Lady Bountiful's Legacy : a Book of Practical Instructions. Edited
by John Timbs. (Griffith and Farran.)--Instead of being a single legacy, this book is a whole will, and Mr. Timba's readers are the resi- duary legatees. Lady Bountiful's wealth mu,t have been fabulous or, at least, it must have been invested in such i variety of ways that the mere enumeration of small sums gives an appearance of vast riches. Every conceivable branch of housekeeping is touched upon in turn. Domestic habits, cookery, furniture, fires, ventilation, making preser-res, giving dinners, choosing and employing servants, fill up a good many chapters. To one Lady Bountiful leaves her valuable selections from Mr. Kerr's book on "Gentlemen's Houses." To another she leaves her cuttings from the Times on the management of waterpipes. To another she gives her collection of antiquarian pickings about garden herbs and simples, about hospitality in the time of Queen Elizabeth and carving in the reign of Lady Mary Wortley-Montagu. Mr. Timbs has drawn the will with the verbal exhaustiveness of a genuine conveyance, and has left nothing to the imagination. There is much in the book that is carious, as, for instance, the order which was promulgated in the house- hold of the fifth Earl of Northumberland, and which began, "It seemeth good to us and our council" that mustard should be made rightly. But the book contains also much that is useful, and the invention of more modern times has been enlisted as well as the experience of our ancestors.
Previous page
