IN some of the most ancient of our chronicles, the authors make sorrowing record of the fact that when the Romans were well established in Britain, the sons of the native chiefs carried anguish to the hearts of their fathers, by adopting the habits, manners, morals, vices, and language of the conquerors. Simplicity and virtue suffered accordingly: young fellows who had known no liquid more potent than spring water, took to drinking Falernian; they made love in a loose way, and in still looser Latin, and they were the original fine gentlemen" of these islands, deriving all the worst qualities of that brotherhood from willing teachers from beyond the Alps. The British paterfamilias, however, had no reasonable grounds of complaint, for he never admitted his son to companionship with him till the lad was sixteen or eighteen years old, and then only to bear arms in the field. It was just at that age that the young Britons found Roman temptation so seductive that they flung off their braccæ, donned the graceful tunic, cut and curled their hair, and looked almost like genuine Italian dandies! All powerful fashion as fully asserted its potentiality after the arrival of the Saxons. The young gentlemen took kindly to hard drinking, and that curious custom of tattooing which so astonished and disgusted the Normans, who, in the latter respect worked a speedy reformation. That the Saxon lord or heir of land VOL. LAV.NO, CCCLXX'

despised trade, and that his inferiors, who did not possess land either in hope or in hand, suffered by an affcetation of similar contempt, is manifest by the law of Athelstan, which ennobled trade by enacting that he who had made three voyages for commercial purposes should ipso facto take rank as a gentleman. But then your fine people laughed at these mercantile thanes. A shopkeeper, dubbed a knight, is hardly an object of severer satire, particularly on the part of those good-natured people who are not likely to be invited within the pale of chivalry.

What Athelstan was unable to effect, the Normans did not pretend to accomplish. The latter brought in few new fashions, for the Saxons had learnt to import them. But the companions of the Conquestor, as William styled himself, introduced a few new vices, followed by extraordinary fashions in dress, to imitate which, to shuffle in long peaked shoes, to wear sleeves which covered the fingers, and to swear as boldly and blasphemously as the king, for the time being, was to do, and to be, the right thing! The Norman era was the true era of the "Goddems." The practice which procured for our ancestors so unpleasant a title was said to be purely English; but profane swearing was a Norman luxury, and a gentleman of that period aired his maledictions, if it were only to show that he was in the new and true fashion, and must be respected accord