XLV

XLVTOWNV.COUNTRYI said at the outset that I am a Whigpur sang; and the historic Whigs were very worthy people. A first-rate specimen of the race was that Duke of Bedford whom Junius lampooned, and whom his great-grandson, Lord John Russell, championed in an interesting contrast. "The want of practical religion and morals which Lord Chesterfield held up to imitation, conducted the French nobility to the guillotine and emigration: the honesty, the attachment to religion, the country habits, the love of home, the activity in rural business and rural sports, in which the Duke of Bedford and others of his class delighted, preserved the English aristocracy from a flood which swept over half of Europe, laying prostrate the highest of her palaces, and scattering the ashes of the most sacred of her monuments."This quotation forms a suitable introduction to the social change which is the subject of the present chapter. In old days, people who had country houses lived in them. It was the magnificent misfortune of the Duke in "Lothair" to have so many castles that he had no home. In thosedays the tradition of Duty required people who had several country houses to spend some time in each of them; and those who had only one passed nine months out of twelve under its sacred roof—sacred because it was inseparably connected with memories of ancestry and parentage and early association, with marriage and children, and pure enjoyments and active benevolence and neighbourly goodwill. In a word, the country house was Home.People who had no country house were honestly pitied; perhaps they were also a little despised. The most gorgeous mansion in Cromwell Road or Tyburnia could never for a moment be quoted as supplying the place of the Hall or the Manor.For people who had a country house the interests of life were very much bound up in the park and the covers, the croquet-ground and the cricket-ground, the kennel, the stable, and the garden. I remember, when I was an undergraduate, lionizing some Yorkshire damsels on their first visit to Oxford, then in the "high midsummer pomp" of its beauty. But all they said was, in the pensive tone of an unwilling exile, "How beautifully the sun must be shining on the South Walk at home!"The village church was a great centre of domestic affection. All the family had been christened in it. The eldest sister had been married in it. Generations of ancestry mouldered under the chancel floor. Christmas decorations were anoccasion of much innocent merriment, and a little ditty high in favour in Tractarian homes warned the decorators to be—"Unselfish—looking not to seeProofs of their own dexterity;But quite contented that 'I' shouldForgotten be in brotherhood."Of course, whether Tractarian or Evangelical, religious people regarded church-going as a spiritual privilege; but every one recognized it as a civil duty. "When a gentleman issur ses terres," said Major Pendennis, "he must give an example to the country people; and, if I could turn a tune, I even think I should sing. The Duke of St. David's, whom I have the honour of knowing, always sings in the country, and let me tell you it has a doosed fine effect from the family pew." Before the passion for "restoration" had set in, and ere yet Sir Gilbert Scott had transmogrified the parish churches of England, the family pew was indeed the ark and sanctuary of the territorial system—and a very comfortable ark too. It had a private entrance, a round table, a good assortment of arm-chairs, a fireplace, and a wood-basket. And I well remember a washleather glove of unusual size which was kept in the wood-basket for the greater convenience of making up the fire during divine service. "You may restore the church as much as you like," said an old friend of my youth, who was lay-rector, to an innovating incumbent, "but I must insist on myfamily pew not being touched. If I had to sit in an open seat, I should never get a wink of sleep again."A country home left its mark for all time on those who were brought up in it. The sons played cricket and went bat-fowling with the village boys, and not seldom joined with them in a poaching enterprise in the paternal preserves. However popular or successful or happy a Public-School boy might be at Eton or Harrow, he counted the days till he could return to his pony and his gun, his ferrets and rat-trap and fishing-rod. Amid all the toil and worry of active life, he looked back lovingly to the corner of the cover where he shot his first pheasant, or the precise spot in the middle of the Vale where he first saw a fox killed, and underwent the disgusting baptism of blood.Girls, living more continuously at home, entered even more intimately into the daily life of the place. Their morning rides led them across the village green; their afternoon drives were often steered by the claims of this or that cottage to a visit. They were taught as soon as they could toddle never to enter a door without knocking, never to sit down without being asked, and never to call at meal-time.They knew every one in the village—old and young; played with the babies, taught the boys in Sunday School, carried savoury messes to the old and impotent, read by the sick-beds, andbrought flowers for the coffin. Mamma knitted comforters and dispensed warm clothing, organized relief in hard winters and times of epidemic, and found places for the hobbledehoys of both sexes. The pony-boy and the scullery-maid were pretty sure to be products of the village. Very likely the young-ladies-maid was a village girl whom the doctor had pronounced too delicate for factory or farm. I have seen an excited young groom staring his eyes out of his head at the Eton and Harrow match, and exclaiming with rapture at a good catch, "It was my young governor as 'scouted' that. 'E's nimble, ain't 'e?" And I well remember an ancient stable-helper at a country house in Buckinghamshire who was called "Old Bucks," because he had never slept out of his native county, and very rarely out of his native village, and had spent his whole life in the service of one family.Of course, when so much of the impressionable part of life was lived amid the "sweet, sincere surroundings of country life," there grew up, between the family at the Hall and the families in the village, a feeling which, in spite of our national unsentimentality, had a chivalrous and almost feudal tone. The interest of the poor in the life and doings of "The Family" was keen and genuine. The English peasant is too much a gentleman to be a flatterer, and compliments were often bestowed in very unexpected forms. "They do tell me as 'is understanding's no worsethan it always were," was a ploughman's way of saying that the old squire was in full possession of his faculties. "We call 'im ''Is Lordship,' because 'e's so old and so cunning," was another's description of a famous pony. "Ah, I know you're but a poor creature at the best!" was the recognized way of complimenting a lady on what she considered her bewitching and romantic delicacy.But these eccentricities were merely verbal, and under them lay a deep vein of genuine and lasting regard. "I've lived under four dukes and four 'ousekeepers, and I'm not going to be put upon in my old age!" was the exclamation of an ancient poultry-woman, whose dignity had been offended by some irregularity touching her Christmas dinner. When the daughter of the house married and went into a far country, she was sure to find some emigrant from her old home who welcomed her with effusion, and was full of enquiries about his lordship and her ladyship, and Miss Pinkerton the governess, and whether Mr. Wheeler was still coachman, and who lived now at the entrance-lodge. Whether the sons got commissions, or took ranches, or become curates in slums, or contested remote constituencies, some grinning face was sure to emerge from the crowd with, "You know me, sir? Bill Juffs, as used to go bird's-nesting with you;" or, "You remember my old dad, my lord? He used to shoe your black pony."When the eldest son came of age, his condescension in taking this step was hailed with genuine enthusiasm. When he came into his kingdom, there might be some grumbling if he went in for small economies, or altered old practices, or was a "hard man" on the Bench or at the Board of Guardians; but, if he went on in the good-natured old ways, the traditional loyalty was unabated.Lord Shaftesbury wrote thus about the birth of his eldest son's eldest son: "My little village is all agog with the birth of a son and heir in the very midst of them, the first, it is believed, since 1600, when the first Lord Shaftesbury was born. The christening yesterday was an ovation. Every cottage had flags and flowers. We had three triumphal arches; and all the people were exulting. 'He is one of us.' 'He is a fellow-villager.' 'We have now got a lord of our own.' This is really gratifying. I did not think that there remained so much of the old respect and affection between peasant and proprietor, landlord and tenant."Whether the kind of relation thus described has utterly perished I do not know; but certainly it has very greatly diminished, and the cause of the diminution is that people live less and less in their country houses, and more and more in London. For those who are compelled by odious necessity to sell or let their hereditary homes one has nothing but compassion; in itself a severe trial, it is madestill sharper to well-conditioned people by the sense that the change is at least as painful to the poor as to themselves. But for those who, having both a country and a London house, deliberately concentrate themselves on the town, forsake the country, and abjure the duties which are inseparable from their birthright, one can only feel Charles Lamb's "imperfect sympathy." The causes which induce this dereliction and its results on society and on the country may be discussed in another chapter.XLVIHOMEI was speaking just now of the growing tendency to desert the country in favour of London. I said that it was difficult to feel sympathy with people who voluntarily abandon Home, and all the duties and pleasures which Home implies, in favour of Lennox Gardens or Portman Square; but that one felt a lively compassion for those who make the exchange under the pressure of—"Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear."Here, again, is another social change. In old days, when people wished to economize, it was London that they deserted. They sold the "family mansion" in Portland Place or Eaton Square; and, if they revisited the glimpses of the social moon, they took a furnished house for six weeks in the summer: the rest of the year they spent in the country. This plan was a manifold saving. There was no rent to pay, and only very small rates, for every one knows that country houses were shamefully under-assessed. Carriages did not require repainting every season, and no new clothes were wanted. "What can it matter whatwe wear here, where every one knows who we are?" The products of the park, the home farm, the hothouses, and the kitchen-garden kept the family supplied with food. A brother magnate staying at Beaudesert with the famous Lord Anglesey waxed enthusiastic over the mutton, and said, "Excuse my asking you a plain question, but how much does this excellent mutton cost you?" "Cost me?" screamed the hero. "Good Gad, it costs me nothing! It's my own," and he was beyond measure astonished when his statistical guest proved that "his own" cost him about a guinea per pound. In another great house, conducted on strictly economical lines, it was said that the very numerous family were reared exclusively on rabbits and garden-stuff, and that their enfeebled constitutions and dismal appearance in later life were due to this ascetic regimen.People were always hospitable in the country, but rural entertaining was not a very costly business. The "three square meals and a snack," which represent the minimum requirement of the present day, are a huge development of the system which prevailed in my youth. Breakfast had already grown from the tea and coffee, and rolls and eggs, which Macaulay tells us were deemed sufficient at Holland House, to an affair of covered dishes. Luncheon-parties were sometimes given—terrible ceremonies which lasted from two to four; but the ordinary luncheon of the familywas really a snack from the servants' joint or the children's rice-pudding; and five o'clock tea was actually not invented. To remember, as I do, the foundress of that divine refreshment seems like having known Stephenson or Jenner.Dinner was substantial enough in all conscience, and the wine nearly as heavy as the food. Imagine quenching one's thirst with sherry in the dog days! Yet so we did, till about half-way through dinner, and then, on great occasions, a dark-coloured rill of champagne began to trickle into the saucer-shaped glasses. At the epoch of cheese, port made its appearance in company with home-brewed beer; and, as soon as the ladies and the schoolboys departed, the men applied themselves, with much seriousness of purpose, to the consumption of claret which was really vinous.In this kind of hospitality there was no great expense. People made very little difference between their way of