XL

XLPRELACY AND PALACESThat delicious prelate whom I have already quoted, but whose name and See are unkindly withheld from us by the Bishop of London, thus justified his expenditure on hospitality: "Palace, I am told, is fromPalatium, 'the open house,' and there is almost daily entertainment of clergy and laity from a distance." I will not presume to question the episcopal etymology; for, whether it be sound or unsound, the practical result is equally good. We have apostolic authority for holding that Bishops should be given to hospitality, and it is satisfactory to know that the travel-worn clergy and laity of the anonymous diocese are not sent empty away. But would not the boiled beef and rice pudding be equally acceptable and equally sustaining if eaten in some apartment less majestic than the banqueting-hall of a Palace? Would not the Ecclesiastical Commissioners be doing a good stroke of business for the Church if they sold every Episcopal Palace in England and provided the evicted Bishops with moderate-sized and commodious houses?These are questions which often present themselvesto the lay mind, and the answer usually returned to them involves some very circuitous reasoning. The Bishops, say their henchmen, must have large incomes because they have to live in Palaces; and they must live in Palaces—I hardly know why, but apparently because they have large incomes. Such reasoning does not always convince the reformer's mind, though it is repeated in each succeeding generation with apparent confidence in its validity. After all, there is nothing very revolutionary in the suggestion that Episcopal palaces should be, in the strictest sense of the word, confiscated. Sixty-four years ago Dr. Hook, who was not exactly an iconoclast, wrote thus to his friend Samuel Wilberforce: "I really do not see how the Church can fairly ask the State to give it money for the purpose of giving a Church education, when the money is to be supplied by Dissenters and infidels and all classes of the people, who, according to the principles of the Constitution, have a right to control the expenditure. The State can only, if consistent, give an infidel education; it cannot employ public money to give a Church education, because of the Dissenters; nor a Protestant education, because of the Papists; and have not Jews, Turks, and infidels as much a right as heretics to demand that the education should not be Christian?" This strikes me as very wholesome doctrine, and, though enounced in 1843, necessary for these times. And, when he turns to ways and means,Dr. Hook is equally explicit: "If we are to educate the people in Church principles, the education must be out of Church funds. We want not proud Lords, haughty Spiritual Peers, to be our Bishops. Offer four thousand out of their five thousand a year for the education of the people. Let Farnham Castle and Winchester House and Ripon Palace be sold, and we shall have funds to establish other Bishoprics.... You see I am almost a Radical, for I do not see why our Bishops should not become as poor as Ambrose or Augustine, that they may make the people really rich." It is not surprising that Samuel Wilberforce, who had already climbed up several rungs of the ladder of promotion, and as he himself tells us, "had often talked" of further elevation, met Dr. Hook's suggestions with solemn repudiation. "Idothink that we want Spiritual Peers." "I see no reason why the Bishops' Palaces should be sold, which would not apply equally to the halls of our squires and the palaces of our princes." "To impoverish our Bishops and sell their Palaces would only be the hopeless career of revolution."The real reason for selling the Episcopal Palaces is that, in plain terms, they are too big and too costly for their present uses. They afford a plausible excuse for paying the Bishops more highly than they ought to be paid; and yet the Bishops turn round and say that even the comfortable incomes which the Ecclesiastical Commissionhas assigned them are unequal to the burden of maintaining the Palaces. The late Bishop Thorold, who was both a wealthy and a liberal man, thus bemoaned his hard fate in having to live at Farnham Castle: "It will give some idea of what the furnishing of this house from top to bottom meant if I mention that the stairs, with the felt beneath, took just a mile and 100 yards of carpet, with 260 brass stair-rods; and that, independently of the carpet in the great hall, the carpets used elsewhere absorbed 1414 yards—a good deal over three-quarters of a mile. As to the entire amount of roof, which in an old house requires constant watching, independently of other parts of the building, it is found to be, on measurement, 32,000 superficial feet, or one acre and one-fifth." What is true of Farnham is true,mutatis mutandis, of Bishopthorpe with its hundred rooms, and Auckland Castle with its park, and Rose Castle with its woodlands, and Lambeth with its tower and guard-room and galleries and gardens. Even the smaller Palaces, such as the "Moated Grange" of Wells, are not maintained for nothing. "My income goes in pelargoniums," growled Bishop Stubbs, as he surveyed the conservatories of Cuddesdon. "It takes ten chaps to keep this place in order," ejaculated a younger prelate as he skipped across his tennis-ground.Of course the root of the mischief is that these Palaces were built and enlarged in the days wheneach See had its own income, and when the incomes of such Sees as Durham and Winchester ran to twenty or thirty thousand a year. The poor Sees—and some were very poor—had Palaces proportioned to their incomes, and very unpalatial they were. "But now," as Bertie Stanhope said to the Bishop of Barchester at Mrs. Proudie's evening party, "they've cut them all down to pretty nearly the same figure," and such buildings as suitably accommodated the princely retinues of Archbishop Harcourt (who kept one valet on purpose to dress his wigs) and Bishop Sumner (who never went from Farnham Castle to the Parish Church except in a coach-and-four) are "a world too wide for the shrunk shanks" of their present occupants.In the Palace of Ely there is a magnificent gallery, which once was the scene of a memorable entertainment. When Bishop Sparke secured a Residentiary Canonry of Ely for his eldest son, the event was so completely in the ordinary course of things that it passed without special notice. But, when he planted his second son in a second Canonry, he was, and rightly, so elated by the achievement that he entertained the whole county of Cambridge at a ball in his gallery. But in those days Ely was worth £11,000 a year, and we are not likely to see a similar festival. Until recent years the Archbishop of Canterbury had a suburban retreat from the cares of Lambeth, at Addington, near Croydon, where one of the ugliest mansionsin Christendom stood in one of the prettiest parks. Archbishop Temple, who was a genuine reformer, determined to get rid of this second Palace and take a modest house near his Cathedral. When he asked the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to sanction this arrangement, they demurred. "Do you think," they asked, "that your successors will wish to live at Canterbury?" "No,I don't" replied the Archbishop, with indescribable emphasis, "and so I'm determined they shall."If every Bishop who is saddled with an inconveniently large house were in earnest about getting rid of it, the Ecclesiastical Commission could soon help him out of his difficulty. Palaces of no architectural or historical interest could be thrown into the market, and follow the fate of Riseholme, once the abode of the Bishops of Lincoln. Those Palaces which are interesting or beautiful, or in any special sense heirlooms of the Church, could be converted into Diocesan Colleges, Training Colleges, Homes for Invalid Clergymen, or Houses of Rest for such as are overworked and broken down. By this arrangement the Church would be no loser, and the Bishops, according to their own showing, would be greatly the gainers. £5000 a year, or even a beggarly four, will go a long way in a villa at Edgbaston or a red-brick house in Kennington Park; and, as the Bishops will no longer have Palaces to maintain, they will no doubt gladly accept still further reductions at the hands of reformers like Dean Lefroy.It would be a sad pity if these contemplated reductions closed thePalatiumor "open house" against the hungry flock; but, if they only check the more mundane proclivities of Prelacy, no harm will be done. One of the most spendidly hospitable prelates who ever adorned the Bench was Archbishop Thomson of York, and this is Bishop Wilberforce's comment on what he saw and heard under the Archiepiscopal roof: "Dinner at Archbishop of York's. A good many Bishops, both of England and Ireland, and not one word said whichimpliedwe were apostles." Perhaps it will be easier to keep that fact in remembrance, when to apostolic succession is added the grace of apostolic poverty.XLIHORRORSThe subject is suggested to me by the notice-board outside the Court Theatre. There I learn that "The Campden Wonder" has run its course. A "horror" of the highest excellence has been on view for four weeks; and I, who might have revelled in it, have made,per viltate, the Great Refusal. I leave the italicized quality untranslated, because I am not quite sure of the English equivalent which would exactly suit my case. "Vileness" is a little crude. "Cowardice" is ignominious. "Poorness of Spirit "is an Evangelical virtue. "Deficiency of Enterprise" and "an impaired nervous system" would, at the best, be paraphrases rather than translations. On the whole, I think the nearest approximation to the facts of my case is to say that my refusal to profit by Mr. Masefield's Horror was due to Decadence.Fuimus.There has been a period when such a tale as the "Campden Wonder" would have attracted me with an irresistible fascination and gripped me with a grasp of iron. But I am not the man I was; and I am beginning to share the apprehensions of the aged lady who told herdoctor that she feared she was breaking up, for she could no longer relish her Murders.Youth, and early youth, is indeed the Golden Age of Horrors. To a well-constituted child battle and murder and sudden death appeal far more powerfully than any smooth tale of love. We snatch a fearful joy from the lurid conversation of servants and neighbours. We gaze, with a kind of panic-stricken rapture, at the stain on the floor which marks the place where old Mr. Yellowboy was murdered for his money; and run very fast, though with a backward gaze, past the tree on which young Rantipole hanged himself on being cut off with a shilling by his uncle Mr. Wormwood Scrubbs. In some privileged families the children are not left to depend on circumjacent gossip, but are dogmatically instructed in hereditary horrors. This happy lot was mine. My father's uncle had been murdered by his valet; and from a very tender age I could have pointed out the house where the murder took place—it went cheap for a good many years afterwards,—and could have described the murderer stripping himself naked before he performed the horrid act, and the bath of blood in which the victim was found, and the devices employed to create an impression of suicide instead of murder. I could have repeated the magnificent peroration in which the murderer's advocate exhorted the jury to spare his client's life (and which, forty years later, was boldlyplagiarized by Mr. Montagu Williams in defending Dr. Lamson). The murderer, Benjamin Francis Courvoisier by name, long occupied a conspicuous place in Madame Tussaud's admirable collection. I can distinctly recall a kind of social eminence among my schoolfellows which was conferred by the fact that I had this relationship with the Chamber of Horrors; and I was conscious of a painful descent when Courvoisier lapsed out of date and was boiled down into Mr. Cobden or Cardinal Wiseman or some other more recent celebrity. Then, again, all literature was full of Horrors; and, though we should have been deprived of jam at tea if we had been caught reading a Murder Trial in theDaily Telegraph, we were encouraged to drink our fill of Shakespeare and Scott and Dickens and other great masters of the Horrible. From De Quincey we learned that Murder may be regarded as a Fine Art, and from an anonymous poet we acquired the immortal verse which narrates the latter end of Mr. William Weare. Shakespeare, as his French critics often remind us, reeks of blood and slaughter; the word "Murder" and its derivatives occupy two columns of Mrs. Cowden Clarke's closely-printed pages. Scott's absolute mastery over his art is nowhere more strikingly exemplified than in his use of murderous mechanisms. "The Heart of Midlothian" begins, continues, and ends with murder. "Rob Roy" contains a murder-scene of lurid beauty. The murderous attack onthe bridegroom in "The Bride of Lammermoor" is a haunting horror. Not all the Dryasdusts in England and Germany combined will ever displace the tradition of Amy Robsart and the concealed trap-door. Front-de-Bœuf's dying agony is to this hour a glimpse of hell. Greatest of the great in humour, Dickens fell not far behind the greatest when he turned his hand to Horrors. One sheds few tears for Mr. Tulkinghorn, and we consign Jonas Chuzzlewit to the gallows without a pang. But is there in fiction a more thrilling scene than the arrest of the murderer on the moonlit tower-stair in "Barnaby Rudge," or the grim escape of Sikes from the vengeance of the mob in "Oliver Twist"? For deliberate, minute, and elaborated horror commend me to the scene at the limekiln on the marshes where Pip awaits his horrible fate at the hands of the crazy savage Dolge Orlick.But it was not only the great masters of fiction who supplied us with our luxuries of horror. The picture of the young man who had murdered his brother, hanging on a gibbet in Blackgrove Wood, is painted with a gruesome fidelity of detail which places Mrs. Sherwood high among literary artists; and the incidents connected with the death of Old Prue would entitle Mrs. Beecher Stowe to claim kinship with Zola.It is curious to reflect that Miss Braddon, the most cheerful and wholesome-minded ofall living novelists, first won her fame by imagining the murderous possibilities of a well, and established it by that unrivalled mystification which confounds the murderer and the murdered in "Henry Dunbar." Nor will the younger generation of authoresses consent to be left behind in the race of Horrors. In old days we were well satisfied if we duly worked up to our predestined murder just before the end of the third volume. To-day Lady Ridley gives us, in the first chapter of "A Daughter of Jael," one of the most delicate and suggestive pieces of murder-writing which I, a confirmed lover of the horrible, can call to mind.To a soul early saturated with literary horrors the experience of life is a curious translation of fancy into fact. Incidents which have hitherto appeared visionary and imaginative now take the character of substantial reality. We discover that horrors are not confined to books or to a picturesque past, but are going on all round us; and the discovery is fraught with an uneasy joy. When I recall the illusions of my infancy and the facts which displaced them, I feel that I fall miserably below the ideal of childhood presented in the famous "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality." My "daily travel further from the East" is marked by memories of dreadful deeds, and the "vision splendid" which attends me on my way is a vivid succession of peculiarly startling murders. In the dawn of consciousnessthese visions have "something of celestial light" about them—they are spiritual, impalpable, ideal. At length the youth perceives them die away, "and melt into the light of common day"—very common day indeed, the day of the Old Bailey and thePolice News. By a curious chain of coincidences, I was early made acquainted with the history of that unfriendly Friend John Tawell, who murdered his sweetheart with prussic acid, and was the first criminal to be arrested by means of the electric telegraph. Heroic was the defence set up by Sir Fitzroy Kelly, who tried to prove that an inordinate love of eating apples, pips and all, accounted for the amount of prussic acid found in the victim's body. Kelly lived to be Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer, but the professional nickname of "Apple-pip Kelly" stuck to him to the end. I know the house where Tawell lived; I have sat under the apple-tree of which his victim ate; and I have stood, the centre of a roaring election crowd, on the exact spot outside the Court-house at Aylesbury where he expiated his crime.Tawell belongs, if I may so say, to a pre-natal impression. But, as the 'sixties of the last century unroll their record, each page displays its peculiar Horror. In 1860 Constance Kent cut her little brother's throat, and buried him in the back-yard. Many a night have I lain quaking in my bed, haunted by visions of sisters armed with razors, and hurried graves in secret spots. Not muchmore cheering was the nocturnal vision of Thomas Hopley, schoolmaster, of Eastbourne, convicted in 1860 of flogging a half-witted pupil to death with a skipping-rope, and afterwards covering the lacerated hands with white kid gloves. I confess to a lasting distaste for private schools, founded on this reminiscence. "The Flowery Land" is a title so prettily fanciful, so suffused with the glamour of the East, that one would scarcely expect to connect it with piracy, murder, and a five-fold execution. Yet that is what it meant for youthful horror-mongers in 1864. In 1865 the plan which pleased my childish thought was that pursued by Dr. Pritchard of Glasgow, who, while he was slowly poisoning his wife and his mother-in-law, kept a diary of their sufferings and recorded their deliverance from the burden of the flesh with pious unction. Two years later a young ruffian, whose crime inspired Mr. James Rhoades to write a passionate poem, cut a child into segments, and recorded in his journal—"Saturday, August 24, 1867: Killed a young girl; it was fine and hot."One might linger long in these paths of dalliance, but space forbids; and memory clears nine years at a bound. Most vivid, most fascinating, most human, if such an epithet be permitted in such a context, was the "Balham Mystery" of 1876. Still I can feel the cob bolting with me across Tooting Common; still I lave my stiffness in a hot bath, and tell the butler that it will do fora cold bath to-morrow; still I plunge my carving-knife into the loin of lamb, and fill up the chinks with that spinach and those eggs; still I quench my thirst with that Burgundy, ofwhich no drop remained in the decanter; and still I wake up in the middle of the night to find myself dying in torture by antimonial poisoning.But we have supped full on horrors. Good night, and pleasant dreams.XLIISOCIAL CHANGESI have been invited to make some comments on recent changes in society, and I obey the call, though not without misgiving. "Society" in its modern extension is so wide a subject that probably no one can survey more than a limited portion of its area; and, if one generalizes too freely from one's own experience, one is likely to provoke the contradictions of critics who, surveying other portions, have been impressed by different, and perhaps contrary, phenomena. All such contradictions I discount in advance. After all, one can only describe what one has seen, and my equipment for the task entrusted to me consists of nothing more than a habit of observation and a retentive memory.I was brought up in that "sacred circle of the Great-Grandmotherhood" of which Mr. Beresford-Hope made such excellent fun in "Strictly Tied Up." As Mr. Squeers considered himself the "right shop for morals," so the Whigs considered themselves the right shop for manners. What they said and did every one ought to say anddo, and from their judgment there was no appeal. A social education of this kind leaves traces which time is powerless to efface—"Vieille école, bonne école, begad!" as Major Pendennis said. In twenty-five years' contact with a more enlarged society, one has found a perpetual interest in watching the departure, gradual but nearly universal, from the social traditions of one's youth. The contrast between Now and Then is constantly reasserting itself; and, if I note some instances of it just as they occur to my mind, I shall be doing, at any rate in part, what has been required of me.I will take the most insignificant instances first—instances of phrase and diction and pronunciation. I am just old enough to remember a greatgrandmother who said that she "lay" at a place when she meant that she had slept there, and spoke of "using the potticary" when we should speak of sending for the doctor. Some relations of a later generation said "ooman" for woman, and, when they were much obliged, said they were much "obleeged." "Brarcelet" for bracelet and "di'monds" for diamonds were common pronunciations. Tuesday was "Toosday," and first was "fust." Chariot was "charr'ot," and Harriet "Harr'yet," and I have even heard "Jeames" for James. "Goold" for gold and "yaller" for yellow were common enough. Stirrups were always called "sturrups," and squirrels "squrrels," and wrapped was pronounced "wropped," and tassels"tossels," and Gertrude "Jertrude." A lilac was always called a "laylock," and a cucumber a "cowcumber." The stress was laid on the second syllable of balcony, even as it is written in the "Diverting History of John Gilpin":—"At Edmonton his loving wifeFrom the balcony spiedHer tender husband, wondering muchTo see how he did ride."N.B.