Let her diet be wholesome and cleanly, prepared at due hours, and cooked with care and diligence, let it be rather to satisfy nature, than her affections, and apter to kill hunger than revive new appetites; let it proceed more from the provision of her own yard, than the furniture of the markets; and let it be rather esteemed for the familiar acquaintance she hath without it, than for the strangeness and rarity it bringeth from other countries."
Very good advice, this, and I fear seldom followed by the housewives Markham is extolling. In another part of the same volume he becomes more specific, more practical, and more accurate. He tells us that the housewife should be skilled in many things that have passed out of fashion. To begin with, she ought to understand medicine and nursing. Markham assists her to a sufficient knowledge of such things by descriptions of the various diseases and by prescriptions for their cure. Here is a fair example, the manner of treatment of quotidian fever: "You shall take a new-laid egg, and opening the crown, you shall put out the white, then fill up the shell with very good aquavitæ, and stir it and the yoke very well together, and then as soon as you feel your cold fit begin to come upon you, suck up the egg, and either labour till you sweat, or alse, laying great