living when they were alone and their way of living when they had company. A visitor who wished to make himself agreeable sometimes brought down a basket of fish or a barrel of oysters from London; and, if one had no deer of one's own, the arrival of a haunch from a neighbour's or kinsman's park was the signal for a gathering of local gastronomers.And in matters other than meals life went on very much the same whether you had friends staying with you or whether you were alone.Your guests drove and rode, and walked and shot, according to their tastes and the season of the year. They were carried off, more or less willingly, to see the sights of the neighbourhood—ruined castles, restored cathedrals, famous views. In summer there might be a picnic or a croquet-party; in winter a lawn-meet or a ball. But all these entertainments were of the most homely and inexpensive character. There was very little outlay, no fuss, and no display. People, who were compelled by stress of financial weather to put into their country houses and remain there till the storm was over, contrived to economize and yet be comfortable. They simply lived their ordinary lives until things righted themselves, and very likely did not attempt London again until they were bringing out another daughter, or had to make a home for a son in the Guards.But now an entirely different spirit prevails. People seem to have lost the power of living quietly and happily in their country homes. They all have imbibed the urban philosophy of George Warrington, who, when Pen gushed about the country with its "long calm days, and long calm evenings," brutally replied, "Devilish long, and a great deal too calm. I've tried 'em." People of that type desert the country simply because they are bored by it. They feel with Mr. Luke in "The New Republic," who, after talking about "liberal air," "sedged brooks," and "meadow grass," admitted that it would be a horrid boreto have no other society than the clergyman of the parish, and no other topics of conversation than Justification by Faith and the measles. They do not care for the country in itself; they have no eye for its beauty, no sense of its atmosphere, no memory for its traditions. It is only made endurable to them by sport and gambling and boisterous house-parties; and, when from one cause or another these resources fail, they are frankly bored and long for London. They are no longer content, as our fathers were, to entertain their friends with hospitable simplicity. So profoundly has all society been vulgarized by the worship of the Golden Calf that, unless people can vie with alien millionaires in the sumptuousness with which they "do you"—delightful phrase,—they prefer not to entertain at all. An emulous ostentation has killed hospitality.So now, when a season of financial pressure sets in, people shut up their country houses, let their shooting, cut themselves off with a sigh of relief from all the unexciting duties and simple pleasures of the Home, and take refuge from boredom in the delights of London. In London life has no duties. Little is expected of one, and nothing required. One can live on a larger or a smaller scale according to one's taste or one's purse; cramp oneself in a doll's house in Mayfair, or expand one's wings in a Kensingtonian mansion; or even contract oneself intoa flat, or hide one's diminished head in the upper storey of a shop. One can entertain or not entertain, spend much or spend little, live on one's friends or be lived on by them, exactly as one finds most convenient: and unquestionably social freedom is a great element in human happiness.For many natures London has an attractiveness which is all its own, and yet to indulge one's taste for it may be a grave dereliction of duty. The State is built upon the Home; and, as a training-place for social virtue, there can surely be no comparison between a home in the country and a home in London."Home! Sweet Home!" Yes. (I am quoting now from my friend, Henry Scott Holland.) That is the song that goes straight to the heart of every English man and woman. For forty years we have never asked Madame Adelina Patti to sing anything else. The unhappy, decadent, Latin races have not even a word in their languages by which to express it, poor things! Home is the secret of our honest British Protestant virtues. It is the only nursery of our Anglo-Saxon citizenship. Back to it our far-flung children turn with all their memories aflame. They may lapse into rough ways, but they keep something sound at the core so long as they are faithful to the old Home. There is still a tenderness in the voice, and tears are in their eyes, as they speak together of the days that can never die out of their lives, when they were athome in the old familiar places, with father and mother in the healthy gladness of their childhood. Ah!"Home! Sweet Home!There's no place like Home."That is what we all repeat, and all believe, and cheer to the echo. And, behind all our British complacency about it, nobody would deny the vital truth that there is in this belief of ours. Whatever tends to make the Home beautiful, attractive, romantic—to associate it with the ideas of pure pleasure and high duty—to connect it not only with all that was happiest but also with all that was best in early years—whatever fulfils these purposes purifies the fountains of national life. A home, to be perfectly a home, should "incorporate tradition, and prolong the reign of the dead." It should animate those who dwell in it to virtue and beneficence by reminding them of what others did, who went before them in the same place and lived amid the same surroundings.XLVIIHOSPITALITYIn my last chapter I was deploring the modern tendency of society to desert the country and cultivate London. And the reason why I deplore it is that all the educating influences of the Home are so infinitely weaker in the town than in the country. In a London home there is nothing to fascinate the eye. The contemplation of the mews and the chimney-pots through the back windows of the nursery will not elevate even the most impressible child. There is no mystery, no dreamland, no Enchanted Palace, no Bluebeard's Chamber, in a stucco mansion built by Cubitt or a palace of terracotta on the Cadogan estate. There can be no traditions of the past, no inspiring memories of virtuous ancestry, in a house which your father bought five years ago and of which the previous owners are not known to you even by name. "The Square" or "the Gardens" are sorry substitutes for the Park and the Pleasure-grounds, the Common and the Downs. Crossing-sweepers are a deserving folk, but you cannot cultivate those intimate relations with them which bind you to the lodge-keeper at home, or to the old women in the almshouses, or the octogenarianwaggoner who has driven your father's team ever since he was ten years old. St. Peter's, Eaton Square, or All Saints, Margaret Street, may be beautifully ornate, and the congregation what Lord Beaconsfield called "brisk and modish"; but they can never have the romantic charm of the country church where you were confirmed side by side with the keeper's son, or proposed to the vicar's daughter when you were wreathing holly round the lectern.Then, again, as regards social relations with friends and neighbours. "An emulous ostentation has destroyed hospitality." This I believe is absolutely true, and it is one of the worst changes which I have seen. I have already spoken of hospitality as practised in the country. Now I will say a word about hospitality in London.Of course rich people always gave banquets from time to time, and these were occasions when, in Lord Beaconsfield's drolly vulgar phrase, "the dinner was stately, as befits the high nobility." They were ceremonious observances, conducted on the constitutional principle of "cutlet for cutlet," and must always have been regarded by all concerned in them, whether as hosts or guests, in the light of duty rather than of pleasure. Twenty people woke that morning with the impression that something was to be gone through before bedtime, which they would be glad enough to escape. Each of the twenty went to bed that night more or less weary and ruffled, but sustainedby the sense that a social duty had been performed. Banquets, however, at the worst were only periodical events. Real hospitality was constant and informal."Come and dine to-night. Eight o'clock. Pot luck. Don't dress.""My dear, I am going to bring back two or three men from the House. Don't put off dinner in case we are kept by a division.""I am afraid I must be going back. I am only paired till eleven. Good-night, and so many thanks.""Good-night; you will always find some dinner here on Government nights. Do look in again!"These are the cheerful echoes of parliamentary homes in the older and better days of unostentatious entertaining, and those "pot luck" dinners often played an important part in political manœuvre. Sir George Trevelyan, whose early manhood was passed in the thick of parliamentary society, tells us, in a footnote to "The Ladies in Parliament," that in the season of 1866 there was much gossip over the fact of Lord Russell having entertained Mr. Bright at dinner, and that people were constantly—"Discussing whether Bright can scan and understand the linesAbout the Wooden Horse of Troy; and when and where he dines.Though gentlemen should blush to talk as if they cared a buttonBecause one night in Chesham Place he ate his slice of mutton."Quite apart from parliamentary strategy, impromptu entertaining in what was called "a friendly way" had its special uses in the social system. There is a delicious passage in "Lothair" describing that hero's initiation into an easier and more graceful society than that in which he had been reared: "He had been a guest at the occasional banquets of his uncle, but these were festivals of the Picts and Scots; rude plenty and coarse splendour, with noise instead of conversation, and a tumult of obstructive dependants, who impeded by their want of skill the very convenience which they were purposed to facilitate." An amazing sentence indeed, but like all Lord Beaconsfield's writings, picturesquely descriptive, and happily contrasted with the succeeding scene: "A table covered with flowers, bright with fanciful crystal, and porcelain that had belonged to Sovereigns who had given a name to its colour or its form. As for those present, all seemed grace and gentleness, from the radiant daughters of the house to the noiseless attendants who anticipated all his wants, and sometimes seemed to suggest his wishes."The mention of "Lothair" reminds people of my date that thirty years ago we knew a house justly famed for the excellent marriages which the daughters made. There banquets were unknown, and even dinners by invitation very rare. The father used to collect young men from Lord's, or the Lobby, or the Club, or whereverhe had been spending the afternoon. Servants were soon dismissed—"It is such a bore to have them staring at one"—and the daughters of the house waited on the guests. Here obviously were matrimonial openings not to be despised; and, even in families where there were no ulterior objects to be served, these free-and-easy entertainings went on from February to July. Short invitations, pleasant company, and genuine friendliness were the characteristics of these gatherings. Very often the dinner was carved on the table. One could ask for a second slice or another wing without feeling greedy, and the claret and amontillado were within the reach of every guest. This, I consider, was genuine hospitality, for it was natural, easy, and unostentatious.But now, according to all accounts, the spirit of entertaining is utterly changed. A dinner is not so much an opportunity of pleasing your friends as of airing your own magnificence; and ostentation, despicable in itself, is doubly odious because it is emulous. If A has a good cook, B must have a better. If C gave you ortolans stuffed with truffles, D must have truffles stuffed with ortolans. If the E's table is piled with strawberries in April, the F's must retaliate with orchids at a guinea a blossom. G is a little inclined to swagger about his wife's pearl necklace, and H is bound in honour to decorate Mrs. H with arivièrewhich belonged to the crown jewels of France.And, as with the food and the decorations, soalso with the company. Here, again, Emulous Ostentation carries all before it. Mr. Goldbug is a Yahoo, but he made his millions in South Africa and spends them in Park Lane. Lord Heath is the most abandoned bore in Christendom, but he is an authority at Newmarket. Lady Bellair has had a notoriously chequered career, but she plays bridge in exalted circles. As Lord Crewe sings of a similar enchantress—"From reflections we shrink;And of comment are chary;But her face issopink,And it don't seem to vary."However, she is unquestionably smart; and Goldbug is a useful man to know; and we are not going to be outdone by the Cashingtons, who got Heath to dine with them twice last year. So we invite our guests, not because we like them or admire them, for that in these cases is impossible; not—heaven knows—because they are beautiful or famous or witty; but because they are the