—Cowper was a Whig.Of course, these archaisms were already passing away when I began to notice them, but some of them survive until this hour, and only last winter, after an evening service in St. Paul's Cathedral, I was delighted to hear a lady, admiring the illuminated dome, exclaim, "How well the doom looks!"Then, again, as regards the names of places. I cannot profess to have heard "Lunnon," but I have heard the headquarters of my family called "'Ooburn," and Rome "Roome," and Sèvres "Saver," and Falmouth "Farmouth," and Penrith "Peerith," and Cirencester "Ciciter."Nowadays it is as much as one can do to get a cabman to take one to Berwick Street or Berkeley Square, unless one calls them Berwick or Burkley. Gower Street and Pall Mall are pronounced as they are spelt; and, if one wants a ticket for Derby, the booking-clerk obligingly corrects one's request to "Durby."And, as with pronunciation, so also with phrase and diction—"Change and decay in all around I see."When I was young the word "lunch," whether substantive or verb, was regarded with a peculiar horror, and ranked with "'bus" in the lowest depths of vulgarity. To "take" in the sense of eat or drink was another abomination which lay too deep for words. "You take exercise or take physic; nothing else," said Brummel to the lady who asked him to take tea. "I beg your pardon, you also take a liberty," was the just rejoinder.I well remember that, when the journals of an Illustrious Person were published and it appeared that a royal party had "taken luncheon" on a hill, it was stoutly contended in Whig circles that the servants had taken the luncheon to the hill where their masters ate it; and, when a close examination of the text proved this gloss to be impossible, it was decided that the original must have been written in German, and that it had been translated by some one who did not know the English idiom. To "ride," meaning to travel in a carriage, was, and I hope still is, regarded as the peculiar property of my friend Pennialinus;[12]and I remember the mild sensation caused in a Whig house when a neighbour who had driven over to luncheon declined to wash her hands on the ground that she had "ridden in gloves." The vehicle which was invented by aLord Chancellor and called after his name was scrupulously pronounced so as to rhyme with groom, and any one indiscreet enough to say that he had ridden in "the Row" would probably have been asked if he had gone round by "the Zoo.""Cherry pie and apple pie; all the rest are tarts," was an axiom carefully instilled into the young gastronomer; while "to pass" the mustard was bound in the same bundle of abominations as "I'll trouble you," "May I assist you?" "Not any, thank you," and "A very small piece."Then, again, as to what may be called the Manners of Eating. A man who put his elbows on the table would have been considered a Yahoo, and he who should eat his asparagus with a knife and fork would have been classed with the traditional collier who boiled his pineapple. Fish-knives (like oxidized silver biscuit-boxes) were unknown and undreamt-of horrors. To eat one's fish with two forks was thecachetof a certain circle, and the manner of manipulating the stones of a cherry pie was thearticulus stantis vel cadentis. The little daughter of a great Whig house, whose eating habits had been contracted in the nursery, once asked her mother with wistful longing, "Mamma, when shall I be old enough to eat bread and cheese with a knife, and put the knife in my mouth?" and she was promptly informed that not if she lived to attain the age of Methuselah would she be able to acquire that "unchartered freedom." On the other hand, old gentlemenof the very highest breeding used after dinner to rinse their mouths in their finger-glasses, and thereby caused unspeakable qualms in unaccustomed guests. In that respect at any rate, if in no other, the most inveterate praiser of times past must admit that alteration has not been deterioration.Another marked change in society is the diminution of stateliness. A really well-turned-out carriage, with a coachman in a wig and two powdered footmen behind, is as rare an object in the Mall as a hansom in Bermondsey or a tandem in Bethnal Green. Men go to the levée in cabs or on motor-cars, and send their wives to the Palace Ball in the products of the Coupé Company. The Dowager Duchess of Cleveland (1792-1883) once told me that Lord Salisbury had no carriage. On my expressing innocent surprise, she said, "I have been told that Lord Salisbury goes about London in a brougham;" and her tone could not have expressed a more lively horror if the vehicle had been a coster's barrow. People of a less remote date than the Duchess's had become inured to barouches for ladies and broughams for men, but a landau was contemned under the derogatory nickname of a "demi-fortune," and the spectacle of a great man scaling the dizzy heights of the 'bus or plunging into the depths of the Twopenny Tube would have given rise to lively comment.A pillar of the Tory party, who died not twenty years ago, finding his newly-married wife pokingthe fire, took the poker from her hands and said with majestic pain, "My dear, will you kindly remember that you are now a countess?" A Liberal statesman, still living, when he went to Harrow for the first time, sailed up the Hill in the family coach, and tradition does not report that his schoolfellows kicked him with any special virulence.I have known people who in travelling would take the whole of a first-class carriage sooner than risk the intrusion of an unknown fellow-passenger: their descendants would as likely as not reach their destination on motor-cars, having pulled up at some wayside inn for mutton chops and whisky-and-soda.XLIIISOCIAL GRACESThough stateliness has palpably diminished, the beauty of life has as palpably increased. In old days people loved, or professed to love, fine pictures, and those who had them made much of them. But with that one exception no one made any attempt to surround himself with beautiful objects. People who happened to have fine furniture used it because they had it; unless, indeed, the desire to keep pace with the fashion induced them to part with Louis Seize or Chippendale and replace it by the austere productions of Tottenham Court Road. The idea of buying a chimneypiece or a cabinet or a bureau because it was beautiful never crossed the ordinary mind. The finest old English china was habitually used, and not seldom smashed, in the housekeeper's room. It was the age of horse-hair and mahogany, and crimson flock papers and green rep curtains. Whatever ornaments the house happened to possess were clustered together on a round table in the middle of the drawing-room. The style has been immortalized by the hand of a master: "There were no skilfully contrasted shades of grey or green, no dado,no distemper. The woodwork was grained and varnished after the manner of the Philistines, the walls papered in dark crimson, with heavy curtains of the same colour, and the sideboard, dinner-waggon, and row of stiff chairs were all carved in the same massive and expensive style of ugliness. The pictures were those familiar presentments of dirty rabbits, fat white horses, bloated goddesses, and misshapen boors by masters, who if younger than they assumed to be, must have been quite old enough to know better." A man who hung a blue-and-white plate on a wall, or put peacocks' feathers in a vase, would have been regarded as insane; and I well remember the outcry of indignation and scorn when a well-known collector of bric-a-brac had himself painted with a pet teapot in his hands.In this respect the change is complete. The owners of fine picture-galleries no longer monopolize "art in the home." People who cannot afford old masters invoke the genius of Mr. Mortimer Menpes. If they have not inherited French furniture they buy it, or at least imitations of the real, which are quite as beautiful. A sage-green wash on the wall, and a white dado to the height of a man's shoulder, cover a multitude of paper-hanger's sins. The commonest china is pretty in form and colour. A couple of rugs from Liberty's replace the hideous and costly carpets which lasted their unfortunate possessors a lifetime; and, whereas in those distant days one never saw a flower on a dinner-table, now "it is roses, roses all the way,"or, when it cannot be roses, it is daffodils and tulips and poppies and chrysanthemums.All this is the work of the despised æsthetes; but this generation will probably see no meaning in the great drama of "Patience," and has no conception of the tyrannous ugliness from which Bunthorne and his friends delivered us. Their double achievement was to make ugliness culpable, and to prove that beauty need not be expensive.The same change may be observed in everything connected with Dinner. No longer is the mind oppressed by those monstrous hecatombs under which, as Bret Harte said, "the table groaned and even the sideboard sighed." Frascatelli's monstrous bills of fare, with six "side dishes" and four sweets, survive only as monuments of what our fathers could do. Racing plate and "epergnes," with silver goddesses and sphinxes and rams' horns, if not discreetly exchanged for prettier substitutes, hide their diminished heads in pantries and safes. Instead of these horrors, we have bright flowers and shaded lights; and a very few, perhaps too few, dishes, which both look pretty and taste good. Here, again, expensive ugliness has been routed, and inexpensive beauty enthroned in its place.The same law, I believe, holds good about dress. With the mysteries of woman's clothes I do not presume to meddle. I do not attempt to estimate the relative cost of the satins and ermine and scarves which Lawrence painted, and the "duck's-egg bolero" and "mauve hopsack" which I havelately seen advertized in the list of a winter sale. But about men's dress I feel more confident. The "rich cut Genoa velvet waistcoat," the solemn frock coat, the satin stock, and the trousers strapped under the wellingtons, were certainly hideous, and I shrewdly suspect that they were vastly more expensive than the blue serge suits, straw hats, brown boots, and sailor-knot ties in which the men of the present day contrive to look smart without being stiff.When Mr. Gladstone in old age revisited Oxford and lectured on Homer to a great gathering of undergraduates, he was asked if he saw any difference between his hearers and the men of his own time. He responded briskly, "Yes, in their dress, an enormous difference. I am told that I had among my audience some of the most highly-connected and richest men in the university, and there wasn't one whom I couldn't have dressed from top to toe for £5."I have spoken so far of material beauty, and here the change in society has been an inexpressible improvement; but, when I turn to beauty of another kind, I cannot speak with equal certainty. Have our manners improved? Beyond all question they have changed, but have they changed for the better?It may seem incongruous to cite Dr. Pusey as an authority on anything more mundane than a hair-shirt, yet he was really a close observer of social phenomena, as his famous sermon on Dives andLazarus, with its strictures on the modern Dives's dinner and Mrs. Dives's ball-gown, sufficiently testifies. He was born a Bouverie in 1800, when the Bouveries still were Whigs, and he testified in old age to "the beauty of the refined worldly manners of the old school," which, as he insisted, were really Christian in their regard for the feelings of others. "If in any case they became soulless as apart from Christianity, the beautiful form was there into which real life might re-enter."We do not, I think, see much of the "beautiful form" nowadays. Men when talking to women lounge, and sprawl, and cross their legs, and keep one hand in a pocket while they shake hands with the other, and shove their partners about in the "Washington Post," and wallow in the Kitchen-Lancers. All this is as little beautiful as can be conceived. Grace and dignity have perished side by side. And yet, oddly enough, the people who are most thoroughly bereft of manners seem bent on displaying their deficiencies in the most conspicuous places. In the old days it would have been thought the very height of vulgarity to run after royalty. The Duke of Wellington said to Charles Greville, "When we meet the Royal Family in society they are our superiors, and we owe them all respect." That was just all. If a Royal Personage knew you sufficiently well to pay you a visit, it was an honour, and all suitable preparations were made. "My father walked backwards with a silver candlestick, and red baize awaited the royal feet."If you encountered a prince or princess in society, you made your bow and thought no more about it. An old-fashioned father, who had taken a schoolboy son to call on a great lady, said, "Your bow was too low. That is the sort of bow we keep for the Royal Family." There was neither drop-down-dead-ativeness, nor pushfulness, nor familiarity. Well-bred people knew how to behave themselves, and there was an end of the matter. But to force one's self on the notice of royalty, to intrigue for visits from Illustrious Personages, to go out of one's way to meet princes or princesses, to parade before the gaping world the amount of intimacy with which one had been honoured, would have been regarded as the very madness of vulgarity.Another respect in which modern manners compare unfavourably with ancient is the growing love of titles. In old days people thought a great deal, perhaps too much, of Family. They had a strong sense of territorial position, and I have heard people say of others, "Oh, they are cousins of ours," as if that fact put them within a sacred and inviolable enclosure. But titles were contemned. If you were a peer, you sate in the House of Lords instead of the House of Commons; and that was all. No one dreamed of babbling about "peers" as a separate order of creation, still less of enumerating the peers to whom they were related.A member of the Tory Government was once at pains to explain to an entirely unsympathetic audience that the only reason why he and LordCurzon had not taken as good a degree as Mr. Asquith was that, being the eldest sons of peers, they were more freely invited into the County society of Oxfordshire. I can safely say that, in the sacred circle of the Great-Grandmotherhood, that theory of academical shortcoming would not have been advanced.The idea of buying a baronetcy would have been thought simply droll, and knighthood was regarded as the guerdon of the successful grocer. I believe that in their inmost hearts the Whigs enjoyed the Garters which were so freely bestowed on them; but they compounded for that human weakness by unmeasured contempt for the Bath, and I doubt if they had ever heard of the Star of India. To state this case is sufficiently to illustrate a conspicuous change in the sentiment of society.XLIVPUBLICITYV.RETICENCEThe great people of old time followed (quite unconsciously) the philosopher who bade man "hide his life." Of course, the stage of politics was always a pillory, and he who ventured to stand on it made up his mind to encounter a vast variety of popular missiles. "In my situation as Chancellor of the University of Oxford," said the Duke of Wellington, "I have been much exposed to authors;" and men whom choice or circumstances forced into politics were exposed to worse annoyances than "authors." But the line was rigidly drawn between public and private life. What went on in the home was sacredly secreted from the public gaze. People lived among their relations and friends and political associates, and kept the gaping world at a distance. Now we worship Publicity as the chief enjoyment of human life. We send lists of our shooting-parties to "Society Journals." We welcome the Interviewer. We contribute personal paragraphs toClassy Cuttings. We admit the photographer to our bedrooms, and give our portraits to illustrated papers. We take our exercise when we have the bestchance of being seen and noticed, and we never eat our dinner with such keen appetites as amid the half-world of a Piccadilly restaurant. In brief, "Expose thy life" is the motto of the new philosophy, and I maintain that in this respect, at any rate, the old was better.With an increasing love of publicity has come an increasing contempt for reticence. In old days there were certain subjects which no one mentioned; among them were Health and Money. I presume that people had pretty much the same complaints as now, but no one talked about them. We used to be told of a lady who died in agony because she insisted on telling the doctor that the pain was in her chest whereas it really was in the unmentionable organ of digestion. That martyr to propriety has no imitators in the present day. Every one has a disease and a doctor; and young people of both sexes are ready on the slightest acquaintance to describe symptoms and compare experiences. "Ice!" exclaimed a pretty girl at dessert, "good gracious, no! so bad for indy"—and her companion, who had not travelled with the times, learned with amazement that "indy" was the pet name for indigestion. "How bitterly cold!" said a plump matron at an open-air luncheon; "just the thing to give one appendicitis." "Oh!" said her neighbour, surveying the company, "we are quite safe there. I shouldn't think we had an appendix between us."Then, again, as to money. In the "SacredCircle of the Great-Grandmotherhood" I never heard the slightest reference to income. Not that the Whigs despised money. They were at least as fond of it as other people, and, even when it took the shape of slum-rents, its odour was not displeasing. But it was not a subject for conversation. People did not chatter about their neighbours' incomes; and, if they made their own money in trades or professions, they did not regale us with statistics of profit and loss. To-day every one seems to be, if I may use the favourite colloquialism, "on the make"; and the sincerity of the devotion with which people worship money pervades their whole conversation and colours their whole view of life. "Scions of aristocracy," to use the good old phrase of Pennialinus, will produce samples of tea or floor-cloth from their pockets, and sue quite winningly for custom. A speculative bottle of extraordinarily cheap peach-brandy will arrive with the compliments of Lord Tom Noddy, who has just gone into the wine trade, and Lord Magnus Charters will tell you that, if you are going to put in the electric light, his firm has got some really good fittings which he can let you have on specially easy terms.But, if in old days Health and Money were subjects eschewed in polite conversation, even more rigid was the avoidance of "risky" topics. To-day no scandal is too gross, no gossip too prurient. Respectable mothers chatter quite freely about that "nest of spicery" over which Sir GorellBarnes presides, and canvass abominations with a self-possession worthy of Gibbon or Zola. In fact, as regards our topics of conversation, we seem to have reached the condition in which the Paris correspondent of theDaily Telegraphfound himself when Mr. Matthew Arnold (in "Friendship's Garland") spoke to him of Delicacy. "He seemed inexplicably struck by this worddelicacy, which he kept repeating to himself. 'Delicacy,' said he; 'delicacy, surely I have heard that word before! Yes, in other days,' he went on dreamily, 'in my fresh enthusiastic youth, before I knew Sala, before I wrote for that infernal paper——.' 'Collect yourself, my friend,' said I, laying my hand on his shoulder, 'you are unmanned.'" A similar emotion would probably be caused by any one so old-fashioned as to protest that any conceivable topic was ill-adapted for discussion in general society.An extreme decorum of phrase accompanied this salutary restriction of topics. To a boisterous youth who, just setting out for a choral festival in a country church, said that he always thought a musical service very jolly, an old Whig lady said in a tone of dignified amendment, "I trust, dear Mr. F——, that we shall derive not only pleasure but profit from the solemnity of this afternoon."Closely related to the love of Publicity and the decay of Reticence is the change in the position of women. This is really a revolution, and it has so impartially pervaded all departments of lifethat one may plunge anywhere into the subject and find the same phenomenon.Fifty years ago the view that "comparisons don't become a young woman" still held the field, and, indeed, might have been much more widely extended. Nothing "became a young woman," which involved clear thinking or plain speaking or independent acting. Mrs. General and Mrs. Grundy were still powers in the land. "Prunes and Prism" were fair burlesques of actual shibboleths. "Fanny," said Mrs. General, "at present forms too many opinions. Perfect breeding forms none, and is never demonstrative." This was hardly a parody of the prevailing and accepted doctrine. To-day it would be difficult to find a subject on which contemporary Fannies do not form opinions, and express them with intense vigour, and translate them into corresponding action.Fifty years ago a hunting woman was a rarity, even though Englishwomen had been horsewomen from time immemorial. Lady Arabella Vane's performances were still remembered in the neighbourhood of Darlington, and Lady William Powlett's "scyarlet" habit was a tradition at Cottesmore. Mrs. Jack Villiers is the only horsewoman in the famous picture of the Quorn, and she suitably gave her name to the best covert in the Vale of Aylesbury. But now the hunting woman and the hunting girl pervade the land, cross their male friends at their fences, and ride over themwhen they lie submerged in ditches, with an airy cheerfulness which wins all hearts. In brief, it may be said that, in respect of outdoor exercises, whatever men and boys do women and girls do. They drive four-in-hand and tandem, they manipulate Motors, they skate and cycle, and fence and swim. A young lady lately showed me a snapshot of herself learning to take a header. A male instructor, classically draped, stood on the bank, and she kindly explained that "the head in the water was the man we were staying with." Lawn-tennis and croquet are regarded as the amusements of the mild and the middle-aged; the ardour of girlhood requires hockey and golf. I am not sure whether girls have taken to Rugby football, but only last summer I saw a girl's cricket eleven dispose most satisfactorily of a boy's team.I can well remember the time when a man, if perchance he met a lady while he was smoking in some rather unfrequented street, flung his cigar away and rather tried to look as if he had not been doing it. Yet so far have we travelled that not long ago, at a hospitable house not a hundred miles from Berkeley Square, the hostess and her daughter were the only smokers in a large luncheon-party, and prefaced their cigarettes by the courteous condition, "If you gentlemen don't mind."Then, again, the political woman is a product of these latter days. In old times a woman served her husband's political party by keeping asalon,giving dinners to the bigwigs, and "routs" to the rank and file. I do not forget the heroic electioneering of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, but her example was not widely followed. On great occasions ladies sate in secluded galleries at public meetings, and encouraged the halting rhetoric of sons or husbands by waving pocket-handkerchiefs. If a triumphant return was to be celebrated, the ladies of the hero's family might gaze from above on the congratulatory banquet, like the house-party at Lothair's coming of age, to whom the "three times three and one cheer more" seemed like a "great naval battle, or the end of the world, or anything else of unimaginable excitement, tumult, and confusion."When it was reported that a celebrated lady of the present day complained of the stuffiness and gloom of the Ladies' Gallery in the House of Commons, Mr. Gladstone—that stiffest of social conservatives—exclaimed, "Mrs. W——, forsooth! I have known much greater ladies than Mrs. W—— quite content to look down through the ventilator."

