was recalling his own youthful experience.) He knew, too, what to-day
we only know in the mass through the newspapers, that a merchant's
business depends not only upon watching the markets, but upon the
actual supply of material--"what commodities are arrived or expected,"
and whether tea is up ½d. or tin ¾d. down, or if hogs closed firm. The
commercial world changes only its methods of communication and
expression.

The first chapter, indeed, is of genuine historical and literary
interest. From the literary point of view, it is a near
descendant--collateral, if not direct, and anyhow based on the same
English empirical humour of life--of Thomas Overbury's _A Wife_
(1614--only one unique copy of this is known to exist), John Earle's
_Microcosmographie_ (1628), in prose, and Thomas Bastard's
_Chrestoleros_* (1598), in verse. It is an early instance of the
stringing together, in a connected narrative, of the material
previously used only in short sketches or "characters"; and so it is
directly in the succession which in the end produced what is perhaps
the most enduring and individual phenomenon in our literature--the
English novel.

* A copy of the very rare first edition fetched £155 at the
Britwell sale in February 1922.

Of course the book says things we do not say now openly--though the
traditional _corpus scriptorum nondum scriptorum_ which almost all men
and even some women know is handed on, a rather noisome torch, from
generation to generation, solely by word of mouth, and flickers now
and again in _The Ten Pleasures_. But they were said openly then, and
by great writers. There is nothing here so nauseatingly indecent as