right people to have in one's house, and we will have the right people or perish in the attempt.XLVIIIOSTENTATIONIt is many a long year since I saw the inside of a ballroom, but by all accounts very much the same change has come over the spirit of ball-giving as of dinner-giving. Here again the "Emulous Ostentation" which I have described is the enemy. When I first grew up, there were infinitely more balls than now. From Easter till August there were at least two every night, and a hostess counted herself lucky if she had only one rival to contend with. Between 11p.m.and 2a.m.Grosvenor Place was blocked by the opposing streams of carriages going from Mayfair to Belgravia, and from Belgravia to Mayfair. There were three or four really great Houses—"Houses" with a capital H—such as Grosvenor House, Stafford House, Dudley House, and Montagu House—where a ball could scarcely help being an event—or, as Pennialinus would say, "a function." But, putting these on one side, the great mass of hostesses contrived to give excellent balls, where every one went and every one enjoyed themselves, with very little fuss and no ostentation. The drawing-room of an ordinary house in Belgraviaor Grosvenor Square made a perfectly sufficient ballroom. A good floor, a good band, and plenty of light, were the only essentials of success. Decoration was represented by such quaint devices as pink muslin on the banisters, or green festoons dependent from the chandelier. A good supper was an additional merit; and, if the host produced his best champagne, he was held in just esteem by dancing men. But yet I well remember a cold supper at a ball which the present King and Queen attended, in 1881, and no one grumbled, though perhaps the young bloods thought it a little old-fashioned. The essence of a good ball was not expense or display or overwhelming preparation, but the certainty that you would meet your friends. Boys and girls danced, and married women looked on, or only stole a waltz when their juniors were at supper. In those days a ball was really a merry-making.Nowadays I gather from theMorning Postthat balls are comparatively rare events, but what they lack in frequency they make up in ostentation. As to the sums which the Heits and the Heims, the Le Beers and the De Porters, lavish on one night's entertainment I hear statistical accounts which not only outrage economy but stagger credibility. Here again the rushing flood of ill-gotten gold has overflowed its banks, and polluted the "crystal river of unreproved enjoyment."There is yet another form of entertainmentwhich Emulous Ostentation has destroyed. A few years ago there still were women in London who could hold a "salon." Of these gatherings the principal attraction was the hostess, and, in a secondary degree, the agreeableness of the people whom she could gather round her. Of fuss and finery, decoration and display, there was absolutely nothing. A typical instance of what I mean will perhaps recur to the memory of some who read this chapter. Picture to yourself two not very large and rather dingy rooms. The furniture is dark and old-fashioned—mahogany and rosewood, with here and there a good cabinet or a French armchair. No prettiness of lace and china; no flowers; and not very much light. Books everywhere, some good engravings, a comfortable sofa, and a tray of tea and coffee. That was all. It is difficult to conceive a less ostentatious or a more economical mode of entertaining; yet the lady who presided over that "salon" had been for fifty years one of the most celebrated women in Europe; had been embraced by Napoleon; had flirted with the Allied Sovereigns; had been described by Byron; had discussed scholarship with Grote, and statecraft with Metternich; had sate to Lawrence, and caballed with Antonelli. Even in old age and decrepitude she opened her rooms to her friends every evening in the year, and never, even in the depths of September, found her court deserted. Certainly it was a social triumph, and one hasonly to compare it with the scene in the stockbroker's saloon—the blaze of electric light, the jungle of flowers, the furniture from Sinclair's, the pictures from Christie's—and to contrast the assembled guests. Instead of celebrities, notorieties—woman at once under-dressed and over-dressed; men with cent. per cent. written deep in every line of their expressive countenances; and, at the centre of the throng, a hostess in a diamond crown, who conducts her correspondence by telegraph, because her spelling is a little shaky and mistakes in telegrams are charitably attributed to the clerks.One of the worst properties of Emulous Ostentation is that it naturally affects its victims with an insatiable thirst for money. If Mrs. Tymmyns in Onslow Gardens is to have as good a dinner, and as smart a victoria, and as large a tiara, as her friend Mrs. Goldbug in Park Lane, it is obvious that Mr. Tymmyns must find the money somehow. Who wills the end wills the means; and, if social exigencies demand a larger outlay, the Tymmynses cannot afford to be too scrupulous about their method of providing for it. I suppose it is this consideration which makes us just now a nation of gamblers, whereas our more respectable but less adventurous fathers were well content to be a nation of shopkeepers.Of course, in all ages there has been a gambling clique in society; but in old days it kept itself, as the saying is, to itself. Of necessity it alwayswas on the look-out for neophytes to initiate and to pillage, but the non-gambling majority of society regarded the gambling minority with horror; and a man who palpably meant to make money out of a visit to a country house would probably have been requested to withdraw. "Order a fly for Mr. L. at eleven o'clock," said old Lord Crewe to the butler when a guest had committed a social atrocity under his roof. "Thank you, Lord Crewe," said Mr. L., "but not for me. I am not going to-day." "Oh yes, you are," responded the host, and secreted himself in his private apartments till the offender had been duly extruded. Similar justice would, I think, have been dealt out to a gambler who rooked the young and the inexperienced. Not so to-day; the pigeon, however unfledged and tender, is the appointed prey of the rook, and the venerable bird who does the plucking is entirely undeterred by any considerations of pity, shame, or fear. "Is he any good?" is a question which circulates round the Board of Green Cloth whenever a new face fresh from Oxford or Sandhurst is noted in the social throng. "Oh yes, he's all right; I know his people," may be the cheerful response; or else, in a very different note, "No, he hasn't got a feather to fly with." Fortunate is the youth on whom this disparaging verdict is pronounced, for in that case he may escape the benevolent attentions of the"Many-wintered crowThat leads the gambling rookery home."But even impecuniosity does not always protect the inexperienced. A lady who had lived for some years in the country returned to London not long ago, and, enumerating the social changes which she had observed, she said, "People seem to marry on £500 a year and yet have diamond tiaras." It was, perhaps, a too hasty generalization, but an instance in point immediately recurred to my recollection. A young couple had married with no other means of subsistence than smartness, good looks, and pleasant manners. After a prolonged tour round the country houses of their innumerable friends, they settled down at Woolwich. "Why Woolwich?" was the natural enquiry; and the reason, when at length it came to light, was highly characteristic of the age. It appeared that these kind young people used to give nice little evening parties, invite the "Gentlemen Cadets" from Woolwich Academy, and make them play cards for money. The device of setting up housekeeping on the pocket-money of babes and sucklings is thoroughly symptomatic of our decadence. Emulous Ostentation makes every one want more money than he has, and at the same time drugs all scruples of conscience as to the method of obtaining it.XLIXPRINCIPLE AND PREJUDICEMr. J. A. Froude once told me that he did not in the least mind the accusation which was brought against him (certainly not without reason) of being prejudiced. "A good stiff prejudice," he said, "is a very useful thing. It is like a rusty weathercock. It will yield to a strong and long-continued blast of conviction, but it does not veer round and round in compliance with every shifting current of opinion."What Mr. Froude expressed other people felt, though perhaps they would not have cared to avow it so honestly.One of the most notable changes which I have seen is the decay of prejudice. In old days people felt strongly and spoke strongly, and acted as they spoke. In every controversy they were absolutely certain that they were right and that the other side was wrong, and they did not mince their words when they expressed their opinions.The first Lord Leicester of the present creation (1775-1844) told my father (1807-1894) that, when he was a boy, his grandfather had taken him on his knee and said, "Now, my dear Tom, whateverelse you do in life, mind you never trust a Tory;" and Lord Leicester added, "I never have, and, by George, I never will." On the other hand, when Dr. Longley, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, did homage on his appointment to the see of Ripon, King William IV. said, "Bishop of Ripon, I charge you, as you shall answer before Almighty God, that you never by word or deed give encouragement to those d—— d Whigs, who would upset the Church of England."John Keble, the gentle saint of the Tractarian movement, when he saw the Whigs preparing to attack the property of the Church, proclaimed that the time had come when "scoundrels should be called scoundrels." And the Tractarians had no monopoly of vigorous invective, for, when their famous "Tract XC." incurred the censure of an Evangelical dean, he urbanely remarked that "he would be sorry to trust the author of that tract with his purse."Macaulay, on the morning after a vital division, in which the Whigs had saved their places by seventy-nine votes, wrote triumphantly to his sister—"So hang the dirty Tories, and let them starve and pine,And hurrah! for the majority of glorious seventy-nine."The same cordial partisan wrote of a political opponent that he was "a bad, a very bad, man; a disgrace to politics and to literature;" and, of an acquaintance who had offended him socially,"his powers gone; his spite immortal—a dead nettle."The great and good Lord Shaftesbury, repudiating the theology of "Ecce Homo," pronounced it "the most pestilential book ever vomited from the jaws of Hell;" and, dividing his political favours with admirable impartiality, he denounced "the brazen faces, low insults, and accursed effrontery" of the Radicals; declared that Mr. Gladstone's "public life had long been an effort to retain his principles and yet not lose his position;" and dismissed Lord Beaconsfield as "a leper, without principle, without feeling, without regard to anything, human or divine, beyond his personal ambition." In the same spirit of hearty prejudice, Bishop Wilberforce deplored the political exigencies which had driven his friend Gladstone into "the foul arms of the Whigs." In the opposite camp was ranged a lady, well remembered in the inner circles of Whiggery, who never would enter a four-wheeled cab until she had elicited from the driver that hewas nota Puseyite andwasa Whig."Mamma," asked a little girl of Whig parentage, who from her cradle had heard nothing but denunciation of her father's political opponents, "are Tories born wicked, or do they grow wicked afterwards?" And her mother judiciously replied, "My dear, they are born wicked and grow worse."But alas! they are "gone down to Hades,even many stalwart sons of heroes,"—with King William at their head, and Lord Shaftesbury and Lord Leicester, and Keble and Macaulay and Froude in his wake—men who knew what they believed, and, knowing it, were not ashamed to avow it, and saw little to praise or like in the adherents of a contrary opinion.They are gone, and we are left—an unprejudiced, but an invertebrate and a flaccid, generation. No one seems to believe anything very firmly. No one has the slightest notion of putting himself to any inconvenience for his belief. No one dreams of disliking or distrusting a political or religious opponent, or of treating difference of opinion as a line of social cleavage.In old days, King Leopold of Belgium told Bishop Wilberforce that "the only position for a Church was to say, 'Believe this or you are damned.'" To-day nothing in religion is regarded as unquestionably true. When the late Archbishop Benson first became acquainted with society in London, he asked, in shocked amazement, "What do these people believe?"