dolls, and its machines for drawing in perspective
instead of tin soldiers and Noah’s arks, stood responsible for the
inutilities she scorned. And what of the charitable lady in “Lazy
Lawrence,” who is “making a grotto,” and buying shells and fossils for
its decoration? Even a filigree basket, which had at least the grace of
impermanence, seems desirable by comparison with a grotto. It will be
remembered also that Madame de Rosier, the “Good French Governess,”
traces her lost son, that “promising young man of fourteen,” by means of
a box he has made out of refuse bits of shell thrown aside in a London
restaurant; while the son in turn discovers a faithful family servant
through the medium of a painted pasteboard dog, which the equally
ingenious domestic has exposed for sale in a shop. It was a good thing in
Miss Edgeworth’s day to cultivate the “ornamental arts,” were it only for
the reunion of families.
Pasteboard, a most ungrateful and unyielding material, was the basis of
so many household decorations that a little volume, published in the
beginning of the last century, is devoted exclusively to its possibilities.
This book, which went through repeated editions, is called “The Art of
Working in Pasteboard upon Scientific Principles”; and it gives minute
directions for making boxes, baskets, tea-trays, caddies,—even
candlesticks, and “an inkstand in the shape of a castle with a tower,”—a
baffling architectural design. What patience and ingenuity must have
been expended upon this pasteboard castle, which had a wing for the ink
well, a wing for the sand box, five circular steps leading up to the
principal entrance, a terrace which was a drawer, a balcony surrounded
by a “crenelled screen,” a tower to hold the quills, a vaulted cupola
which lifted like a lid, and a lantern with a “quadrilateral pyramid” for its
roof, surmounted by a real pea or a glass bead as the final bit of
decoration. There is a drawing of this edifice, which is as imposing as its
dimensions will permit; and there are four pages of mysterious
instructions which make the reader feel as though he were studying
architecture by correspondence.
Far more difficult of accomplishment, and far more useless when
accomplished,—for they could not even hold pens and ink,—were the
Grecian temples and Gothic towers, made of pasteboard covered with
marbled paper, and designed as “elegant ornaments for the mantelpiece.”
A small Ionic temple requires ten pages of directions. It is built of “the
best Bristol-board, except the shafts of the pillars and some of the
decorations, which are made of royal drawing-paper”; and its
manufacturers are implored not to spare time, trouble, or material, if they
would attain to anything so classic. “The art of working in pasteboard,”
says the preface of this engaging little book, “may be carried to a high
degree of usefulness and perfection, and may eventually be productive of
substantial benefits to young persons of both sexes, who wisely devote
their leisure hours to pleasing, quiet, and useful recreations, preferably to
frivolous, noisy, and expensive amusements.”
A pleasing, quiet, and useful recreation which wasted nothing but
eyesight,—and that nobody valued,—was pricking pictures with pins.
The broad lines and heavy shadows were pricked with stout pins, the fine
lines and high lights with little ones, while a toothed wheel, sharply
pointed, was used for large spaces and simple decorative designs. This
was an ambitious field of art, much of the work being of a microscopic
delicacy. The folds of a lady’s dress could be pricked in such film-like
waves that only close scrutiny revealed the thousand tiny holes of which
its billowy softness was composed. The cleanness and dryness of pins
commend them to our taste after a long contemplation of varnish and
glue pots; of “poonah work,” which was a sticky sort of stencilling; of
“Japan work,” in which embossed figures were made of “gum-water,
thickened to a proper consistence with equal parts of bole ammoniac and
whiting”; of “Chinese enamel,” which was a base imitation of ebony
inlaid with ivory; and of “potichomanie,” which converted a piece of
English glass into something that “not one in a hundred could tell from
French china.” We sympathize with the refined editor of the “Monthly
Museum,” who recommends knotting to his female readers, not only
because it had the sanction of a queen,
Who, when she rode in coach abroad,
Was always knotting threads;
but because of its “pure nature” and “innocent simplicity.” “I cannot but
think,” says this true friend of my sex, “that shirts and smocks are unfit
for any lady of delicacy to handle; but the shuttle is an easy flowing
object, to which the eye may remove with propriety and grace.”
Grace was never overlooked in our great-grandmother’s day, but took
rank as an important factor in education. A London schoolmistress,
offering in 1815 some advice as to the music “best fitted for ladies,”
confesses that it is hard to decide between the “wide range” of the
pianoforte and the harp-player’s “elegance of position,” which gives to
her instrument “no small powers of rivalry.” Sentiment was interwoven
with every accomplishment. Tender mottoes, like those which Miss
Euphemia Dundas entreats Thaddeus of Warsaw to design for her, were
painted upon boxes and hand-screens. Who can forget the white leather
“souvenir,” adorned with the words “Toujours cher,” which Miss
Euphemia presses upon Thaddeus, and which that attractive but virtuous
exile is modestly reluctant to accept. A velvet bracelet embroidered with
forget-me-nots symbolized friendship. A handkerchief, designed as a gift
from a young girl to her betrothed, had a celestial sphere worked in one
corner, to indicate the purity of their flame; a bouquet of buds and
blossoms in another, to mark the pleasures and the brevity of life; and, in
a third, Cupid playing with a spaniel, “as an emblem of the most
passionate fidelity.” Even samplers, which represented the first step in
the pursuit of accomplishments, had their emblematic designs no less
than their moral axioms. The village schoolmistress, whom Miss Mitford
knew and loved, complained that all her pupils wanted to work samplers
instead of learning to sew; and that all their mothers valued these works
of art more than they did the neatest of caps and aprons. The sampler
stood for gentility as well as industry. It reflected credit on the family as
well as on the child. At the bottom of a faded canvas, worked more than
a hundred years ago, and now hanging in a great museum of art, is this
inspiring verse:—
I have done this that you may see
What care my parents took of me.
And when I’m dead and in my grave,
This piece of work I trust you’ll save.
If the little girl who embodied her high hopes in the painful precision of
cross-stitch could but know of their splendid fulfilment!
 THE ALBUM AMICORUM
She kept an album too, at home,
Well stocked with all an album’s glories,
Paintings of butterflies and Rome,
Patterns for trimmings, Persian stories.

