T HE Judge on circuit at Taunton lately found good reason

to complain of the discomfort of his quarters in the Castle. Our "Justices in eyre" have, perhaps, no right to insist on all the comforts of a home when occupying judges' lodgings. But there are special reasons why in Taunton his Majesty's representative should be accorded rather more than the usual degree of domestic comfort due to travelling Judges equally with home-staying citizens. Taunton, in company with a few other old boroughs, has emphasised the worship of the hearth in a very original manner, and from an ancient date. Before the Reform Act of 1832 its electors based their title to vote at all on the fact that they possessed a fireside as a real going concern; in other words, that they not only possessed a hearth and home, but one where there was a fire on which they could cook their meals. Nor was this to be a mere makeshift of a fire, a miserable handful of coals at which you could toast a red-herring. It was to be a real good downright hot fire on which you could boil a joint in an iron pot. Your finicking tea-kettle was then unknown, when ladies like the daughters of the Earl Percy had a " boiled bone "—i.e., a boiled mutton chop—sent up for their breakfast with a pint of small beer. The sturdy Taunton voters, thus firmly entrenched by their fireside, rejoiced in the name of "pot- wallopers," or men who could boil their own pots on their

own fires. If we may read their opinions by the Members they sent to Parliament, they were Radicals to a man, in spite of their property franchise ; and when they wanted to "register" before a General Election they would even set their pots before their doors and " wallop " them in front of the enemy, that no one might dispute their franchise.

Without linking up the domestic fire with political rights, or building altars on which to keep it sacred, the English in their quiet way have always given the hearth a place close to their affections, and have devoted not a little trouble and thought to beautifying and adorning it. Among the self- respecting but not overrich classes in which the female head of the family has always done personal work in the nettoyage of the establishment the fireside and its surroundings have always had the first call upon their energies. In the last two centuries it was carried to a point at which effort and result almost parted company, as far as proportion is concerned, so elaborate was the equipment of the hearth, and so exacting the attention needed to keep it, and also its satellites of the kitchen or the fuel-store, in shining apparel. Modern feeling about the hearth in dwelling-rooms goes back tc the primitive simplicity of our ancestors, when wood was the only fuel,' and the hearths were constructed to match. These ancient fires, in house, castle, or hall, tended to be as simple as they were magnificent. As a rule, the big logs lay on the hearth, which was of brick or stone, in a bed of hot white ashes. Neither by day nor by night did the fire go out, and often it was placed in the middle of the room in an octagonal fence of iron or stone, whence the flames and smoke went up to the lantern or louvre in the ceiling. This is not our idea of a comfortable fireside. Nor can it be supposed for a moment that it was comfortable. Also it had not a " side,"—its ill-regulated heat and smoke drifted in any direction in which the draught took it. But there is a fine story connected with the open fire in the centre of the old Guildhall which shows that people did gather round it in the sense that we draw our chairs to the fireside. When Dick Whittington was Mayor of the Staple of London and Calais he lent great sums to Henry V. In the triumph after Agincourt, an entertainment was offered by the citizens to the King on his return to London, and after the dinner the occupants of the high table drew round the central fire, where the King and the company warmed themselves. Then Sir Richard sent for his clerk, who appeared with a casket in which were the King's bonds for £60,000, or vastly more in our money. These the merchant drew out, and after explaining his purpose to the company, cast the bonds into the fire as his contribution to the greatest victory won over the French.

In those days, and the later Plantagenet times, fino fireplaces were often made. There are some excellent " pent-house " mantelpieces of stone even in the Norman keeps. The fireplaces in the splendid tower-house of Tattersall Castle are so elaborate that, though made in the days of Henry VI., they were reproduced in the new Houses of Parliament. But in the pre-Tudor days, antedating the era of comfort, in the great age of draughts, there was probably more sense of home and happiness before the fire of the humble than of the great. The equipment of the hearth, which was also the cooking-place, scarcely altered for hundreds of years, until King Coal came and banished it all, or changed it greatly for the worse. In many old farm- houses, in some cottages, and in some manor-houses the old kitchen fireside remains almost unaltered. In the last the big old kitchen has sometimes been converted into the servants' hall, where the equipment still remains, while a modern "working kitchen" has been added. From up the chimney hung an iron "ratchet," toothed, and from this hung the big black pot. The fire was of wood, but often it rested on a low platform of iron bars, through which the ashes dropped, so that they did not blow upon the cooking meat with every gust of wind. When the day's work was over this was the real fireside, before which men " sat with the good folks." The farmer roasted chestnuts in his fire,—Shakespeare says so, so it must be true; Puck used to stretch his limbs before it when the household went to bed. The " dead and drowsy " fire was the symbol of domestic discomfort. There are signs that by Shakespeare's time the shadow of King Coal was