—and no very satisfactory answer was forthcoming. If society has any religious beliefs (and this is more than questionable), it holds them with the loosest grasp, and is on the easiest terms of intercourse with every other belief and unbelief. The most fashionable teachers of religion have one eye nervously fixed on the ever-shifting currents of negation, talk plausibly about puttingthe Faith in its proper relation with modern thought, and toil panting in the wake of science; only to find each fresh theory exploded just at the moment when they have managed to apprehend it.We used to be taught in our nurseries that, when "Old Daddy Longlegs wouldn't say his prayers," it was our duty to "Take him by the left leg and throw him downstairs;" and the student of folklore will be pleased to observe in this ditty the immemorial inclination of mankind to punish people who will not square their religion with ours. The spirit of religious persecution dies hard, but the decay of prejudice has sapped its strength. It does not thrive in the atmosphere of modern indifferentism, and admirable ladies who believe that Ritualists ride donkeys on Palm Sunday and sacrifice lambs on Good Friday find it difficult to revive the cry of "No Popery" with any practical effect.The decay of prejudice in the sphere of politics is even more remarkable than in that of religion. In old days, political agreement was a strong and a constraining bond. When people saw a clear right and wrong in politics, they governed their private as well as their public life accordingly. People who held the same political beliefs lived and died together. In society and hospitality, in work and recreation, in journalism and literature—even in such seemingly indifferent matters as art and the drama—they were closely and permanently associated.Eton was supposed to cherish a romantic affection for the Stuarts, and therefore to be a fit training place for sucking Tories; Harrow had always been Hanoverian, and therefore attracted little Whigs to its Hill. Oxford, with its Caroline theology and Jacobite tradition, was the Tory university; Cambridge was the nursing-mother of Whigs, until Edinburgh, under the influence of Jeffrey and Brougham, tore her babes from her breast. In society you must choose between the Duchess of Devonshire and the Duchess of Gordon, or, in a later generation, between Lady Holland and Lady Jersey. In clubland the width of St. James's Street marked a dividing line of abysmal depth; and to this day "Grillon's" remains the memorial of an attempt, then unique, to bring politicians of opposite sides together in social intercourse. On the one side stood Scott—where Burke had stood before him—the Guardian Angel of Monarchy and Aristocracy: on the other were Shelley and Byron, and (till they turned their coats) the emancipated singers of Freedom and Humanity. The two political parties had even their favourite actors, and the Tories swore by Kemble while the Whigs roared for Kean.Then, as now, the Tories were a wealthy, powerful, and highly-organized confederacy. The Whigs were notoriously a family party. From John, Lord Gower, who died in 1754, and was the great-great-great-grandfather of the present Duke of Sutherland, descend all the Gowers,Levesons, Howards, Cavendishes, Grosvenors, Harcourts, and Russells who walk on the face of the earth. It is a goodly company. Well might Thackeray exclaim, "I'm not a Whig; but oh, how I should like to be one!"Lord Beaconsfield described in "Coningsby" how the Radical manufacturer, sending his boy to Eton, charged him to form no intimacies with his father's hereditary foes. This may have been a flight of fancy; but certainly, when a lad was going to Oxford or Cambridge, his parents and family friends would warn him against entering into friendships with the other side. The University Clubs which he joined and the votes which he gave at the Union were watched with anxious care. He was early initiated into the political society to which his father belonged. Extraneous intimacies were regarded with the most suspicious anxiety. Mothers did all they knew to make their darlings acquainted with daughters of families whose political faith was pure, and I have myself learned, by not remote tradition, the indignant horror which pervaded a great Whig family when the heir-presumptive to its honours married the daughter of a Tory Lord Chamberlain. "That girl will ruin the politics of the family and undo the work of two hundred years" was the prophecy; and I have seen it fulfilled.LCULTUREOne of the social changes which most impresses me is the decay of intellectual cultivation. This may sound paradoxical in an age which habitually talks so much about Education and Culture; but I am persuaded that it is true. Dilettantism is universal, and a smattering of erudition, infinitely more offensive than honest and manly ignorance, has usurped the place which was formerly occupied by genuine and liberal learning. My own view of the subject is probably tinged by the fact that I was born a Whig and brought up in a Whiggish society; for the Whigs were rather specially the allies of learning, and made it a point of honour to know, though never to parade, the best that has been thought and written. Very likely they had no monopoly of culture, and the Tories were just as well-informed. But a man "belongs to his belongings," and one can only describe what one has seen; and here the contrast between Past and Present is palpable enough. I am not now thinking of professed scholars and students, such as Lord Stanhope and Sir Charles Bunbury, or of professed blue-stockings, such asBarbarina Lady Dacre and Georgiana Lady Chatterton; but of ordinary men and women of good family and good position, who had received the usual education of their class and had profited by it.Mr. Gladstone used to say that, in his schooldays at Eton, it was possible to learn much or to learn nothing, but it was not possible to learn superficially. And one saw the same in afterlife. What people professed to know they knew. The affectation of culture was despised; and ignorance, where it existed, was honestly confessed. For example, every one knew Italian, but no one pretended to know German. I remember men who had never been to a University but had passed straight from a Public School to a Cavalry Regiment or the House of Commons, and who yet could quote Horace as easily as the present generation quotes Kipling. These people inherited the traditions of Mrs. Montagu, who "vindicated the genius of Shakespeare against the calumnies of Voltaire," and they knew the greatest poet of all time with an absolute ease and familiarity. They did not trouble themselves about various readings and corrupt texts and difficult passages. They had nothing in common with that true father of all Shakespearean criticism, Mr. Curdle in "Nicholas Nickleby," who had written a treatise on the question whether Juliet's nurse's husband was really "a merry man" or whether it was merelyhis widow's affectionate partiality that induced her so to report him. But they knew the whole mass of the plays with a wide and generous intimacy; their speech was saturated with the immortal diction, and Hamlet's speculations were their nearest approach to metaphysics.Broadly speaking, all educated people knew the English poets down to the end of the eighteenth century. Byron and Moore were enjoyed with a sort of furtive and fearful pleasure; and Wordsworth was tolerated. Every one knew Scott's novels by heart, and had his or her favourite heroine and hero.Then, again, all educated people knew history in a broad and comprehensive way. They did not concern themselves about ethnological theories, influences of race and climate and geography, streams of tendency, and the operation of unseen laws; but they knew all about the great people and the great events of time. They were conversant with all that was concrete and ascertainable; and they took sides as eagerly and as definitely in the strifes of Yorkist and Lancastrian, Protestant and Papist, Roundhead and Cavalier, as in the controversies over the Reform Bill or the Repeal of the Corn Laws.Then, again, all educated people knew the laws of architecture and of painting; and, though it must be confessed that in these respects their views were not very original, still they were founded on first-hand knowledge of famousmodels, and, though conventional, were never ignorant.But it will be said that all this represents no very overwhelming mass of culture, and that, if these were all the accomplishments which the last generation had to boast of, their successors have no reason to dread comparison.Well, I expressly said that I was not describing learned or even exceptionally well-read people, but merely the general level of educated society; and that level is, I am persuaded, infinitely lower than it was in former generations. Of course there are instances to the contrary which perplex and disturb the public judgment, and give rise to the delusion that this is a learned age. Thus we have in society and politics such scholars as Lord Milner and Mr. Asquith and Mr. Herbert Paul; but then there have always been some scholars in public life, so there is nothing remarkable in the persistence of the type; whereas, on the other hand, the system of smattering and top-dressing which pervades Universities and Public Schools produces an ever-increasing crop of gentlemen who, like Mr. Riley in "The Mill on the Floss," have brought away with them from Oxford or Cambridge a general sense of knowing Latin, though their comprehension of any particular Latin is not ready.It is, I believe, generally admitted that we speak French less fluently and less idiomatically than our fathers. The "barbarous neglect" of Italian,which used to rouse Mr. Gladstone's indignation, is now complete; and an even superstitious respect for the German language is accompanied by a curious ignorance of German literature. I remember an excellent picture inPunchwhich depicted that ideal representative of skin-deep culture—the Rev. Robert Elsmere—on his knees before the sceptical squire, saying, "Pray, pray, don't mention the name of another German writer, or I shall have to resign my living."Then, again, as regards women; of whom, quite as much as of men, I was thinking when I described the culture of bygone society. Here and there we see startling instances of erudition which throw a reflected and undeserved glory upon the undistinguished average. Thus we have seen a lady Senior Wrangler and a lady Senior Classic, and I myself have the honour of knowing a sweet girl-graduate with golden hair, who got two Firsts at Oxford.The face of the earth is covered with Girls' High Schools, and Women's Colleges standing where they ought not. I am told, but do not know, that girl-undergraduates are permitted to witness physiological experiments in the torture-dens of science; and a complete emancipation in the matter of reading has introduced women to regions of thought and feeling which in old days were the peculiar domain of men. The results are not far to seek.One lady boldly takes the field with an assaulton Christianity, and her apparatus of belated criticism and second-hand learning sets all society agape. Another fills a novel with morbid pathology, slays the villain by heart-disease, or makes the heroine interesting with phthisis; and people, forgetting Mr. Casaubon and Clifford Gray, exclaim, "How marvellous! This is, indeed, original research." A third, a fourth, and a fifth devote themselves to the task of readjusting the relation of the sexes, and fill their passionate volumes with seduction and lubricity. And here, again, just because our mothers did not traffic in these wares, the undiscerning public thinks that it has discovered a new vein of real though unsavoury learning, and ladies say, "It is not exactly a pleasant book, but one cannot help admiring the power."Now I submit that these abnormalities are no substitute for decent and reasonable culture. Pedantry is not learning; and a vast deal of specialism, "mugged-up," as boys say, at the British Museum and the London Library, may co-exist with a profound ignorance of all that is really worth knowing. It sounds very intellectual to theorize about the authorship of the Fourth Gospel, and to scoff at St. John's "senile iterations and contorted metaphysics"; but, when a clergyman read St. Paul's eulogy on Charity instead of the address at the end of a wedding, one of his hearers said, "How very appropriate that was! Where did you get it from?"We can all patter about the traces of Bacon's influence in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," and ransack our family histories for the original of "Mr. W. H." But, when "Cymbeline" was put on the stage, society was startled to find that the title-rôle was not a woman's. A year or two ago some excellent scenes from Jane Austen's novels were given in a Belgravian drawing-room, and a lady of the highest notoriety, enthusiastically praising the performance, enquired who was the author of the dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood, and whether he had written anything else.I have known in these later years a judge who had never seen the view from Richmond Hill; a publicist who had never heard of Lord Althorp; and an authoress who did not know the name of Izaak Walton. But probably the most typical illustration of modern culture was the reply of a lady who had been enthusing over the Wagnerian Cycle, and, when I asked her to tell me quite honestly, as between old friends, if she really enjoyed it, replied, "Oh yes! I think one likes Wagner—doesn't one?"