XLPRELACY AND PALACESThat delicious prelate whom I have already quoted, but whose name and See are unkindly withheld from us by the Bishop of London, thus justified his expenditure on hospitality: "Palace, I am told, is fromPalatium, 'the open house,' and there is almost daily entertainment of clergy and laity from a distance." I will not presume to question the episcopal etymology; for, whether it be sound or unsound, the practical result is equally good. We have apostolic authority for holding that Bishops should be given to hospitality, and it is satisfactory to know that the travel-worn clergy and laity of the anonymous diocese are not sent empty away. But would not the boiled beef and rice pudding be equally acceptable and equally sustaining if eaten in some apartment less majestic than the banqueting-hall of a Palace? Would not the Ecclesiastical Commissioners be doing a good stroke of business for the Church if they sold every Episcopal Palace in England and provided the evicted Bishops with moderate-sized and commodious houses?These are questions which often present themselvesto the lay mind, and the answer usually returned to them involves some very circuitous reasoning. The Bishops, say their henchmen, must have large incomes because they have to live in Palaces; and they must live in Palaces—I hardly know why, but apparently because they have large incomes. Such reasoning does not always convince the reformer's mind, though it is repeated in each succeeding generation with apparent confidence in its validity. After all, there is nothing very revolutionary in the suggestion that Episcopal palaces should be, in the strictest sense of the word, confiscated. Sixty-four years ago Dr. Hook, who was not exactly an iconoclast, wrote thus to his friend Samuel Wilberforce: "I really do not see how the Church can fairly ask the State to give it money for the purpose of giving a Church education, when the money is to be supplied by Dissenters and infidels and all classes of the people, who, according to the principles of the Constitution, have a right to control the expenditure. The State can only, if consistent, give an infidel education; it cannot employ public money to give a Church education, because of the Dissenters; nor a Protestant education, because of the Papists; and have not Jews, Turks, and infidels as much a right as heretics to demand that the education should not be Christian?" This strikes me as very wholesome doctrine, and, though enounced in 1843, necessary for these times. And, when he turns to ways and means,Dr. Hook is equally explicit: "If we are to educate the people in Church principles, the education must be out of Church funds. We want not proud Lords, haughty Spiritual Peers, to be our Bishops. Offer four thousand out of their five thousand a year for the education of the people. Let Farnham Castle and Winchester House and Ripon Palace be sold, and we shall have funds to establish other Bishoprics.... You see I am almost a Radical, for I do not see why our Bishops should not become as poor as Ambrose or Augustine, that they may make the people really rich." It is not surprising that Samuel Wilberforce, who had already climbed up several rungs of the ladder of promotion, and as he himself tells us, "had often talked" of further elevation, met Dr. Hook's suggestions with solemn repudiation. "Idothink that we want Spiritual Peers." "I see no reason why the Bishops' Palaces should be sold, which would not apply equally to the halls of our squires and the palaces of our princes." "To impoverish our Bishops and sell their Palaces would only be the hopeless career of revolution."The real reason for selling the Episcopal Palaces is that, in plain terms, they are too big and too costly for their present uses. They afford a plausible excuse for paying the Bishops more highly than they ought to be paid; and yet the Bishops turn round and say that even the comfortable incomes which the Ecclesiastical Commissionhas assigned them are unequal to the burden of maintaining the Palaces. The late Bishop Thorold, who was both a wealthy and a liberal man, thus bemoaned his hard fate in having to live at Farnham Castle: "It will give some idea of what the furnishing of this house from top to bottom meant if I mention that the stairs, with the felt beneath, took just a mile and 100 yards of carpet, with 260 brass stair-rods; and that, independently of the carpet in the great hall, the carpets used elsewhere absorbed 1414 yards—a good deal over three-quarters of a mile. As to the entire amount of roof, which in an old house requires constant watching, independently of other parts of the building, it is found to be, on measurement, 32,000 superficial feet, or one acre and one-fifth." What is true of Farnham is true,mutatis mutandis, of Bishopthorpe with its hundred rooms, and Auckland Castle with its park, and Rose Castle with its woodlands, and Lambeth with its tower and guard-room and galleries and gardens. Even the smaller Palaces, such as the "Moated Grange" of Wells, are not maintained for nothing. "My income goes in pelargoniums," growled Bishop Stubbs, as he surveyed the conservatories of Cuddesdon. "It takes ten chaps to keep this place in order," ejaculated a younger prelate as he skipped across his tennis-ground.Of course the root of the mischief is that these Palaces were built and enlarged in the days wheneach See had its own income, and when the incomes of such Sees as Durham and Winchester ran to twenty or thirty thousand a year. The poor Sees—and some were very poor—had Palaces proportioned to their incomes, and very unpalatial they were. "But now," as Bertie Stanhope said to the Bishop of Barchester at Mrs. Proudie's evening party, "they've cut them all down to pretty nearly the same figure," and such buildings as suitably accommodated the princely retinues of Archbishop Harcourt (who kept one valet on purpose to dress his wigs) and Bishop Sumner (who never went from Farnham Castle to the Parish Church except in a coach-and-four) are "a world too wide for the shrunk shanks" of their present occupants.In the Palace of Ely there is a magnificent gallery, which once was the scene of a memorable entertainment. When Bishop Sparke secured a Residentiary Canonry of Ely for his eldest son, the event was so completely in the ordinary course of things that it passed without special notice. But, when he planted his second son in a second Canonry, he was, and rightly, so elated by the achievement that he entertained the whole county of Cambridge at a ball in his gallery. But in those days Ely was worth £11,000 a year, and we are not likely to see a similar festival. Until recent years the Archbishop of Canterbury had a suburban retreat from the cares of Lambeth, at Addington, near Croydon, where one of the ugliest mansionsin Christendom stood in one of the prettiest parks. Archbishop Temple, who was a genuine reformer, determined to get rid of this second Palace and take a modest house near his Cathedral. When he asked the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to sanction this arrangement, they demurred. "Do you think," they asked, "that your successors will wish to live at Canterbury?" "No,I don't" replied the Archbishop, with indescribable emphasis, "and so I'm determined they shall."If every Bishop who is saddled with an inconveniently large house were in earnest about getting rid of it, the Ecclesiastical Commission could soon help him out of his difficulty. Palaces of no architectural or historical interest could be thrown into the market, and follow the fate of Riseholme, once the abode of the Bishops of Lincoln. Those Palaces which are interesting or beautiful, or in any special sense heirlooms of the Church, could be converted into Diocesan Colleges, Training Colleges, Homes for Invalid Clergymen, or Houses of Rest for such as are overworked and broken down. By this arrangement the Church would be no loser, and the Bishops, according to their own showing, would be greatly the gainers. £5000 a year, or even a beggarly four, will go a long way in a villa at Edgbaston or a red-brick house in Kennington Park; and, as the Bishops will no longer have Palaces to maintain, they will no doubt gladly accept still further reductions at the hands of reformers like Dean Lefroy.It would be a sad pity if these contemplated reductions closed thePalatiumor "open house" against the hungry flock; but, if they only check the more mundane proclivities of Prelacy, no harm will be done. One of the most spendidly hospitable prelates who ever adorned the Bench was Archbishop Thomson of York, and this is Bishop Wilberforce's comment on what he saw and heard under the Archiepiscopal roof: "Dinner at Archbishop of York's. A good many Bishops, both of England and Ireland, and not one word said whichimpliedwe were apostles." Perhaps it will be easier to keep that fact in remembrance, when to apostolic succession is added the grace of apostolic poverty.