P .

M authors who object to being asked for their autographs, and

who complain piteously of the persecutions they endure in this regard,
would do well to consider what they have gained by being born in an age
when commercialism has supplanted compliment. Had they been their
own great-grandfathers, they would have been expected to present to
their female friends the verses they now sell to magazines. They would
have written a few playful and affectionate lines every time they dined
out, and have paid for a week’s hospitality with sentimental tributes to
their hostess. And not their hostess only. Her budding daughters would
have looked for some recognition of their charms, and her infant son
would have presented a theme too obvious for disregard. It is recorded
that when Campbell spent two days at the country seat of Mr. James
Craig, the Misses Craig kept him busy most of that time composing
verses for their albums,—a pleasant way of entertaining a poet guest. On
another occasion he writes to Mrs. Arkwright, lamenting, though with
much good-humour, the importunities of mothers. “Mrs. Grahame has a
plot upon me that I should write a poem upon her boy, three years old.
Oh, such a boy! But in the way of writing lines on lovely children, I am
engaged three deep, and dare not promise.”
It seems that parents not only petitioned for these poetic windfalls, but
pressed their claims hard. Campbell, one of the most amiable of men,
yielded in time to this demand, as he had yielded to many others, and
sent to little Master Grahame some verses of singular ineptitude.

Sweet bud of life! thy future doom

Is present to my eyes,
And joyously I see thee bloom
In Fortune’s fairest skies.
 One day that breast, scarce conscious now,
Shall burn with patriot flame;
And, fraught with love, that little brow
Shall wear the wreath of fame.

There are many more stanzas, but these are enough to make us wonder
why parents did not let the poet alone. Perhaps, if they had, he would
have volunteered his services. We know that when young Fanny Kemble
showed him her nosegay at a ball, and asked how she should keep the
flowers from fading, he answered hardily: “Give them to me, and I will
immortalize them,”—an enviable assurance of renown.
Album verses date from the old easy days, when rhyming was regarded
as a gentlemanly accomplishment rather than as a means of livelihood.
Titled authors, poets wealthy and well-born—for there were always such
—naturally addressed themselves to the ladies of their acquaintance.
They could say with Lord Chesterfield that they thanked Heaven they
did not have to live by their brains. It was a theory, long and fondly
cherished, that poetry was not common merchandise, to be bought and
sold like meal and malt; that it was, as Burns admirably said, either
above price or worth nothing at all. Later on, when poets became
excellent men of business, when Byron had been seduced by Murray’s
generosity, when Moore drove his wonderful bargains, and poetic
narrative was the best-selling commodity in the market, we hear a rising
murmur of protest against the uncommercial exactions of the album.
Sonneteers who could sell their wares for hard cash no longer felt repaid
by a word of flattery. Even the myrtle wreaths which crowned the victors
of the Bath Easton contests appeared but slender compensation, save in
Miss Seward’s eyes, or in Mrs. Hayley’s. When Mrs. Hayley went to
Bath in 1781, and witnessed the solemn ceremonies inaugurated by Lady
Miller; when she saw the laurels, and myrtles, and fluttering ribbons, her
soul was fired with longing, and she set to work to persuade her husband
that the Bath Easton prize was not wholly beneath his notice. The author
of “The Triumphs of Temper” was naturally fearful of lowering his
dignity by sporting with minor poets; and there was much wifely artifice
in her assumption that such playfulness on his part would be recognized
as true condescension. “If you should feel disposed to honour this slight
amusement with a light composition, I am persuaded you will oblige
very highly.” The responsive Hayley was not unwilling to oblige,
provided no one would suspect him of being in earnest. He “scribbled”
the desired lines “in the most rapid manner,” “literally in a morning and