XLVTOWNV.COUNTRYI said at the outset that I am a Whigpur sang; and the historic Whigs were very worthy people. A first-rate specimen of the race was that Duke of Bedford whom Junius lampooned, and whom his great-grandson, Lord John Russell, championed in an interesting contrast. "The want of practical religion and morals which Lord Chesterfield held up to imitation, conducted the French nobility to the guillotine and emigration: the honesty, the attachment to religion, the country habits, the love of home, the activity in rural business and rural sports, in which the Duke of Bedford and others of his class delighted, preserved the English aristocracy from a flood which swept over half of Europe, laying prostrate the highest of her palaces, and scattering the ashes of the most sacred of her monuments."This quotation forms a suitable introduction to the social change which is the subject of the present chapter. In old days, people who had country houses lived in them. It was the magnificent misfortune of the Duke in "Lothair" to have so many castles that he had no home. In thosedays the tradition of Duty required people who had several country houses to spend some time in each of them; and those who had only one passed nine months out of twelve under its sacred roof—sacred because it was inseparably connected with memories of ancestry and parentage and early association, with marriage and children, and pure enjoyments and active benevolence and neighbourly goodwill. In a word, the country house was Home.People who had no country house were honestly pitied; perhaps they were also a little despised. The most gorgeous mansion in Cromwell Road or Tyburnia could never for a moment be quoted as supplying the place of the Hall or the Manor.For people who had a country house the interests of life were very much bound up in the park and the covers, the croquet-ground and the cricket-ground, the kennel, the stable, and the garden. I remember, when I was an undergraduate, lionizing some Yorkshire damsels on their first visit to Oxford, then in the "high midsummer pomp" of its beauty. But all they said was, in the pensive tone of an unwilling exile, "How beautifully the sun must be shining on the South Walk at home!"The village church was a great centre of domestic affection. All the family had been christened in it. The eldest sister had been married in it. Generations of ancestry mouldered under the chancel floor. Christmas decorations were anoccasion of much innocent merriment, and a little ditty high in favour in Tractarian homes warned the decorators to be—"Unselfish—looking not to seeProofs of their own dexterity;But quite contented that 'I' shouldForgotten be in brotherhood."Of course, whether Tractarian or Evangelical, religious people regarded church-going as a spiritual privilege; but every one recognized it as a civil duty. "When a gentleman issur ses terres," said Major Pendennis, "he must give an example to the country people; and, if I could turn a tune, I even think I should sing. The Duke of St. David's, whom I have the honour of knowing, always sings in the country, and let me tell you it has a doosed fine effect from the family pew." Before the passion for "restoration" had set in, and ere yet Sir Gilbert Scott had transmogrified the parish churches of England, the family pew was indeed the ark and sanctuary of the territorial system—and a very comfortable ark too. It had a private entrance, a round table, a good assortment of arm-chairs, a fireplace, and a wood-basket. And I well remember a washleather glove of unusual size which was kept in the wood-basket for the greater convenience of making up the fire during divine service. "You may restore the church as much as you like," said an old friend of my youth, who was lay-rector, to an innovating incumbent, "but I must insist on myfamily pew not being touched. If I had to sit in an open seat, I should never get a wink of sleep again."A country home left its mark for all time on those who were brought up in it. The sons played cricket and went bat-fowling with the village boys, and not seldom joined with them in a poaching enterprise in the paternal preserves. However popular or successful or happy a Public-School boy might be at Eton or Harrow, he counted the days till he could return to his pony and his gun, his ferrets and rat-trap and fishing-rod. Amid all the toil and worry of active life, he looked back lovingly to the corner of the cover where he shot his first pheasant, or the precise spot in the middle of the Vale where he first saw a fox killed, and underwent the disgusting baptism of blood.Girls, living more continuously at home, entered even more intimately into the daily life of the place. Their morning rides led them across the village green; their afternoon drives were often steered by the claims of this or that cottage to a visit. They were taught as soon as they could toddle never to enter a door without knocking, never to sit down without being asked, and never to call at meal-time.They knew every one in the village—old and young; played with the babies, taught the boys in Sunday School, carried savoury messes to the old and impotent, read by the sick-beds, andbrought flowers for the coffin. Mamma knitted comforters and dispensed warm clothing, organized relief in hard winters and times of epidemic, and found places for the hobbledehoys of both sexes. The pony-boy and the scullery-maid were pretty sure to be products of the village. Very likely the young-ladies-maid was a village girl whom the doctor had pronounced too delicate for factory or farm. I have seen an excited young groom staring his eyes out of his head at the Eton and Harrow match, and exclaiming with rapture at a good catch, "It was my young governor as 'scouted' that. 'E's nimble, ain't 'e?" And I well remember an ancient stable-helper at a country house in Buckinghamshire who was called "Old Bucks," because he had never slept out of his native county, and very rarely out of his native village, and had spent his whole life in the service of one family.Of course, when so much of the impressionable part of life was lived amid the "sweet, sincere surroundings of country life," there grew up, between the family at the Hall and the families in the village, a feeling which, in spite of our national unsentimentality, had a chivalrous and almost feudal tone. The interest of the poor in the life and doings of "The Family" was keen and genuine. The English peasant is too much a gentleman to be a flatterer, and compliments were often bestowed in very unexpected forms. "They do tell me as 'is understanding's no worsethan it always were," was a ploughman's way of saying that the old squire was in full possession of his faculties. "We call 'im ''Is Lordship,' because 'e's so old and so cunning," was another's description of a famous pony. "Ah, I know you're but a poor creature at the best!" was the recognized way of complimenting a lady on what she considered her bewitching and romantic delicacy.But these eccentricities were merely verbal, and under them lay a deep vein of genuine and lasting regard. "I've lived under four dukes and four 'ousekeepers, and I'm not going to be put upon in my old age!" was the exclamation of an ancient poultry-woman, whose dignity had been offended by some irregularity touching her Christmas dinner. When the daughter of the house married and went into a far country, she was sure to find some emigrant from her old home who welcomed her with effusion, and was full of enquiries about his lordship and her ladyship, and Miss Pinkerton the governess, and whether Mr. Wheeler was still coachman, and who lived now at the entrance-lodge. Whether the sons got commissions, or took ranches, or become curates in slums, or contested remote constituencies, some grinning face was sure to emerge from the crowd with, "You know me, sir? Bill Juffs, as used to go bird's-nesting with you;" or, "You remember my old dad, my lord? He used to shoe your black pony."When the eldest son came of age, his condescension in taking this step was hailed with genuine enthusiasm. When he came into his kingdom, there might be some grumbling if he went in for small economies, or altered old practices, or was a "hard man" on the Bench or at the Board of Guardians; but, if he went on in the good-natured old ways, the traditional loyalty was unabated.Lord Shaftesbury wrote thus about the birth of his eldest son's eldest son: "My little village is all agog with the birth of a son and heir in the very midst of them, the first, it is believed, since 1600, when the first Lord Shaftesbury was born. The christening yesterday was an ovation. Every cottage had flags and flowers. We had three triumphal arches; and all the people were exulting. 'He is one of us.' 'He is a fellow-villager.' 'We have now got a lord of our own.' This is really gratifying. I did not think that there remained so much of the old respect and affection between peasant and proprietor, landlord and tenant."Whether the kind of relation thus described has utterly perished I do not know; but certainly it has very greatly diminished, and the cause of the diminution is that people live less and less in their country houses, and more and more in London. For those who are compelled by odious necessity to sell or let their hereditary homes one has nothing but compassion; in itself a severe trial, it is madestill sharper to well-conditioned people by the sense that the change is at least as painful to the poor as to themselves. But for those who, having both a country and a London house, deliberately concentrate themselves on the town, forsake the country, and abjure the duties which are inseparable from their birthright, one can only feel Charles Lamb's "imperfect sympathy." The causes which induce this dereliction and its results on society and on the country may be discussed in another chapter.