PRELACY AND PALACES

That delicious prelate whom I have already quoted, but whose name and See are unkindly withheld from us by the Bishop of London, thus justified his expenditure on hospitality: "Palace, I am told, is fromPalatium, 'the open house,' and there is almost daily entertainment of clergy and laity from a distance." I will not presume to question the episcopal etymology; for, whether it be sound or unsound, the practical result is equally good. We have apostolic authority for holding that Bishops should be given to hospitality, and it is satisfactory to know that the travel-worn clergy and laity of the anonymous diocese are not sent empty away. But would not the boiled beef and rice pudding be equally acceptable and equally sustaining if eaten in some apartment less majestic than the banqueting-hall of a Palace? Would not the Ecclesiastical Commissioners be doing a good stroke of business for the Church if they sold every Episcopal Palace in England and provided the evicted Bishops with moderate-sized and commodious houses?

These are questions which often present themselvesto the lay mind, and the answer usually returned to them involves some very circuitous reasoning. The Bishops, say their henchmen, must have large incomes because they have to live in Palaces; and they must live in Palaces—I hardly know why, but apparently because they have large incomes. Such reasoning does not always convince the reformer's mind, though it is repeated in each succeeding generation with apparent confidence in its validity. After all, there is nothing very revolutionary in the suggestion that Episcopal palaces should be, in the strictest sense of the word, confiscated. Sixty-four years ago Dr. Hook, who was not exactly an iconoclast, wrote thus to his friend Samuel Wilberforce: "I really do not see how the Church can fairly ask the State to give it money for the purpose of giving a Church education, when the money is to be supplied by Dissenters and infidels and all classes of the people, who, according to the principles of the Constitution, have a right to control the expenditure. The State can only, if consistent, give an infidel education; it cannot employ public money to give a Church education, because of the Dissenters; nor a Protestant education, because of the Papists; and have not Jews, Turks, and infidels as much a right as heretics to demand that the education should not be Christian?" This strikes me as very wholesome doctrine, and, though enounced in 1843, necessary for these times. And, when he turns to ways and means,Dr. Hook is equally explicit: "If we are to educate the people in Church principles, the education must be out of Church funds. We want not proud Lords, haughty Spiritual Peers, to be our Bishops. Offer four thousand out of their five thousand a year for the education of the people. Let Farnham Castle and Winchester House and Ripon Palace be sold, and we shall have funds to establish other Bishoprics.... You see I am almost a Radical, for I do not see why our Bishops should not become as poor as Ambrose or Augustine, that they may make the people really rich." It is not surprising that Samuel Wilberforce, who had already climbed up several rungs of the ladder of promotion, and as he himself tells us, "had often talked" of further elevation, met Dr. Hook's suggestions with solemn repudiation. "Idothink that we want Spiritual Peers." "I see no reason why the Bishops' Palaces should be sold, which would not apply equally to the halls of our squires and the palaces of our princes." "To impoverish our Bishops and sell their Palaces would only be the hopeless career of revolution."

The real reason for selling the Episcopal Palaces is that, in plain terms, they are too big and too costly for their present uses. They afford a plausible excuse for paying the Bishops more highly than they ought to be paid; and yet the Bishops turn round and say that even the comfortable incomes which the Ecclesiastical Commissionhas assigned them are unequal to the burden of maintaining the Palaces. The late Bishop Thorold, who was both a wealthy and a liberal man, thus bemoaned his hard fate in having to live at Farnham Castle: "It will give some idea of what the furnishing of this house from top to bottom meant if I mention that the stairs, with the felt beneath, took just a mile and 100 yards of carpet, with 260 brass stair-rods; and that, independently of the carpet in the great hall, the carpets used elsewhere absorbed 1414 yards—a good deal over three-quarters of a mile. As to the entire amount of roof, which in an old house requires constant watching, independently of other parts of the building, it is found to be, on measurement, 32,000 superficial feet, or one acre and one-fifth." What is true of Farnham is true,mutatis mutandis, of Bishopthorpe with its hundred rooms, and Auckland Castle with its park, and Rose Castle with its woodlands, and Lambeth with its tower and guard-room and galleries and gardens. Even the smaller Palaces, such as the "Moated Grange" of Wells, are not maintained for nothing. "My income goes in pelargoniums," growled Bishop Stubbs, as he surveyed the conservatories of Cuddesdon. "It takes ten chaps to keep this place in order," ejaculated a younger prelate as he skipped across his tennis-ground.

Of course the root of the mischief is that these Palaces were built and enlarged in the days wheneach See had its own income, and when the incomes of such Sees as Durham and Winchester ran to twenty or thirty thousand a year. The poor Sees—and some were very poor—had Palaces proportioned to their incomes, and very unpalatial they were. "But now," as Bertie Stanhope said to the Bishop of Barchester at Mrs. Proudie's evening party, "they've cut them all down to pretty nearly the same figure," and such buildings as suitably accommodated the princely retinues of Archbishop Harcourt (who kept one valet on purpose to dress his wigs) and Bishop Sumner (who never went from Farnham Castle to the Parish Church except in a coach-and-four) are "a world too wide for the shrunk shanks" of their present occupants.

In the Palace of Ely there is a magnificent gallery, which once was the scene of a memorable entertainment. When Bishop Sparke secured a Residentiary Canonry of Ely for his eldest son, the event was so completely in the ordinary course of things that it passed without special notice. But, when he planted his second son in a second Canonry, he was, and rightly, so elated by the achievement that he entertained the whole county of Cambridge at a ball in his gallery. But in those days Ely was worth £11,000 a year, and we are not likely to see a similar festival. Until recent years the Archbishop of Canterbury had a suburban retreat from the cares of Lambeth, at Addington, near Croydon, where one of the ugliest mansionsin Christendom stood in one of the prettiest parks. Archbishop Temple, who was a genuine reformer, determined to get rid of this second Palace and take a modest house near his Cathedral. When he asked the Ecclesiastical Commissioners to sanction this arrangement, they demurred. "Do you think," they asked, "that your successors will wish to live at Canterbury?" "No,I don't" replied the Archbishop, with indescribable emphasis, "and so I'm determined they shall."

If every Bishop who is saddled with an inconveniently large house were in earnest about getting rid of it, the Ecclesiastical Commission could soon help him out of his difficulty. Palaces of no architectural or historical interest could be thrown into the market, and follow the fate of Riseholme, once the abode of the Bishops of Lincoln. Those Palaces which are interesting or beautiful, or in any special sense heirlooms of the Church, could be converted into Diocesan Colleges, Training Colleges, Homes for Invalid Clergymen, or Houses of Rest for such as are overworked and broken down. By this arrangement the Church would be no loser, and the Bishops, according to their own showing, would be greatly the gainers. £5000 a year, or even a beggarly four, will go a long way in a villa at Edgbaston or a red-brick house in Kennington Park; and, as the Bishops will no longer have Palaces to maintain, they will no doubt gladly accept still further reductions at the hands of reformers like Dean Lefroy.

It would be a sad pity if these contemplated reductions closed thePalatiumor "open house" against the hungry flock; but, if they only check the more mundane proclivities of Prelacy, no harm will be done. One of the most spendidly hospitable prelates who ever adorned the Bench was Archbishop Thomson of York, and this is Bishop Wilberforce's comment on what he saw and heard under the Archiepiscopal roof: "Dinner at Archbishop of York's. A good many Bishops, both of England and Ireland, and not one word said whichimpliedwe were apostles." Perhaps it will be easier to keep that fact in remembrance, when to apostolic succession is added the grace of apostolic poverty.

XLIHORRORSThe subject is suggested to me by the notice-board outside the Court Theatre. There I learn that "The Campden Wonder" has run its course. A "horror" of the highest excellence has been on view for four weeks; and I, who might have revelled in it, have made,per viltate, the Great Refusal. I leave the italicized quality untranslated, because I am not quite sure of the English equivalent which would exactly suit my case. "Vileness" is a little crude. "Cowardice" is ignominious. "Poorness of Spirit "is an Evangelical virtue. "Deficiency of Enterprise" and "an impaired nervous system" would, at the best, be paraphrases rather than translations. On the whole, I think the nearest approximation to the facts of my case is to say that my refusal to profit by Mr. Masefield's Horror was due to Decadence.Fuimus.There has been a period when such a tale as the "Campden Wonder" would have attracted me with an irresistible fascination and gripped me with a grasp of iron. But I am not the man I was; and I am beginning to share the apprehensions of the aged lady who told herdoctor that she feared she was breaking up, for she could no longer relish her Murders.Youth, and early youth, is indeed the Golden Age of Horrors. To a well-constituted child battle and murder and sudden death appeal far more powerfully than any smooth tale of love. We snatch a fearful joy from the lurid conversation of servants and neighbours. We gaze, with a kind of panic-stricken rapture, at the stain on the floor which marks the place where old Mr. Yellowboy was murdered for his money; and run very fast, though with a backward gaze, past the tree on which young Rantipole hanged himself on being cut off with a shilling by his uncle Mr. Wormwood Scrubbs. In some privileged families the children are not left to depend on circumjacent gossip, but are dogmatically instructed in hereditary horrors. This happy lot was mine. My father's uncle had been murdered by his valet; and from a very tender age I could have pointed out the house where the murder took place—it went cheap for a good many years afterwards,—and could have described the murderer stripping himself naked before he performed the horrid act, and the bath of blood in which the victim was found, and the devices employed to create an impression of suicide instead of murder. I could have repeated the magnificent peroration in which the murderer's advocate exhorted the jury to spare his client's life (and which, forty years later, was boldlyplagiarized by Mr. Montagu Williams in defending Dr. Lamson). The murderer, Benjamin Francis Courvoisier by name, long occupied a conspicuous place in Madame Tussaud's admirable collection. I can distinctly recall a kind of social eminence among my schoolfellows which was conferred by the fact that I had this relationship with the Chamber of Horrors; and I was conscious of a painful descent when Courvoisier lapsed out of date and was boiled down into Mr. Cobden or Cardinal Wiseman or some other more recent celebrity. Then, again, all literature was full of Horrors; and, though we should have been deprived of jam at tea if we had been caught reading a Murder Trial in theDaily Telegraph, we were encouraged to drink our fill of Shakespeare and Scott and Dickens and other great masters of the Horrible. From De Quincey we learned that Murder may be regarded as a Fine Art, and from an anonymous poet we acquired the immortal verse which narrates the latter end of Mr. William Weare. Shakespeare, as his French critics often remind us, reeks of blood and slaughter; the word "Murder" and its derivatives occupy two columns of Mrs. Cowden Clarke's closely-printed pages. Scott's absolute mastery over his art is nowhere more strikingly exemplified than in his use of murderous mechanisms. "The Heart of Midlothian" begins, continues, and ends with murder. "Rob Roy" contains a murder-scene of lurid beauty. The murderous attack onthe bridegroom in "The Bride of Lammermoor" is a haunting horror. Not all the Dryasdusts in England and Germany combined will ever displace the tradition of Amy Robsart and the concealed trap-door. Front-de-Bœuf's dying agony is to this hour a glimpse of hell. Greatest of the great in humour, Dickens fell not far behind the greatest when he turned his hand to Horrors. One sheds few tears for Mr. Tulkinghorn, and we consign Jonas Chuzzlewit to the gallows without a pang. But is there in fiction a more thrilling scene than the arrest of the murderer on the moonlit tower-stair in "Barnaby Rudge," or the grim escape of Sikes from the vengeance of the mob in "Oliver Twist"? For deliberate, minute, and elaborated horror commend me to the scene at the limekiln on the marshes where Pip awaits his horrible fate at the hands of the crazy savage Dolge Orlick.But it was not only the great masters of fiction who supplied us with our luxuries of horror. The picture of the young man who had murdered his brother, hanging on a gibbet in Blackgrove Wood, is painted with a gruesome fidelity of detail which places Mrs. Sherwood high among literary artists; and the incidents connected with the death of Old Prue would entitle Mrs. Beecher Stowe to claim kinship with Zola.It is curious to reflect that Miss Braddon, the most cheerful and wholesome-minded ofall living novelists, first won her fame by imagining the murderous possibilities of a well, and established it by that unrivalled mystification which confounds the murderer and the murdered in "Henry Dunbar." Nor will the younger generation of authoresses consent to be left behind in the race of Horrors. In old days we were well satisfied if we duly worked up to our predestined murder just before the end of the third volume. To-day Lady Ridley gives us, in the first chapter of "A Daughter of Jael," one of the most delicate and suggestive pieces of murder-writing which I, a confirmed lover of the horrible, can call to mind.To a soul early saturated with literary horrors the experience of life is a curious translation of fancy into fact. Incidents which have hitherto appeared visionary and imaginative now take the character of substantial reality. We discover that horrors are not confined to books or to a picturesque past, but are going on all round us; and the discovery is fraught with an uneasy joy. When I recall the illusions of my infancy and the facts which displaced them, I feel that I fall miserably below the ideal of childhood presented in the famous "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality." My "daily travel further from the East" is marked by memories of dreadful deeds, and the "vision splendid" which attends me on my way is a vivid succession of peculiarly startling murders. In the dawn of consciousnessthese visions have "something of celestial light" about them—they are spiritual, impalpable, ideal. At length the youth perceives them die away, "and melt into the light of common day"—very common day indeed, the day of the Old Bailey and thePolice News. By a curious chain of coincidences, I was early made acquainted with the history of that unfriendly Friend John Tawell, who murdered his sweetheart with prussic acid, and was the first criminal to be arrested by means of the electric telegraph. Heroic was the defence set up by Sir Fitzroy Kelly, who tried to prove that an inordinate love of eating apples, pips and all, accounted for the amount of prussic acid found in the victim's body. Kelly lived to be Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer, but the professional nickname of "Apple-pip Kelly" stuck to him to the end. I know the house where Tawell lived; I have sat under the apple-tree of which his victim ate; and I have stood, the centre of a roaring election crowd, on the exact spot outside the Court-house at Aylesbury where he expiated his crime.Tawell belongs, if I may so say, to a pre-natal impression. But, as the 'sixties of the last century unroll their record, each page displays its peculiar Horror. In 1860 Constance Kent cut her little brother's throat, and buried him in the back-yard. Many a night have I lain quaking in my bed, haunted by visions of sisters armed with razors, and hurried graves in secret spots. Not muchmore cheering was the nocturnal vision of Thomas Hopley, schoolmaster, of Eastbourne, convicted in 1860 of flogging a half-witted pupil to death with a skipping-rope, and afterwards covering the lacerated hands with white kid gloves. I confess to a lasting distaste for private schools, founded on this reminiscence. "The Flowery Land" is a title so prettily fanciful, so suffused with the glamour of the East, that one would scarcely expect to connect it with piracy, murder, and a five-fold execution. Yet that is what it meant for youthful horror-mongers in 1864. In 1865 the plan which pleased my childish thought was that pursued by Dr. Pritchard of Glasgow, who, while he was slowly poisoning his wife and his mother-in-law, kept a diary of their sufferings and recorded their deliverance from the burden of the flesh with pious unction. Two years later a young ruffian, whose crime inspired Mr. James Rhoades to write a passionate poem, cut a child into segments, and recorded in his journal—"Saturday, August 24, 1867: Killed a young girl; it was fine and hot."One might linger long in these paths of dalliance, but space forbids; and memory clears nine years at a bound. Most vivid, most fascinating, most human, if such an epithet be permitted in such a context, was the "Balham Mystery" of 1876. Still I can feel the cob bolting with me across Tooting Common; still I lave my stiffness in a hot bath, and tell the butler that it will do fora cold bath to-morrow; still I plunge my carving-knife into the loin of lamb, and fill up the chinks with that spinach and those eggs; still I quench my thirst with that Burgundy, ofwhich no drop remained in the decanter; and still I wake up in the middle of the night to find myself dying in torture by antimonial poisoning.But we have supped full on horrors. Good night, and pleasant dreams.