falling on the old hearth. Sea-coal fires are mentioned more than once. But wood was so plentiful that the jolly old wide hearths were in no immediate danger. Lord Tollemache's lamented death will remind many that the open fire in the great hall at Helmingbam must have been burning oak-logs for some three centuries. In Sussex, where the vast woods took the place that coal does now in industry, the first iron fire-backs and fire-dogs were made. It is about all that the ironworkers of that county did produce in the way of manufactured iron till they took to making cannon, it being a pig-iron industry. Still, it is remarkable that their first efforts should have been devoted to the embellishment of the hearth. They made fire-bucks and " dogs." Shovels were not wanted. On the other hand, an enormous pair of bellows, of which the shape seems never to have altered, was part of the invariable fireside furniture. The Tudor builders, while keeping the open hearth, dogs, and logs, made the fireplace the centre of the scheme of decoration of every room. Those were the magnificent days of firesides, when a man sometimes saw the arms of six generations of ancestors sprouting out of each other as he warmed his feet before his fire.

Coal fires caused a curious social change. They made possible the era of the tea-kettle and the small but comfort- able house, in which the parlour fire, not the kitchen hearth, was the social centre. Small houses might almost be divided into those of the post- and pre-carboniferous fireplace. It is difficult to picture the cosiness of the eighteenth-century parlour, if it had been necessary to have a great wood fire sputtering in it, and taking up a third of one wall-side at the least. You could not have a sofa close to one of the old yule-log-burning fireplaces :— "Now stir the flre, and close the shutters fast, Let fall the curtains, wheel the sofa round, And while the bubbling and loud hissing urn, Throws up a steaming column, and the cups, That cheer but not inebriate, wait on each, So let us welcome peaceful evening in."

That is a picture of what is meant, or was meant, by the English fireside. Contrast for true feeling, though it is not a poem written at the time it celebrates, the ordinary evening in a Border castle three centuries earlier :—

" The tables were drawn, it was idless all ;

Knight, and page, and household squire, Loitered through the lofty hall,

Or crowded round the ample fire. The staghounds, weary with the chase, Lay stretched upon the rushy floor, And urged in dreams the forest chase, From Teviot Stone to Eskdale Moor."

This is true, if a little tame; but Sir Walter redeems the tameness later:-

"Nine-and-twenty knights of fame

Hung their shields in Branksome Hall; Nine-and-twenty squires of name Brought them their steeds to bower from stall.

........ •

Ten of them were sheathed in steel, With bolted swords and spur on heel; They quitted not their harness bright, Neither by day nor yet by night.

They lay down to rest With corslet laced, Pillowed on buckler cold and hard; They carved at the meal With gloves of steel, And they drank the red wine through the helmet barred."

The old castle fireside seems to have been developed in the barrack room, for which the castle hall was the equivalent.

About the days of Cowper, and a little later, people took to " petting " their fireside. If the coals had been little gods they could not have enshrined them with greater care. It became the fashion for a short time to have cut-steel fenders, sidepieces, and even mantelpieces, these and the fenders being sometimes as finely cut into diamond patterns as the glasses in the old dessert sets. A few of these are still preserved,

and the polished steel fireplace and fender remained a house- hold idol, and a curse to their acolytes, the housemaids, for some fifty years.

Now there is a complete change and return to very early patterns in nearly all new houses. The flat brick or stone hearth, the natural log-fire, the dogs, and even the bellows, are all reintroduced, with a certain intentional roughness in the hall and dwelling-room, and rather more finish in the reception-room. It seems a sensible revival.