TOWNV.COUNTRY

I said at the outset that I am a Whigpur sang; and the historic Whigs were very worthy people. A first-rate specimen of the race was that Duke of Bedford whom Junius lampooned, and whom his great-grandson, Lord John Russell, championed in an interesting contrast. "The want of practical religion and morals which Lord Chesterfield held up to imitation, conducted the French nobility to the guillotine and emigration: the honesty, the attachment to religion, the country habits, the love of home, the activity in rural business and rural sports, in which the Duke of Bedford and others of his class delighted, preserved the English aristocracy from a flood which swept over half of Europe, laying prostrate the highest of her palaces, and scattering the ashes of the most sacred of her monuments."

This quotation forms a suitable introduction to the social change which is the subject of the present chapter. In old days, people who had country houses lived in them. It was the magnificent misfortune of the Duke in "Lothair" to have so many castles that he had no home. In thosedays the tradition of Duty required people who had several country houses to spend some time in each of them; and those who had only one passed nine months out of twelve under its sacred roof—sacred because it was inseparably connected with memories of ancestry and parentage and early association, with marriage and children, and pure enjoyments and active benevolence and neighbourly goodwill. In a word, the country house was Home.

People who had no country house were honestly pitied; perhaps they were also a little despised. The most gorgeous mansion in Cromwell Road or Tyburnia could never for a moment be quoted as supplying the place of the Hall or the Manor.

For people who had a country house the interests of life were very much bound up in the park and the covers, the croquet-ground and the cricket-ground, the kennel, the stable, and the garden. I remember, when I was an undergraduate, lionizing some Yorkshire damsels on their first visit to Oxford, then in the "high midsummer pomp" of its beauty. But all they said was, in the pensive tone of an unwilling exile, "How beautifully the sun must be shining on the South Walk at home!"

The village church was a great centre of domestic affection. All the family had been christened in it. The eldest sister had been married in it. Generations of ancestry mouldered under the chancel floor. Christmas decorations were anoccasion of much innocent merriment, and a little ditty high in favour in Tractarian homes warned the decorators to be—

"Unselfish—looking not to seeProofs of their own dexterity;But quite contented that 'I' shouldForgotten be in brotherhood."

Of course, whether Tractarian or Evangelical, religious people regarded church-going as a spiritual privilege; but every one recognized it as a civil duty. "When a gentleman issur ses terres," said Major Pendennis, "he must give an example to the country people; and, if I could turn a tune, I even think I should sing. The Duke of St. David's, whom I have the honour of knowing, always sings in the country, and let me tell you it has a doosed fine effect from the family pew." Before the passion for "restoration" had set in, and ere yet Sir Gilbert Scott had transmogrified the parish churches of England, the family pew was indeed the ark and sanctuary of the territorial system—and a very comfortable ark too. It had a private entrance, a round table, a good assortment of arm-chairs, a fireplace, and a wood-basket. And I well remember a washleather glove of unusual size which was kept in the wood-basket for the greater convenience of making up the fire during divine service. "You may restore the church as much as you like," said an old friend of my youth, who was lay-rector, to an innovating incumbent, "but I must insist on myfamily pew not being touched. If I had to sit in an open seat, I should never get a wink of sleep again."

A country home left its mark for all time on those who were brought up in it. The sons played cricket and went bat-fowling with the village boys, and not seldom joined with them in a poaching enterprise in the paternal preserves. However popular or successful or happy a Public-School boy might be at Eton or Harrow, he counted the days till he could return to his pony and his gun, his ferrets and rat-trap and fishing-rod. Amid all the toil and worry of active life, he looked back lovingly to the corner of the cover where he shot his first pheasant, or the precise spot in the middle of the Vale where he first saw a fox killed, and underwent the disgusting baptism of blood.

Girls, living more continuously at home, entered even more intimately into the daily life of the place. Their morning rides led them across the village green; their afternoon drives were often steered by the claims of this or that cottage to a visit. They were taught as soon as they could toddle never to enter a door without knocking, never to sit down without being asked, and never to call at meal-time.

They knew every one in the village—old and young; played with the babies, taught the boys in Sunday School, carried savoury messes to the old and impotent, read by the sick-beds, andbrought flowers for the coffin. Mamma knitted comforters and dispensed warm clothing, organized relief in hard winters and times of epidemic, and found places for the hobbledehoys of both sexes. The pony-boy and the scullery-maid were pretty sure to be products of the village. Very likely the young-ladies-maid was a village girl whom the doctor had pronounced too delicate for factory or farm. I have seen an excited young groom staring his eyes out of his head at the Eton and Harrow match, and exclaiming with rapture at a good catch, "It was my young governor as 'scouted' that. 'E's nimble, ain't 'e?" And I well remember an ancient stable-helper at a country house in Buckinghamshire who was called "Old Bucks," because he had never slept out of his native county, and very rarely out of his native village, and had spent his whole life in the service of one family.

Of course, when so much of the impressionable part of life was lived amid the "sweet, sincere surroundings of country life," there grew up, between the family at the Hall and the families in the village, a feeling which, in spite of our national unsentimentality, had a chivalrous and almost feudal tone. The interest of the poor in the life and doings of "The Family" was keen and genuine. The English peasant is too much a gentleman to be a flatterer, and compliments were often bestowed in very unexpected forms. "They do tell me as 'is understanding's no worsethan it always were," was a ploughman's way of saying that the old squire was in full possession of his faculties. "We call 'im ''Is Lordship,' because 'e's so old and so cunning," was another's description of a famous pony. "Ah, I know you're but a poor creature at the best!" was the recognized way of complimenting a lady on what she considered her bewitching and romantic delicacy.