HORRORS

The subject is suggested to me by the notice-board outside the Court Theatre. There I learn that "The Campden Wonder" has run its course. A "horror" of the highest excellence has been on view for four weeks; and I, who might have revelled in it, have made,per viltate, the Great Refusal. I leave the italicized quality untranslated, because I am not quite sure of the English equivalent which would exactly suit my case. "Vileness" is a little crude. "Cowardice" is ignominious. "Poorness of Spirit "is an Evangelical virtue. "Deficiency of Enterprise" and "an impaired nervous system" would, at the best, be paraphrases rather than translations. On the whole, I think the nearest approximation to the facts of my case is to say that my refusal to profit by Mr. Masefield's Horror was due to Decadence.Fuimus.There has been a period when such a tale as the "Campden Wonder" would have attracted me with an irresistible fascination and gripped me with a grasp of iron. But I am not the man I was; and I am beginning to share the apprehensions of the aged lady who told herdoctor that she feared she was breaking up, for she could no longer relish her Murders.

Youth, and early youth, is indeed the Golden Age of Horrors. To a well-constituted child battle and murder and sudden death appeal far more powerfully than any smooth tale of love. We snatch a fearful joy from the lurid conversation of servants and neighbours. We gaze, with a kind of panic-stricken rapture, at the stain on the floor which marks the place where old Mr. Yellowboy was murdered for his money; and run very fast, though with a backward gaze, past the tree on which young Rantipole hanged himself on being cut off with a shilling by his uncle Mr. Wormwood Scrubbs. In some privileged families the children are not left to depend on circumjacent gossip, but are dogmatically instructed in hereditary horrors. This happy lot was mine. My father's uncle had been murdered by his valet; and from a very tender age I could have pointed out the house where the murder took place—it went cheap for a good many years afterwards,—and could have described the murderer stripping himself naked before he performed the horrid act, and the bath of blood in which the victim was found, and the devices employed to create an impression of suicide instead of murder. I could have repeated the magnificent peroration in which the murderer's advocate exhorted the jury to spare his client's life (and which, forty years later, was boldlyplagiarized by Mr. Montagu Williams in defending Dr. Lamson). The murderer, Benjamin Francis Courvoisier by name, long occupied a conspicuous place in Madame Tussaud's admirable collection. I can distinctly recall a kind of social eminence among my schoolfellows which was conferred by the fact that I had this relationship with the Chamber of Horrors; and I was conscious of a painful descent when Courvoisier lapsed out of date and was boiled down into Mr. Cobden or Cardinal Wiseman or some other more recent celebrity. Then, again, all literature was full of Horrors; and, though we should have been deprived of jam at tea if we had been caught reading a Murder Trial in theDaily Telegraph, we were encouraged to drink our fill of Shakespeare and Scott and Dickens and other great masters of the Horrible. From De Quincey we learned that Murder may be regarded as a Fine Art, and from an anonymous poet we acquired the immortal verse which narrates the latter end of Mr. William Weare. Shakespeare, as his French critics often remind us, reeks of blood and slaughter; the word "Murder" and its derivatives occupy two columns of Mrs. Cowden Clarke's closely-printed pages. Scott's absolute mastery over his art is nowhere more strikingly exemplified than in his use of murderous mechanisms. "The Heart of Midlothian" begins, continues, and ends with murder. "Rob Roy" contains a murder-scene of lurid beauty. The murderous attack onthe bridegroom in "The Bride of Lammermoor" is a haunting horror. Not all the Dryasdusts in England and Germany combined will ever displace the tradition of Amy Robsart and the concealed trap-door. Front-de-Bœuf's dying agony is to this hour a glimpse of hell. Greatest of the great in humour, Dickens fell not far behind the greatest when he turned his hand to Horrors. One sheds few tears for Mr. Tulkinghorn, and we consign Jonas Chuzzlewit to the gallows without a pang. But is there in fiction a more thrilling scene than the arrest of the murderer on the moonlit tower-stair in "Barnaby Rudge," or the grim escape of Sikes from the vengeance of the mob in "Oliver Twist"? For deliberate, minute, and elaborated horror commend me to the scene at the limekiln on the marshes where Pip awaits his horrible fate at the hands of the crazy savage Dolge Orlick.

But it was not only the great masters of fiction who supplied us with our luxuries of horror. The picture of the young man who had murdered his brother, hanging on a gibbet in Blackgrove Wood, is painted with a gruesome fidelity of detail which places Mrs. Sherwood high among literary artists; and the incidents connected with the death of Old Prue would entitle Mrs. Beecher Stowe to claim kinship with Zola.

It is curious to reflect that Miss Braddon, the most cheerful and wholesome-minded ofall living novelists, first won her fame by imagining the murderous possibilities of a well, and established it by that unrivalled mystification which confounds the murderer and the murdered in "Henry Dunbar." Nor will the younger generation of authoresses consent to be left behind in the race of Horrors. In old days we were well satisfied if we duly worked up to our predestined murder just before the end of the third volume. To-day Lady Ridley gives us, in the first chapter of "A Daughter of Jael," one of the most delicate and suggestive pieces of murder-writing which I, a confirmed lover of the horrible, can call to mind.

To a soul early saturated with literary horrors the experience of life is a curious translation of fancy into fact. Incidents which have hitherto appeared visionary and imaginative now take the character of substantial reality. We discover that horrors are not confined to books or to a picturesque past, but are going on all round us; and the discovery is fraught with an uneasy joy. When I recall the illusions of my infancy and the facts which displaced them, I feel that I fall miserably below the ideal of childhood presented in the famous "Ode on the Intimations of Immortality." My "daily travel further from the East" is marked by memories of dreadful deeds, and the "vision splendid" which attends me on my way is a vivid succession of peculiarly startling murders. In the dawn of consciousnessthese visions have "something of celestial light" about them—they are spiritual, impalpable, ideal. At length the youth perceives them die away, "and melt into the light of common day"—very common day indeed, the day of the Old Bailey and thePolice News. By a curious chain of coincidences, I was early made acquainted with the history of that unfriendly Friend John Tawell, who murdered his sweetheart with prussic acid, and was the first criminal to be arrested by means of the electric telegraph. Heroic was the defence set up by Sir Fitzroy Kelly, who tried to prove that an inordinate love of eating apples, pips and all, accounted for the amount of prussic acid found in the victim's body. Kelly lived to be Lord Chief Baron of the Exchequer, but the professional nickname of "Apple-pip Kelly" stuck to him to the end. I know the house where Tawell lived; I have sat under the apple-tree of which his victim ate; and I have stood, the centre of a roaring election crowd, on the exact spot outside the Court-house at Aylesbury where he expiated his crime.

Tawell belongs, if I may so say, to a pre-natal impression. But, as the 'sixties of the last century unroll their record, each page displays its peculiar Horror. In 1860 Constance Kent cut her little brother's throat, and buried him in the back-yard. Many a night have I lain quaking in my bed, haunted by visions of sisters armed with razors, and hurried graves in secret spots. Not muchmore cheering was the nocturnal vision of Thomas Hopley, schoolmaster, of Eastbourne, convicted in 1860 of flogging a half-witted pupil to death with a skipping-rope, and afterwards covering the lacerated hands with white kid gloves. I confess to a lasting distaste for private schools, founded on this reminiscence. "The Flowery Land" is a title so prettily fanciful, so suffused with the glamour of the East, that one would scarcely expect to connect it with piracy, murder, and a five-fold execution. Yet that is what it meant for youthful horror-mongers in 1864. In 1865 the plan which pleased my childish thought was that pursued by Dr. Pritchard of Glasgow, who, while he was slowly poisoning his wife and his mother-in-law, kept a diary of their sufferings and recorded their deliverance from the burden of the flesh with pious unction. Two years later a young ruffian, whose crime inspired Mr. James Rhoades to write a passionate poem, cut a child into segments, and recorded in his journal—"Saturday, August 24, 1867: Killed a young girl; it was fine and hot."

One might linger long in these paths of dalliance, but space forbids; and memory clears nine years at a bound. Most vivid, most fascinating, most human, if such an epithet be permitted in such a context, was the "Balham Mystery" of 1876. Still I can feel the cob bolting with me across Tooting Common; still I lave my stiffness in a hot bath, and tell the butler that it will do fora cold bath to-morrow; still I plunge my carving-knife into the loin of lamb, and fill up the chinks with that spinach and those eggs; still I quench my thirst with that Burgundy, ofwhich no drop remained in the decanter; and still I wake up in the middle of the night to find myself dying in torture by antimonial poisoning.

But we have supped full on horrors. Good night, and pleasant dreams.

XLIISOCIAL CHANGESI have been invited to make some comments on recent changes in society, and I obey the call, though not without misgiving. "Society" in its modern extension is so wide a subject that probably no one can survey more than a limited portion of its area; and, if one generalizes too freely from one's own experience, one is likely to provoke the contradictions of critics who, surveying other portions, have been impressed by different, and perhaps contrary, phenomena. All such contradictions I discount in advance. After all, one can only describe what one has seen, and my equipment for the task entrusted to me consists of nothing more than a habit of observation and a retentive memory.I was brought up in that "sacred circle of the Great-Grandmotherhood" of which Mr. Beresford-Hope made such excellent fun in "Strictly Tied Up." As Mr. Squeers considered himself the "right shop for morals," so the Whigs considered themselves the right shop for manners. What they said and did every one ought to say anddo, and from their judgment there was no appeal. A social education of this kind leaves traces which time is powerless to efface—"Vieille école, bonne école, begad!" as Major Pendennis said. In twenty-five years' contact with a more enlarged society, one has found a perpetual interest in watching the departure, gradual but nearly universal, from the social traditions of one's youth. The contrast between Now and Then is constantly reasserting itself; and, if I note some instances of it just as they occur to my mind, I shall be doing, at any rate in part, what has been required of me.I will take the most insignificant instances first—instances of phrase and diction and pronunciation. I am just old enough to remember a greatgrandmother who said that she "lay" at a place when she meant that she had slept there, and spoke of "using the potticary" when we should speak of sending for the doctor. Some relations of a later generation said "ooman" for woman, and, when they were much obliged, said they were much "obleeged." "Brarcelet" for bracelet and "di'monds" for diamonds were common pronunciations. Tuesday was "Toosday," and first was "fust." Chariot was "charr'ot," and Harriet "Harr'yet," and I have even heard "Jeames" for James. "Goold" for gold and "yaller" for yellow were common enough. Stirrups were always called "sturrups," and squirrels "squrrels," and wrapped was pronounced "wropped," and tassels"tossels," and Gertrude "Jertrude." A lilac was always called a "laylock," and a cucumber a "cowcumber." The stress was laid on the second syllable of balcony, even as it is written in the "Diverting History of John Gilpin":—"At Edmonton his loving wifeFrom the balcony spiedHer tender husband, wondering muchTo see how he did ride."N.B.—Cowper was a Whig.Of course, these archaisms were already passing away when I began to notice them, but some of them survive until this hour, and only last winter, after an evening service in St. Paul's Cathedral, I was delighted to hear a lady, admiring the illuminated dome, exclaim, "How well the doom looks!"Then, again, as regards the names of places. I cannot profess to have heard "Lunnon," but I have heard the headquarters of my family called "'Ooburn," and Rome "Roome," and Sèvres "Saver," and Falmouth "Farmouth," and Penrith "Peerith," and Cirencester "Ciciter."Nowadays it is as much as one can do to get a cabman to take one to Berwick Street or Berkeley Square, unless one calls them Berwick or Burkley. Gower Street and Pall Mall are pronounced as they are spelt; and, if one wants a ticket for Derby, the booking-clerk obligingly corrects one's request to "Durby."And, as with pronunciation, so also with phrase and diction—"Change and decay in all around I see."When I was young the word "lunch," whether substantive or verb, was regarded with a peculiar horror, and ranked with "'bus" in the lowest depths of vulgarity. To "take" in the sense of eat or drink was another abomination which lay too deep for words. "You take exercise or take physic; nothing else," said Brummel to the lady who asked him to take tea. "I beg your pardon, you also take a liberty," was the just rejoinder.I well remember that, when the journals of an Illustrious Person were published and it appeared that a royal party had "taken luncheon" on a hill, it was stoutly contended in Whig circles that the servants had taken the luncheon to the hill where their masters ate it; and, when a close examination of the text proved this gloss to be impossible, it was decided that the original must have been written in German, and that it had been translated by some one who did not know the English idiom. To "ride," meaning to travel in a carriage, was, and I hope still is, regarded as the peculiar property of my friend Pennialinus;[12]and I remember the mild sensation caused in a Whig house when a neighbour who had driven over to luncheon declined to wash her hands on the ground that she had "ridden in gloves." The vehicle which was invented by aLord Chancellor and called after his name was scrupulously pronounced so as to rhyme with groom, and any one indiscreet enough to say that he had ridden in "the Row" would probably have been asked if he had gone round by "the Zoo.""Cherry pie and apple pie; all the rest are tarts," was an axiom carefully instilled into the young gastronomer; while "to pass" the mustard was bound in the same bundle of abominations as "I'll trouble you," "May I assist you?" "Not any, thank you," and "A very small piece."Then, again, as to what may be called the Manners of Eating. A man who put his elbows on the table would have been considered a Yahoo, and he who should eat his asparagus with a knife and fork would have been classed with the traditional collier who boiled his pineapple. Fish-knives (like oxidized silver biscuit-boxes) were unknown and undreamt-of horrors. To eat one's fish with two forks was thecachetof a certain circle, and the manner of manipulating the stones of a cherry pie was thearticulus stantis vel cadentis. The little daughter of a great Whig house, whose eating habits had been contracted in the nursery, once asked her mother with wistful longing, "Mamma, when shall I be old enough to eat bread and cheese with a knife, and put the knife in my mouth?" and she was promptly informed that not if she lived to attain the age of Methuselah would she be able to acquire that "unchartered freedom." On the other hand, old gentlemenof the very highest breeding used after dinner to rinse their mouths in their finger-glasses, and thereby caused unspeakable qualms in unaccustomed guests. In that respect at any rate, if in no other, the most inveterate praiser of times past must admit that alteration has not been deterioration.Another marked change in society is the diminution of stateliness. A really well-turned-out carriage, with a coachman in a wig and two powdered footmen behind, is as rare an object in the Mall as a hansom in Bermondsey or a tandem in Bethnal Green. Men go to the levée in cabs or on motor-cars, and send their wives to the Palace Ball in the products of the Coupé Company. The Dowager Duchess of Cleveland (1792-1883) once told me that Lord Salisbury had no carriage. On my expressing innocent surprise, she said, "I have been told that Lord Salisbury goes about London in a brougham;" and her tone could not have expressed a more lively horror if the vehicle had been a coster's barrow. People of a less remote date than the Duchess's had become inured to barouches for ladies and broughams for men, but a landau was contemned under the derogatory nickname of a "demi-fortune," and the spectacle of a great man scaling the dizzy heights of the 'bus or plunging into the depths of the Twopenny Tube would have given rise to lively comment.A pillar of the Tory party, who died not twenty years ago, finding his newly-married wife pokingthe fire, took the poker from her hands and said with majestic pain, "My dear, will you kindly remember that you are now a countess?" A Liberal statesman, still living, when he went to Harrow for the first time, sailed up the Hill in the family coach, and tradition does not report that his schoolfellows kicked him with any special virulence.I have known people who in travelling would take the whole of a first-class carriage sooner than risk the intrusion of an unknown fellow-passenger: their descendants would as likely as not reach their destination on motor-cars, having pulled up at some wayside inn for mutton chops and whisky-and-soda.

SOCIAL CHANGES

I have been invited to make some comments on recent changes in society, and I obey the call, though not without misgiving. "Society" in its modern extension is so wide a subject that probably no one can survey more than a limited portion of its area; and, if one generalizes too freely from one's own experience, one is likely to provoke the contradictions of critics who, surveying other portions, have been impressed by different, and perhaps contrary, phenomena. All such contradictions I discount in advance. After all, one can only describe what one has seen, and my equipment for the task entrusted to me consists of nothing more than a habit of observation and a retentive memory.

I was brought up in that "sacred circle of the Great-Grandmotherhood" of which Mr. Beresford-Hope made such excellent fun in "Strictly Tied Up." As Mr. Squeers considered himself the "right shop for morals," so the Whigs considered themselves the right shop for manners. What they said and did every one ought to say anddo, and from their judgment there was no appeal. A social education of this kind leaves traces which time is powerless to efface—"Vieille école, bonne école, begad!" as Major Pendennis said. In twenty-five years' contact with a more enlarged society, one has found a perpetual interest in watching the departure, gradual but nearly universal, from the social traditions of one's youth. The contrast between Now and Then is constantly reasserting itself; and, if I note some instances of it just as they occur to my mind, I shall be doing, at any rate in part, what has been required of me.

I will take the most insignificant instances first—instances of phrase and diction and pronunciation. I am just old enough to remember a greatgrandmother who said that she "lay" at a place when she meant that she had slept there, and spoke of "using the potticary" when we should speak of sending for the doctor. Some relations of a later generation said "ooman" for woman, and, when they were much obliged, said they were much "obleeged." "Brarcelet" for bracelet and "di'monds" for diamonds were common pronunciations. Tuesday was "Toosday," and first was "fust." Chariot was "charr'ot," and Harriet "Harr'yet," and I have even heard "Jeames" for James. "Goold" for gold and "yaller" for yellow were common enough. Stirrups were always called "sturrups," and squirrels "squrrels," and wrapped was pronounced "wropped," and tassels"tossels," and Gertrude "Jertrude." A lilac was always called a "laylock," and a cucumber a "cowcumber." The stress was laid on the second syllable of balcony, even as it is written in the "Diverting History of John Gilpin":—

"At Edmonton his loving wifeFrom the balcony spied

Her tender husband, wondering muchTo see how he did ride."

N.B.—Cowper was a Whig.

Of course, these archaisms were already passing away when I began to notice them, but some of them survive until this hour, and only last winter, after an evening service in St. Paul's Cathedral, I was delighted to hear a lady, admiring the illuminated dome, exclaim, "How well the doom looks!"

Then, again, as regards the names of places. I cannot profess to have heard "Lunnon," but I have heard the headquarters of my family called "'Ooburn," and Rome "Roome," and Sèvres "Saver," and Falmouth "Farmouth," and Penrith "Peerith," and Cirencester "Ciciter."

Nowadays it is as much as one can do to get a cabman to take one to Berwick Street or Berkeley Square, unless one calls them Berwick or Burkley. Gower Street and Pall Mall are pronounced as they are spelt; and, if one wants a ticket for Derby, the booking-clerk obligingly corrects one's request to "Durby."

And, as with pronunciation, so also with phrase and diction—

"Change and decay in all around I see."

When I was young the word "lunch," whether substantive or verb, was regarded with a peculiar horror, and ranked with "'bus" in the lowest depths of vulgarity. To "take" in the sense of eat or drink was another abomination which lay too deep for words. "You take exercise or take physic; nothing else," said Brummel to the lady who asked him to take tea. "I beg your pardon, you also take a liberty," was the just rejoinder.

I well remember that, when the journals of an Illustrious Person were published and it appeared that a royal party had "taken luncheon" on a hill, it was stoutly contended in Whig circles that the servants had taken the luncheon to the hill where their masters ate it; and, when a close examination of the text proved this gloss to be impossible, it was decided that the original must have been written in German, and that it had been translated by some one who did not know the English idiom. To "ride," meaning to travel in a carriage, was, and I hope still is, regarded as the peculiar property of my friend Pennialinus;[12]and I remember the mild sensation caused in a Whig house when a neighbour who had driven over to luncheon declined to wash her hands on the ground that she had "ridden in gloves." The vehicle which was invented by aLord Chancellor and called after his name was scrupulously pronounced so as to rhyme with groom, and any one indiscreet enough to say that he had ridden in "the Row" would probably have been asked if he had gone round by "the Zoo."

"Cherry pie and apple pie; all the rest are tarts," was an axiom carefully instilled into the young gastronomer; while "to pass" the mustard was bound in the same bundle of abominations as "I'll trouble you," "May I assist you?" "Not any, thank you," and "A very small piece."

Then, again, as to what may be called the Manners of Eating. A man who put his elbows on the table would have been considered a Yahoo, and he who should eat his asparagus with a knife and fork would have been classed with the traditional collier who boiled his pineapple. Fish-knives (like oxidized silver biscuit-boxes) were unknown and undreamt-of horrors. To eat one's fish with two forks was thecachetof a certain circle, and the manner of manipulating the stones of a cherry pie was thearticulus stantis vel cadentis. The little daughter of a great Whig house, whose eating habits had been contracted in the nursery, once asked her mother with wistful longing, "Mamma, when shall I be old enough to eat bread and cheese with a knife, and put the knife in my mouth?" and she was promptly informed that not if she lived to attain the age of Methuselah would she be able to acquire that "unchartered freedom." On the other hand, old gentlemenof the very highest breeding used after dinner to rinse their mouths in their finger-glasses, and thereby caused unspeakable qualms in unaccustomed guests. In that respect at any rate, if in no other, the most inveterate praiser of times past must admit that alteration has not been deterioration.

Another marked change in society is the diminution of stateliness. A really well-turned-out carriage, with a coachman in a wig and two powdered footmen behind, is as rare an object in the Mall as a hansom in Bermondsey or a tandem in Bethnal Green. Men go to the levée in cabs or on motor-cars, and send their wives to the Palace Ball in the products of the Coupé Company. The Dowager Duchess of Cleveland (1792-1883) once told me that Lord Salisbury had no carriage. On my expressing innocent surprise, she said, "I have been told that Lord Salisbury goes about London in a brougham;" and her tone could not have expressed a more lively horror if the vehicle had been a coster's barrow. People of a less remote date than the Duchess's had become inured to barouches for ladies and broughams for men, but a landau was contemned under the derogatory nickname of a "demi-fortune," and the spectacle of a great man scaling the dizzy heights of the 'bus or plunging into the depths of the Twopenny Tube would have given rise to lively comment.

A pillar of the Tory party, who died not twenty years ago, finding his newly-married wife pokingthe fire, took the poker from her hands and said with majestic pain, "My dear, will you kindly remember that you are now a countess?" A Liberal statesman, still living, when he went to Harrow for the first time, sailed up the Hill in the family coach, and tradition does not report that his schoolfellows kicked him with any special virulence.

I have known people who in travelling would take the whole of a first-class carriage sooner than risk the intrusion of an unknown fellow-passenger: their descendants would as likely as not reach their destination on motor-cars, having pulled up at some wayside inn for mutton chops and whisky-and-soda.