But these eccentricities were merely verbal, and under them lay a deep vein of genuine and lasting regard. "I've lived under four dukes and four 'ousekeepers, and I'm not going to be put upon in my old age!" was the exclamation of an ancient poultry-woman, whose dignity had been offended by some irregularity touching her Christmas dinner. When the daughter of the house married and went into a far country, she was sure to find some emigrant from her old home who welcomed her with effusion, and was full of enquiries about his lordship and her ladyship, and Miss Pinkerton the governess, and whether Mr. Wheeler was still coachman, and who lived now at the entrance-lodge. Whether the sons got commissions, or took ranches, or become curates in slums, or contested remote constituencies, some grinning face was sure to emerge from the crowd with, "You know me, sir? Bill Juffs, as used to go bird's-nesting with you;" or, "You remember my old dad, my lord? He used to shoe your black pony."

When the eldest son came of age, his condescension in taking this step was hailed with genuine enthusiasm. When he came into his kingdom, there might be some grumbling if he went in for small economies, or altered old practices, or was a "hard man" on the Bench or at the Board of Guardians; but, if he went on in the good-natured old ways, the traditional loyalty was unabated.

Lord Shaftesbury wrote thus about the birth of his eldest son's eldest son: "My little village is all agog with the birth of a son and heir in the very midst of them, the first, it is believed, since 1600, when the first Lord Shaftesbury was born. The christening yesterday was an ovation. Every cottage had flags and flowers. We had three triumphal arches; and all the people were exulting. 'He is one of us.' 'He is a fellow-villager.' 'We have now got a lord of our own.' This is really gratifying. I did not think that there remained so much of the old respect and affection between peasant and proprietor, landlord and tenant."

Whether the kind of relation thus described has utterly perished I do not know; but certainly it has very greatly diminished, and the cause of the diminution is that people live less and less in their country houses, and more and more in London. For those who are compelled by odious necessity to sell or let their hereditary homes one has nothing but compassion; in itself a severe trial, it is madestill sharper to well-conditioned people by the sense that the change is at least as painful to the poor as to themselves. But for those who, having both a country and a London house, deliberately concentrate themselves on the town, forsake the country, and abjure the duties which are inseparable from their birthright, one can only feel Charles Lamb's "imperfect sympathy." The causes which induce this dereliction and its results on society and on the country may be discussed in another chapter.

XLVIHOMEI was speaking just now of the growing tendency to desert the country in favour of London. I said that it was difficult to feel sympathy with people who voluntarily abandon Home, and all the duties and pleasures which Home implies, in favour of Lennox Gardens or Portman Square; but that one felt a lively compassion for those who make the exchange under the pressure of—"Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear."Here, again, is another social change. In old days, when people wished to economize, it was London that they deserted. They sold the "family mansion" in Portland Place or Eaton Square; and, if they revisited the glimpses of the social moon, they took a furnished house for six weeks in the summer: the rest of the year they spent in the country. This plan was a manifold saving. There was no rent to pay, and only very small rates, for every one knows that country houses were shamefully under-assessed. Carriages did not require repainting every season, and no new clothes were wanted. "What can it matter whatwe wear here, where every one knows who we are?" The products of the park, the home farm, the hothouses, and the kitchen-garden kept the family supplied with food. A brother magnate staying at Beaudesert with the famous Lord Anglesey waxed enthusiastic over the mutton, and said, "Excuse my asking you a plain question, but how much does this excellent mutton cost you?" "Cost me?" screamed the hero. "Good Gad, it costs me nothing! It's my own," and he was beyond measure astonished when his statistical guest proved that "his own" cost him about a guinea per pound. In another great house, conducted on strictly economical lines, it was said that the very numerous family were reared exclusively on rabbits and garden-stuff, and that their enfeebled constitutions and dismal appearance in later life were due to this ascetic regimen.People were always hospitable in the country, but rural entertaining was not a very costly business. The "three square meals and a snack," which represent the minimum requirement of the present day, are a huge development of the system which prevailed in my youth. Breakfast had already grown from the tea and coffee, and rolls and eggs, which Macaulay tells us were deemed sufficient at Holland House, to an affair of covered dishes. Luncheon-parties were sometimes given—terrible ceremonies which lasted from two to four; but the ordinary luncheon of the familywas really a snack from the servants' joint or the children's rice-pudding; and five o'clock tea was actually not invented. To remember, as I do, the foundress of that divine refreshment seems like having known Stephenson or Jenner.Dinner was substantial enough in all conscience, and the wine nearly as heavy as the food. Imagine quenching one's thirst with sherry in the dog days! Yet so we did, till about half-way through dinner, and then, on great occasions, a dark-coloured rill of champagne began to trickle into the saucer-shaped glasses. At the epoch of cheese, port made its appearance in company with home-brewed beer; and, as soon as the ladies and the schoolboys departed, the men applied themselves, with much seriousness of purpose, to the consumption of claret which was really vinous.In this kind of hospitality there was no great expense. People made very little difference between their way of living when they were alone and their way of living when they had company. A visitor who wished to make himself agreeable sometimes brought down a basket of fish or a barrel of oysters from London; and, if one had no deer of one's own, the arrival of a haunch from a neighbour's or kinsman's park was the signal for a gathering of local gastronomers.And in matters other than meals life went on very much the same whether you had friends staying with you or whether you were alone.Your guests drove and rode, and walked and shot, according to their tastes and the season of the year. They were carried off, more or less willingly, to see the sights of the neighbourhood—ruined castles, restored cathedrals, famous views. In summer there might be a picnic or a croquet-party; in winter a lawn-meet or a ball. But all these entertainments were of the most homely and inexpensive character. There was very little outlay, no fuss, and no display. People, who were compelled by stress of financial weather to put into their country houses and remain there till the storm was over, contrived to economize and yet be comfortable. They simply lived their ordinary lives until things righted themselves, and very likely did not attempt London again until they were bringing out another daughter, or had to make a home for a son in the Guards.But now an entirely different spirit prevails. People seem to have lost the power of living quietly and happily in their country homes. They all have imbibed the urban philosophy of George Warrington, who, when Pen gushed about the country with its "long calm days, and long calm evenings," brutally replied, "Devilish long, and a great deal too calm. I've tried 'em." People of that type desert the country simply because they are bored by it. They feel with Mr. Luke in "The New Republic," who, after talking about "liberal air," "sedged brooks," and "meadow grass," admitted that it would be a horrid boreto have no other society than the clergyman of the parish, and no other topics of conversation than Justification by Faith and the measles. They do not care for the country in itself; they have no eye for its beauty, no sense of its atmosphere, no memory for its traditions. It is only made endurable to them by sport and gambling and boisterous house-parties; and, when from one cause or another these resources fail, they are frankly bored and long for London. They are no longer content, as our fathers were, to entertain their friends with hospitable simplicity. So profoundly has all society been vulgarized by the worship of the Golden Calf that, unless people can vie with alien millionaires in the sumptuousness with which they "do you"—delightful phrase,—they prefer not to entertain at all. An emulous ostentation has killed hospitality.So now, when a season of financial pressure sets in, people shut up their country houses, let their shooting, cut themselves off with a sigh of relief from all the unexciting duties and simple pleasures of the Home, and take refuge from boredom in the delights of London. In London life has no duties. Little is expected of one, and nothing required. One can live on a larger or a smaller scale according to one's taste or one's purse; cramp oneself in a doll's house in Mayfair, or expand one's wings in a Kensingtonian mansion; or even contract oneself intoa flat, or hide one's diminished head in the upper storey of a shop. One can entertain or not entertain, spend much or spend little, live on one's friends or be lived on by them, exactly as one finds most convenient: and unquestionably social freedom is a great element in human happiness.For many natures London has an attractiveness which is all its own, and yet to indulge one's taste for it may be a grave dereliction of duty. The State is built upon the Home; and, as a training-place for social virtue, there can surely be no comparison between a home in the country and a home in London."Home! Sweet Home!" Yes. (I am quoting now from my friend, Henry Scott Holland.) That is the song that goes straight to the heart of every English man and woman. For forty years we have never asked Madame Adelina Patti to sing anything else. The unhappy, decadent, Latin races have not even a word in their languages by which to express it, poor things! Home is the secret of our honest British Protestant virtues. It is the only nursery of our Anglo-Saxon citizenship. Back to it our far-flung children turn with all their memories aflame. They may lapse into rough ways, but they keep something sound at the core so long as they are faithful to the old Home. There is still a tenderness in the voice, and tears are in their eyes, as they speak together of the days that can never die out of their lives, when they were athome in the old familiar places, with father and mother in the healthy gladness of their childhood. Ah!"Home! Sweet Home!There's no place like Home."That is what we all repeat, and all believe, and cheer to the echo. And, behind all our British complacency about it, nobody would deny the vital truth that there is in this belief of ours. Whatever tends to make the Home beautiful, attractive, romantic—to associate it with the ideas of pure pleasure and high duty—to connect it not only with all that was happiest but also with all that was best in early years—whatever fulfils these purposes purifies the fountains of national life. A home, to be perfectly a home, should "incorporate tradition, and prolong the reign of the dead." It should animate those who dwell in it to virtue and beneficence by reminding them of what others did, who went before them in the same place and lived amid the same surroundings.