XLIIISOCIAL GRACESThough stateliness has palpably diminished, the beauty of life has as palpably increased. In old days people loved, or professed to love, fine pictures, and those who had them made much of them. But with that one exception no one made any attempt to surround himself with beautiful objects. People who happened to have fine furniture used it because they had it; unless, indeed, the desire to keep pace with the fashion induced them to part with Louis Seize or Chippendale and replace it by the austere productions of Tottenham Court Road. The idea of buying a chimneypiece or a cabinet or a bureau because it was beautiful never crossed the ordinary mind. The finest old English china was habitually used, and not seldom smashed, in the housekeeper's room. It was the age of horse-hair and mahogany, and crimson flock papers and green rep curtains. Whatever ornaments the house happened to possess were clustered together on a round table in the middle of the drawing-room. The style has been immortalized by the hand of a master: "There were no skilfully contrasted shades of grey or green, no dado,no distemper. The woodwork was grained and varnished after the manner of the Philistines, the walls papered in dark crimson, with heavy curtains of the same colour, and the sideboard, dinner-waggon, and row of stiff chairs were all carved in the same massive and expensive style of ugliness. The pictures were those familiar presentments of dirty rabbits, fat white horses, bloated goddesses, and misshapen boors by masters, who if younger than they assumed to be, must have been quite old enough to know better." A man who hung a blue-and-white plate on a wall, or put peacocks' feathers in a vase, would have been regarded as insane; and I well remember the outcry of indignation and scorn when a well-known collector of bric-a-brac had himself painted with a pet teapot in his hands.In this respect the change is complete. The owners of fine picture-galleries no longer monopolize "art in the home." People who cannot afford old masters invoke the genius of Mr. Mortimer Menpes. If they have not inherited French furniture they buy it, or at least imitations of the real, which are quite as beautiful. A sage-green wash on the wall, and a white dado to the height of a man's shoulder, cover a multitude of paper-hanger's sins. The commonest china is pretty in form and colour. A couple of rugs from Liberty's replace the hideous and costly carpets which lasted their unfortunate possessors a lifetime; and, whereas in those distant days one never saw a flower on a dinner-table, now "it is roses, roses all the way,"or, when it cannot be roses, it is daffodils and tulips and poppies and chrysanthemums.All this is the work of the despised æsthetes; but this generation will probably see no meaning in the great drama of "Patience," and has no conception of the tyrannous ugliness from which Bunthorne and his friends delivered us. Their double achievement was to make ugliness culpable, and to prove that beauty need not be expensive.The same change may be observed in everything connected with Dinner. No longer is the mind oppressed by those monstrous hecatombs under which, as Bret Harte said, "the table groaned and even the sideboard sighed." Frascatelli's monstrous bills of fare, with six "side dishes" and four sweets, survive only as monuments of what our fathers could do. Racing plate and "epergnes," with silver goddesses and sphinxes and rams' horns, if not discreetly exchanged for prettier substitutes, hide their diminished heads in pantries and safes. Instead of these horrors, we have bright flowers and shaded lights; and a very few, perhaps too few, dishes, which both look pretty and taste good. Here, again, expensive ugliness has been routed, and inexpensive beauty enthroned in its place.The same law, I believe, holds good about dress. With the mysteries of woman's clothes I do not presume to meddle. I do not attempt to estimate the relative cost of the satins and ermine and scarves which Lawrence painted, and the "duck's-egg bolero" and "mauve hopsack" which I havelately seen advertized in the list of a winter sale. But about men's dress I feel more confident. The "rich cut Genoa velvet waistcoat," the solemn frock coat, the satin stock, and the trousers strapped under the wellingtons, were certainly hideous, and I shrewdly suspect that they were vastly more expensive than the blue serge suits, straw hats, brown boots, and sailor-knot ties in which the men of the present day contrive to look smart without being stiff.When Mr. Gladstone in old age revisited Oxford and lectured on Homer to a great gathering of undergraduates, he was asked if he saw any difference between his hearers and the men of his own time. He responded briskly, "Yes, in their dress, an enormous difference. I am told that I had among my audience some of the most highly-connected and richest men in the university, and there wasn't one whom I couldn't have dressed from top to toe for £5."I have spoken so far of material beauty, and here the change in society has been an inexpressible improvement; but, when I turn to beauty of another kind, I cannot speak with equal certainty. Have our manners improved? Beyond all question they have changed, but have they changed for the better?It may seem incongruous to cite Dr. Pusey as an authority on anything more mundane than a hair-shirt, yet he was really a close observer of social phenomena, as his famous sermon on Dives andLazarus, with its strictures on the modern Dives's dinner and Mrs. Dives's ball-gown, sufficiently testifies. He was born a Bouverie in 1800, when the Bouveries still were Whigs, and he testified in old age to "the beauty of the refined worldly manners of the old school," which, as he insisted, were really Christian in their regard for the feelings of others. "If in any case they became soulless as apart from Christianity, the beautiful form was there into which real life might re-enter."We do not, I think, see much of the "beautiful form" nowadays. Men when talking to women lounge, and sprawl, and cross their legs, and keep one hand in a pocket while they shake hands with the other, and shove their partners about in the "Washington Post," and wallow in the Kitchen-Lancers. All this is as little beautiful as can be conceived. Grace and dignity have perished side by side. And yet, oddly enough, the people who are most thoroughly bereft of manners seem bent on displaying their deficiencies in the most conspicuous places. In the old days it would have been thought the very height of vulgarity to run after royalty. The Duke of Wellington said to Charles Greville, "When we meet the Royal Family in society they are our superiors, and we owe them all respect." That was just all. If a Royal Personage knew you sufficiently well to pay you a visit, it was an honour, and all suitable preparations were made. "My father walked backwards with a silver candlestick, and red baize awaited the royal feet."If you encountered a prince or princess in society, you made your bow and thought no more about it. An old-fashioned father, who had taken a schoolboy son to call on a great lady, said, "Your bow was too low. That is the sort of bow we keep for the Royal Family." There was neither drop-down-dead-ativeness, nor pushfulness, nor familiarity. Well-bred people knew how to behave themselves, and there was an end of the matter. But to force one's self on the notice of royalty, to intrigue for visits from Illustrious Personages, to go out of one's way to meet princes or princesses, to parade before the gaping world the amount of intimacy with which one had been honoured, would have been regarded as the very madness of vulgarity.Another respect in which modern manners compare unfavourably with ancient is the growing love of titles. In old days people thought a great deal, perhaps too much, of Family. They had a strong sense of territorial position, and I have heard people say of others, "Oh, they are cousins of ours," as if that fact put them within a sacred and inviolable enclosure. But titles were contemned. If you were a peer, you sate in the House of Lords instead of the House of Commons; and that was all. No one dreamed of babbling about "peers" as a separate order of creation, still less of enumerating the peers to whom they were related.A member of the Tory Government was once at pains to explain to an entirely unsympathetic audience that the only reason why he and LordCurzon had not taken as good a degree as Mr. Asquith was that, being the eldest sons of peers, they were more freely invited into the County society of Oxfordshire. I can safely say that, in the sacred circle of the Great-Grandmotherhood, that theory of academical shortcoming would not have been advanced.The idea of buying a baronetcy would have been thought simply droll, and knighthood was regarded as the guerdon of the successful grocer. I believe that in their inmost hearts the Whigs enjoyed the Garters which were so freely bestowed on them; but they compounded for that human weakness by unmeasured contempt for the Bath, and I doubt if they had ever heard of the Star of India. To state this case is sufficiently to illustrate a conspicuous change in the sentiment of society.

SOCIAL GRACES

Though stateliness has palpably diminished, the beauty of life has as palpably increased. In old days people loved, or professed to love, fine pictures, and those who had them made much of them. But with that one exception no one made any attempt to surround himself with beautiful objects. People who happened to have fine furniture used it because they had it; unless, indeed, the desire to keep pace with the fashion induced them to part with Louis Seize or Chippendale and replace it by the austere productions of Tottenham Court Road. The idea of buying a chimneypiece or a cabinet or a bureau because it was beautiful never crossed the ordinary mind. The finest old English china was habitually used, and not seldom smashed, in the housekeeper's room. It was the age of horse-hair and mahogany, and crimson flock papers and green rep curtains. Whatever ornaments the house happened to possess were clustered together on a round table in the middle of the drawing-room. The style has been immortalized by the hand of a master: "There were no skilfully contrasted shades of grey or green, no dado,no distemper. The woodwork was grained and varnished after the manner of the Philistines, the walls papered in dark crimson, with heavy curtains of the same colour, and the sideboard, dinner-waggon, and row of stiff chairs were all carved in the same massive and expensive style of ugliness. The pictures were those familiar presentments of dirty rabbits, fat white horses, bloated goddesses, and misshapen boors by masters, who if younger than they assumed to be, must have been quite old enough to know better." A man who hung a blue-and-white plate on a wall, or put peacocks' feathers in a vase, would have been regarded as insane; and I well remember the outcry of indignation and scorn when a well-known collector of bric-a-brac had himself painted with a pet teapot in his hands.

In this respect the change is complete. The owners of fine picture-galleries no longer monopolize "art in the home." People who cannot afford old masters invoke the genius of Mr. Mortimer Menpes. If they have not inherited French furniture they buy it, or at least imitations of the real, which are quite as beautiful. A sage-green wash on the wall, and a white dado to the height of a man's shoulder, cover a multitude of paper-hanger's sins. The commonest china is pretty in form and colour. A couple of rugs from Liberty's replace the hideous and costly carpets which lasted their unfortunate possessors a lifetime; and, whereas in those distant days one never saw a flower on a dinner-table, now "it is roses, roses all the way,"or, when it cannot be roses, it is daffodils and tulips and poppies and chrysanthemums.

All this is the work of the despised æsthetes; but this generation will probably see no meaning in the great drama of "Patience," and has no conception of the tyrannous ugliness from which Bunthorne and his friends delivered us. Their double achievement was to make ugliness culpable, and to prove that beauty need not be expensive.

The same change may be observed in everything connected with Dinner. No longer is the mind oppressed by those monstrous hecatombs under which, as Bret Harte said, "the table groaned and even the sideboard sighed." Frascatelli's monstrous bills of fare, with six "side dishes" and four sweets, survive only as monuments of what our fathers could do. Racing plate and "epergnes," with silver goddesses and sphinxes and rams' horns, if not discreetly exchanged for prettier substitutes, hide their diminished heads in pantries and safes. Instead of these horrors, we have bright flowers and shaded lights; and a very few, perhaps too few, dishes, which both look pretty and taste good. Here, again, expensive ugliness has been routed, and inexpensive beauty enthroned in its place.

The same law, I believe, holds good about dress. With the mysteries of woman's clothes I do not presume to meddle. I do not attempt to estimate the relative cost of the satins and ermine and scarves which Lawrence painted, and the "duck's-egg bolero" and "mauve hopsack" which I havelately seen advertized in the list of a winter sale. But about men's dress I feel more confident. The "rich cut Genoa velvet waistcoat," the solemn frock coat, the satin stock, and the trousers strapped under the wellingtons, were certainly hideous, and I shrewdly suspect that they were vastly more expensive than the blue serge suits, straw hats, brown boots, and sailor-knot ties in which the men of the present day contrive to look smart without being stiff.

When Mr. Gladstone in old age revisited Oxford and lectured on Homer to a great gathering of undergraduates, he was asked if he saw any difference between his hearers and the men of his own time. He responded briskly, "Yes, in their dress, an enormous difference. I am told that I had among my audience some of the most highly-connected and richest men in the university, and there wasn't one whom I couldn't have dressed from top to toe for £5."

I have spoken so far of material beauty, and here the change in society has been an inexpressible improvement; but, when I turn to beauty of another kind, I cannot speak with equal certainty. Have our manners improved? Beyond all question they have changed, but have they changed for the better?

It may seem incongruous to cite Dr. Pusey as an authority on anything more mundane than a hair-shirt, yet he was really a close observer of social phenomena, as his famous sermon on Dives andLazarus, with its strictures on the modern Dives's dinner and Mrs. Dives's ball-gown, sufficiently testifies. He was born a Bouverie in 1800, when the Bouveries still were Whigs, and he testified in old age to "the beauty of the refined worldly manners of the old school," which, as he insisted, were really Christian in their regard for the feelings of others. "If in any case they became soulless as apart from Christianity, the beautiful form was there into which real life might re-enter."

We do not, I think, see much of the "beautiful form" nowadays. Men when talking to women lounge, and sprawl, and cross their legs, and keep one hand in a pocket while they shake hands with the other, and shove their partners about in the "Washington Post," and wallow in the Kitchen-Lancers. All this is as little beautiful as can be conceived. Grace and dignity have perished side by side. And yet, oddly enough, the people who are most thoroughly bereft of manners seem bent on displaying their deficiencies in the most conspicuous places. In the old days it would have been thought the very height of vulgarity to run after royalty. The Duke of Wellington said to Charles Greville, "When we meet the Royal Family in society they are our superiors, and we owe them all respect." That was just all. If a Royal Personage knew you sufficiently well to pay you a visit, it was an honour, and all suitable preparations were made. "My father walked backwards with a silver candlestick, and red baize awaited the royal feet."If you encountered a prince or princess in society, you made your bow and thought no more about it. An old-fashioned father, who had taken a schoolboy son to call on a great lady, said, "Your bow was too low. That is the sort of bow we keep for the Royal Family." There was neither drop-down-dead-ativeness, nor pushfulness, nor familiarity. Well-bred people knew how to behave themselves, and there was an end of the matter. But to force one's self on the notice of royalty, to intrigue for visits from Illustrious Personages, to go out of one's way to meet princes or princesses, to parade before the gaping world the amount of intimacy with which one had been honoured, would have been regarded as the very madness of vulgarity.

Another respect in which modern manners compare unfavourably with ancient is the growing love of titles. In old days people thought a great deal, perhaps too much, of Family. They had a strong sense of territorial position, and I have heard people say of others, "Oh, they are cousins of ours," as if that fact put them within a sacred and inviolable enclosure. But titles were contemned. If you were a peer, you sate in the House of Lords instead of the House of Commons; and that was all. No one dreamed of babbling about "peers" as a separate order of creation, still less of enumerating the peers to whom they were related.

A member of the Tory Government was once at pains to explain to an entirely unsympathetic audience that the only reason why he and LordCurzon had not taken as good a degree as Mr. Asquith was that, being the eldest sons of peers, they were more freely invited into the County society of Oxfordshire. I can safely say that, in the sacred circle of the Great-Grandmotherhood, that theory of academical shortcoming would not have been advanced.

The idea of buying a baronetcy would have been thought simply droll, and knighthood was regarded as the guerdon of the successful grocer. I believe that in their inmost hearts the Whigs enjoyed the Garters which were so freely bestowed on them; but they compounded for that human weakness by unmeasured contempt for the Bath, and I doubt if they had ever heard of the Star of India. To state this case is sufficiently to illustrate a conspicuous change in the sentiment of society.

XLIVPUBLICITYV.RETICENCEThe great people of old time followed (quite unconsciously) the philosopher who bade man "hide his life." Of course, the stage of politics was always a pillory, and he who ventured to stand on it made up his mind to encounter a vast variety of popular missiles. "In my situation as Chancellor of the University of Oxford," said the Duke of Wellington, "I have been much exposed to authors;" and men whom choice or circumstances forced into politics were exposed to worse annoyances than "authors." But the line was rigidly drawn between public and private life. What went on in the home was sacredly secreted from the public gaze. People lived among their relations and friends and political associates, and kept the gaping world at a distance. Now we worship Publicity as the chief enjoyment of human life. We send lists of our shooting-parties to "Society Journals." We welcome the Interviewer. We contribute personal paragraphs toClassy Cuttings. We admit the photographer to our bedrooms, and give our portraits to illustrated papers. We take our exercise when we have the bestchance of being seen and noticed, and we never eat our dinner with such keen appetites as amid the half-world of a Piccadilly restaurant. In brief, "Expose thy life" is the motto of the new philosophy, and I maintain that in this respect, at any rate, the old was better.With an increasing love of publicity has come an increasing contempt for reticence. In old days there were certain subjects which no one mentioned; among them were Health and Money. I presume that people had pretty much the same complaints as now, but no one talked about them. We used to be told of a lady who died in agony because she insisted on telling the doctor that the pain was in her chest whereas it really was in the unmentionable organ of digestion. That martyr to propriety has no imitators in the present day. Every one has a disease and a doctor; and young people of both sexes are ready on the slightest acquaintance to describe symptoms and compare experiences. "Ice!" exclaimed a pretty girl at dessert, "good gracious, no! so bad for indy"—and her companion, who had not travelled with the times, learned with amazement that "indy" was the pet name for indigestion. "How bitterly cold!" said a plump matron at an open-air luncheon; "just the thing to give one appendicitis." "Oh!" said her neighbour, surveying the company, "we are quite safe there. I shouldn't think we had an appendix between us."Then, again, as to money. In the "SacredCircle of the Great-Grandmotherhood" I never heard the slightest reference to income. Not that the Whigs despised money. They were at least as fond of it as other people, and, even when it took the shape of slum-rents, its odour was not displeasing. But it was not a subject for conversation. People did not chatter about their neighbours' incomes; and, if they made their own money in trades or professions, they did not regale us with statistics of profit and loss. To-day every one seems to be, if I may use the favourite colloquialism, "on the make"; and the sincerity of the devotion with which people worship money pervades their whole conversation and colours their whole view of life. "Scions of aristocracy," to use the good old phrase of Pennialinus, will produce samples of tea or floor-cloth from their pockets, and sue quite winningly for custom. A speculative bottle of extraordinarily cheap peach-brandy will arrive with the compliments of Lord Tom Noddy, who has just gone into the wine trade, and Lord Magnus Charters will tell you that, if you are going to put in the electric light, his firm has got some really good fittings which he can let you have on specially easy terms.But, if in old days Health and Money were subjects eschewed in polite conversation, even more rigid was the avoidance of "risky" topics. To-day no scandal is too gross, no gossip too prurient. Respectable mothers chatter quite freely about that "nest of spicery" over which Sir GorellBarnes presides, and canvass abominations with a self-possession worthy of Gibbon or Zola. In fact, as regards our topics of conversation, we seem to have reached the condition in which the Paris correspondent of theDaily Telegraphfound himself when Mr. Matthew Arnold (in "Friendship's Garland") spoke to him of Delicacy. "He seemed inexplicably struck by this worddelicacy, which he kept repeating to himself. 'Delicacy,' said he; 'delicacy, surely I have heard that word before! Yes, in other days,' he went on dreamily, 'in my fresh enthusiastic youth, before I knew Sala, before I wrote for that infernal paper——.' 'Collect yourself, my friend,' said I, laying my hand on his shoulder, 'you are unmanned.'" A similar emotion would probably be caused by any one so old-fashioned as to protest that any conceivable topic was ill-adapted for discussion in general society.An extreme decorum of phrase accompanied this salutary restriction of topics. To a boisterous youth who, just setting out for a choral festival in a country church, said that he always thought a musical service very jolly, an old Whig lady said in a tone of dignified amendment, "I trust, dear Mr. F——, that we shall derive not only pleasure but profit from the solemnity of this afternoon."Closely related to the love of Publicity and the decay of Reticence is the change in the position of women. This is really a revolution, and it has so impartially pervaded all departments of lifethat one may plunge anywhere into the subject and find the same phenomenon.Fifty years ago the view that "comparisons don't become a young woman" still held the field, and, indeed, might have been much more widely extended. Nothing "became a young woman," which involved clear thinking or plain speaking or independent acting. Mrs. General and Mrs. Grundy were still powers in the land. "Prunes and Prism" were fair burlesques of actual shibboleths. "Fanny," said Mrs. General, "at present forms too many opinions. Perfect breeding forms none, and is never demonstrative." This was hardly a parody of the prevailing and accepted doctrine. To-day it would be difficult to find a subject on which contemporary Fannies do not form opinions, and express them with intense vigour, and translate them into corresponding action.Fifty years ago a hunting woman was a rarity, even though Englishwomen had been horsewomen from time immemorial. Lady Arabella Vane's performances were still remembered in the neighbourhood of Darlington, and Lady William Powlett's "scyarlet" habit was a tradition at Cottesmore. Mrs. Jack Villiers is the only horsewoman in the famous picture of the Quorn, and she suitably gave her name to the best covert in the Vale of Aylesbury. But now the hunting woman and the hunting girl pervade the land, cross their male friends at their fences, and ride over themwhen they lie submerged in ditches, with an airy cheerfulness which wins all hearts. In brief, it may be said that, in respect of outdoor exercises, whatever men and boys do women and girls do. They drive four-in-hand and tandem, they manipulate Motors, they skate and cycle, and fence and swim. A young lady lately showed me a snapshot of herself learning to take a header. A male instructor, classically draped, stood on the bank, and she kindly explained that "the head in the water was the man we were staying with." Lawn-tennis and croquet are regarded as the amusements of the mild and the middle-aged; the ardour of girlhood requires hockey and golf. I am not sure whether girls have taken to Rugby football, but only last summer I saw a girl's cricket eleven dispose most satisfactorily of a boy's team.I can well remember the time when a man, if perchance he met a lady while he was smoking in some rather unfrequented street, flung his cigar away and rather tried to look as if he had not been doing it. Yet so far have we travelled that not long ago, at a hospitable house not a hundred miles from Berkeley Square, the hostess and her daughter were the only smokers in a large luncheon-party, and prefaced their cigarettes by the courteous condition, "If you gentlemen don't mind."Then, again, the political woman is a product of these latter days. In old times a woman served her husband's political party by keeping asalon,giving dinners to the bigwigs, and "routs" to the rank and file. I do not forget the heroic electioneering of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, but her example was not widely followed. On great occasions ladies sate in secluded galleries at public meetings, and encouraged the halting rhetoric of sons or husbands by waving pocket-handkerchiefs. If a triumphant return was to be celebrated, the ladies of the hero's family might gaze from above on the congratulatory banquet, like the house-party at Lothair's coming of age, to whom the "three times three and one cheer more" seemed like a "great naval battle, or the end of the world, or anything else of unimaginable excitement, tumult, and confusion."When it was reported that a celebrated lady of the present day complained of the stuffiness and gloom of the Ladies' Gallery in the House of Commons, Mr. Gladstone—that stiffest of social conservatives—exclaimed, "Mrs. W——, forsooth! I have known much greater ladies than Mrs. W—— quite content to look down through the ventilator."

PUBLICITYV.RETICENCE

The great people of old time followed (quite unconsciously) the philosopher who bade man "hide his life." Of course, the stage of politics was always a pillory, and he who ventured to stand on it made up his mind to encounter a vast variety of popular missiles. "In my situation as Chancellor of the University of Oxford," said the Duke of Wellington, "I have been much exposed to authors;" and men whom choice or circumstances forced into politics were exposed to worse annoyances than "authors." But the line was rigidly drawn between public and private life. What went on in the home was sacredly secreted from the public gaze. People lived among their relations and friends and political associates, and kept the gaping world at a distance. Now we worship Publicity as the chief enjoyment of human life. We send lists of our shooting-parties to "Society Journals." We welcome the Interviewer. We contribute personal paragraphs toClassy Cuttings. We admit the photographer to our bedrooms, and give our portraits to illustrated papers. We take our exercise when we have the bestchance of being seen and noticed, and we never eat our dinner with such keen appetites as amid the half-world of a Piccadilly restaurant. In brief, "Expose thy life" is the motto of the new philosophy, and I maintain that in this respect, at any rate, the old was better.

With an increasing love of publicity has come an increasing contempt for reticence. In old days there were certain subjects which no one mentioned; among them were Health and Money. I presume that people had pretty much the same complaints as now, but no one talked about them. We used to be told of a lady who died in agony because she insisted on telling the doctor that the pain was in her chest whereas it really was in the unmentionable organ of digestion. That martyr to propriety has no imitators in the present day. Every one has a disease and a doctor; and young people of both sexes are ready on the slightest acquaintance to describe symptoms and compare experiences. "Ice!" exclaimed a pretty girl at dessert, "good gracious, no! so bad for indy"—and her companion, who had not travelled with the times, learned with amazement that "indy" was the pet name for indigestion. "How bitterly cold!" said a plump matron at an open-air luncheon; "just the thing to give one appendicitis." "Oh!" said her neighbour, surveying the company, "we are quite safe there. I shouldn't think we had an appendix between us."

Then, again, as to money. In the "SacredCircle of the Great-Grandmotherhood" I never heard the slightest reference to income. Not that the Whigs despised money. They were at least as fond of it as other people, and, even when it took the shape of slum-rents, its odour was not displeasing. But it was not a subject for conversation. People did not chatter about their neighbours' incomes; and, if they made their own money in trades or professions, they did not regale us with statistics of profit and loss. To-day every one seems to be, if I may use the favourite colloquialism, "on the make"; and the sincerity of the devotion with which people worship money pervades their whole conversation and colours their whole view of life. "Scions of aristocracy," to use the good old phrase of Pennialinus, will produce samples of tea or floor-cloth from their pockets, and sue quite winningly for custom. A speculative bottle of extraordinarily cheap peach-brandy will arrive with the compliments of Lord Tom Noddy, who has just gone into the wine trade, and Lord Magnus Charters will tell you that, if you are going to put in the electric light, his firm has got some really good fittings which he can let you have on specially easy terms.

But, if in old days Health and Money were subjects eschewed in polite conversation, even more rigid was the avoidance of "risky" topics. To-day no scandal is too gross, no gossip too prurient. Respectable mothers chatter quite freely about that "nest of spicery" over which Sir GorellBarnes presides, and canvass abominations with a self-possession worthy of Gibbon or Zola. In fact, as regards our topics of conversation, we seem to have reached the condition in which the Paris correspondent of theDaily Telegraphfound himself when Mr. Matthew Arnold (in "Friendship's Garland") spoke to him of Delicacy. "He seemed inexplicably struck by this worddelicacy, which he kept repeating to himself. 'Delicacy,' said he; 'delicacy, surely I have heard that word before! Yes, in other days,' he went on dreamily, 'in my fresh enthusiastic youth, before I knew Sala, before I wrote for that infernal paper——.' 'Collect yourself, my friend,' said I, laying my hand on his shoulder, 'you are unmanned.'" A similar emotion would probably be caused by any one so old-fashioned as to protest that any conceivable topic was ill-adapted for discussion in general society.

An extreme decorum of phrase accompanied this salutary restriction of topics. To a boisterous youth who, just setting out for a choral festival in a country church, said that he always thought a musical service very jolly, an old Whig lady said in a tone of dignified amendment, "I trust, dear Mr. F——, that we shall derive not only pleasure but profit from the solemnity of this afternoon."

Closely related to the love of Publicity and the decay of Reticence is the change in the position of women. This is really a revolution, and it has so impartially pervaded all departments of lifethat one may plunge anywhere into the subject and find the same phenomenon.

Fifty years ago the view that "comparisons don't become a young woman" still held the field, and, indeed, might have been much more widely extended. Nothing "became a young woman," which involved clear thinking or plain speaking or independent acting. Mrs. General and Mrs. Grundy were still powers in the land. "Prunes and Prism" were fair burlesques of actual shibboleths. "Fanny," said Mrs. General, "at present forms too many opinions. Perfect breeding forms none, and is never demonstrative." This was hardly a parody of the prevailing and accepted doctrine. To-day it would be difficult to find a subject on which contemporary Fannies do not form opinions, and express them with intense vigour, and translate them into corresponding action.

Fifty years ago a hunting woman was a rarity, even though Englishwomen had been horsewomen from time immemorial. Lady Arabella Vane's performances were still remembered in the neighbourhood of Darlington, and Lady William Powlett's "scyarlet" habit was a tradition at Cottesmore. Mrs. Jack Villiers is the only horsewoman in the famous picture of the Quorn, and she suitably gave her name to the best covert in the Vale of Aylesbury. But now the hunting woman and the hunting girl pervade the land, cross their male friends at their fences, and ride over themwhen they lie submerged in ditches, with an airy cheerfulness which wins all hearts. In brief, it may be said that, in respect of outdoor exercises, whatever men and boys do women and girls do. They drive four-in-hand and tandem, they manipulate Motors, they skate and cycle, and fence and swim. A young lady lately showed me a snapshot of herself learning to take a header. A male instructor, classically draped, stood on the bank, and she kindly explained that "the head in the water was the man we were staying with." Lawn-tennis and croquet are regarded as the amusements of the mild and the middle-aged; the ardour of girlhood requires hockey and golf. I am not sure whether girls have taken to Rugby football, but only last summer I saw a girl's cricket eleven dispose most satisfactorily of a boy's team.

I can well remember the time when a man, if perchance he met a lady while he was smoking in some rather unfrequented street, flung his cigar away and rather tried to look as if he had not been doing it. Yet so far have we travelled that not long ago, at a hospitable house not a hundred miles from Berkeley Square, the hostess and her daughter were the only smokers in a large luncheon-party, and prefaced their cigarettes by the courteous condition, "If you gentlemen don't mind."

Then, again, the political woman is a product of these latter days. In old times a woman served her husband's political party by keeping asalon,giving dinners to the bigwigs, and "routs" to the rank and file. I do not forget the heroic electioneering of Georgiana, Duchess of Devonshire, but her example was not widely followed. On great occasions ladies sate in secluded galleries at public meetings, and encouraged the halting rhetoric of sons or husbands by waving pocket-handkerchiefs. If a triumphant return was to be celebrated, the ladies of the hero's family might gaze from above on the congratulatory banquet, like the house-party at Lothair's coming of age, to whom the "three times three and one cheer more" seemed like a "great naval battle, or the end of the world, or anything else of unimaginable excitement, tumult, and confusion."

When it was reported that a celebrated lady of the present day complained of the stuffiness and gloom of the Ladies' Gallery in the House of Commons, Mr. Gladstone—that stiffest of social conservatives—exclaimed, "Mrs. W——, forsooth! I have known much greater ladies than Mrs. W—— quite content to look down through the ventilator."

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