HOME

I was speaking just now of the growing tendency to desert the country in favour of London. I said that it was difficult to feel sympathy with people who voluntarily abandon Home, and all the duties and pleasures which Home implies, in favour of Lennox Gardens or Portman Square; but that one felt a lively compassion for those who make the exchange under the pressure of—

"Bitter constraint and sad occasion dear."

Here, again, is another social change. In old days, when people wished to economize, it was London that they deserted. They sold the "family mansion" in Portland Place or Eaton Square; and, if they revisited the glimpses of the social moon, they took a furnished house for six weeks in the summer: the rest of the year they spent in the country. This plan was a manifold saving. There was no rent to pay, and only very small rates, for every one knows that country houses were shamefully under-assessed. Carriages did not require repainting every season, and no new clothes were wanted. "What can it matter whatwe wear here, where every one knows who we are?" The products of the park, the home farm, the hothouses, and the kitchen-garden kept the family supplied with food. A brother magnate staying at Beaudesert with the famous Lord Anglesey waxed enthusiastic over the mutton, and said, "Excuse my asking you a plain question, but how much does this excellent mutton cost you?" "Cost me?" screamed the hero. "Good Gad, it costs me nothing! It's my own," and he was beyond measure astonished when his statistical guest proved that "his own" cost him about a guinea per pound. In another great house, conducted on strictly economical lines, it was said that the very numerous family were reared exclusively on rabbits and garden-stuff, and that their enfeebled constitutions and dismal appearance in later life were due to this ascetic regimen.

People were always hospitable in the country, but rural entertaining was not a very costly business. The "three square meals and a snack," which represent the minimum requirement of the present day, are a huge development of the system which prevailed in my youth. Breakfast had already grown from the tea and coffee, and rolls and eggs, which Macaulay tells us were deemed sufficient at Holland House, to an affair of covered dishes. Luncheon-parties were sometimes given—terrible ceremonies which lasted from two to four; but the ordinary luncheon of the familywas really a snack from the servants' joint or the children's rice-pudding; and five o'clock tea was actually not invented. To remember, as I do, the foundress of that divine refreshment seems like having known Stephenson or Jenner.

Dinner was substantial enough in all conscience, and the wine nearly as heavy as the food. Imagine quenching one's thirst with sherry in the dog days! Yet so we did, till about half-way through dinner, and then, on great occasions, a dark-coloured rill of champagne began to trickle into the saucer-shaped glasses. At the epoch of cheese, port made its appearance in company with home-brewed beer; and, as soon as the ladies and the schoolboys departed, the men applied themselves, with much seriousness of purpose, to the consumption of claret which was really vinous.

In this kind of hospitality there was no great expense. People made very little difference between their way of living when they were alone and their way of living when they had company. A visitor who wished to make himself agreeable sometimes brought down a basket of fish or a barrel of oysters from London; and, if one had no deer of one's own, the arrival of a haunch from a neighbour's or kinsman's park was the signal for a gathering of local gastronomers.

And in matters other than meals life went on very much the same whether you had friends staying with you or whether you were alone.Your guests drove and rode, and walked and shot, according to their tastes and the season of the year. They were carried off, more or less willingly, to see the sights of the neighbourhood—ruined castles, restored cathedrals, famous views. In summer there might be a picnic or a croquet-party; in winter a lawn-meet or a ball. But all these entertainments were of the most homely and inexpensive character. There was very little outlay, no fuss, and no display. People, who were compelled by stress of financial weather to put into their country houses and remain there till the storm was over, contrived to economize and yet be comfortable. They simply lived their ordinary lives until things righted themselves, and very likely did not attempt London again until they were bringing out another daughter, or had to make a home for a son in the Guards.

But now an entirely different spirit prevails. People seem to have lost the power of living quietly and happily in their country homes. They all have imbibed the urban philosophy of George Warrington, who, when Pen gushed about the country with its "long calm days, and long calm evenings," brutally replied, "Devilish long, and a great deal too calm. I've tried 'em." People of that type desert the country simply because they are bored by it. They feel with Mr. Luke in "The New Republic," who, after talking about "liberal air," "sedged brooks," and "meadow grass," admitted that it would be a horrid boreto have no other society than the clergyman of the parish, and no other topics of conversation than Justification by Faith and the measles. They do not care for the country in itself; they have no eye for its beauty, no sense of its atmosphere, no memory for its traditions. It is only made endurable to them by sport and gambling and boisterous house-parties; and, when from one cause or another these resources fail, they are frankly bored and long for London. They are no longer content, as our fathers were, to entertain their friends with hospitable simplicity. So profoundly has all society been vulgarized by the worship of the Golden Calf that, unless people can vie with alien millionaires in the sumptuousness with which they "do you"—delightful phrase,—they prefer not to entertain at all. An emulous ostentation has killed hospitality.

So now, when a season of financial pressure sets in, people shut up their country houses, let their shooting, cut themselves off with a sigh of relief from all the unexciting duties and simple pleasures of the Home, and take refuge from boredom in the delights of London. In London life has no duties. Little is expected of one, and nothing required. One can live on a larger or a smaller scale according to one's taste or one's purse; cramp oneself in a doll's house in Mayfair, or expand one's wings in a Kensingtonian mansion; or even contract oneself intoa flat, or hide one's diminished head in the upper storey of a shop. One can entertain or not entertain, spend much or spend little, live on one's friends or be lived on by them, exactly as one finds most convenient: and unquestionably social freedom is a great element in human happiness.

For many natures London has an attractiveness which is all its own, and yet to indulge one's taste for it may be a grave dereliction of duty. The State is built upon the Home; and, as a training-place for social virtue, there can surely be no comparison between a home in the country and a home in London.

"Home! Sweet Home!" Yes. (I am quoting now from my friend, Henry Scott Holland.) That is the song that goes straight to the heart of every English man and woman. For forty years we have never asked Madame Adelina Patti to sing anything else. The unhappy, decadent, Latin races have not even a word in their languages by which to express it, poor things! Home is the secret of our honest British Protestant virtues. It is the only nursery of our Anglo-Saxon citizenship. Back to it our far-flung children turn with all their memories aflame. They may lapse into rough ways, but they keep something sound at the core so long as they are faithful to the old Home. There is still a tenderness in the voice, and tears are in their eyes, as they speak together of the days that can never die out of their lives, when they were athome in the old familiar places, with father and mother in the healthy gladness of their childhood. Ah!

"Home! Sweet Home!There's no place like Home."

That is what we all repeat, and all believe, and cheer to the echo. And, behind all our British complacency about it, nobody would deny the vital truth that there is in this belief of ours. Whatever tends to make the Home beautiful, attractive, romantic—to associate it with the ideas of pure pleasure and high duty—to connect it not only with all that was happiest but also with all that was best in early years—whatever fulfils these purposes purifies the fountains of national life. A home, to be perfectly a home, should "incorporate tradition, and prolong the reign of the dead." It should animate those who dwell in it to virtue and beneficence by reminding them of what others did, who went before them in the same place and lived amid the same surroundings.

XLVIIHOSPITALITYIn my last chapter I was deploring the modern tendency of society to desert the country and cultivate London. And the reason why I deplore it is that all the educating influences of the Home are so infinitely weaker in the town than in the country. In a London home there is nothing to fascinate the eye. The contemplation of the mews and the chimney-pots through the back windows of the nursery will not elevate even the most impressible child. There is no mystery, no dreamland, no Enchanted Palace, no Bluebeard's Chamber, in a stucco mansion built by Cubitt or a palace of terracotta on the Cadogan estate. There can be no traditions of the past, no inspiring memories of virtuous ancestry, in a house which your father bought five years ago and of which the previous owners are not known to you even by name. "The Square" or "the Gardens" are sorry substitutes for the Park and the Pleasure-grounds, the Common and the Downs. Crossing-sweepers are a deserving folk, but you cannot cultivate those intimate relations with them which bind you to the lodge-keeper at home, or to the old women in the almshouses, or the octogenarianwaggoner who has driven your father's team ever since he was ten years old. St. Peter's, Eaton Square, or All Saints, Margaret Street, may be beautifully ornate, and the congregation what Lord Beaconsfield called "brisk and modish"; but they can never have the romantic charm of the country church where you were confirmed side by side with the keeper's son, or proposed to the vicar's daughter when you were wreathing holly round the lectern.Then, again, as regards social relations with friends and neighbours. "An emulous ostentation has destroyed hospitality." This I believe is absolutely true, and it is one of the worst changes which I have seen. I have already spoken of hospitality as practised in the country. Now I will say a word about hospitality in London.Of course rich people always gave banquets from time to time, and these were occasions when, in Lord Beaconsfield's drolly vulgar phrase, "the dinner was stately, as befits the high nobility." They were ceremonious observances, conducted on the constitutional principle of "cutlet for cutlet," and must always have been regarded by all concerned in them, whether as hosts or guests, in the light of duty rather than of pleasure. Twenty people woke that morning with the impression that something was to be gone through before bedtime, which they would be glad enough to escape. Each of the twenty went to bed that night more or less weary and ruffled, but sustainedby the sense that a social duty had been performed. Banquets, however, at the worst were only periodical events. Real hospitality was constant and informal."Come and dine to-night. Eight o'clock. Pot luck. Don't dress.""My dear, I am going to bring back two or three men from the House. Don't put off dinner in case we are kept by a division.""I am afraid I must be going back. I am only paired till eleven. Good-night, and so many thanks.""Good-night; you will always find some dinner here on Government nights. Do look in again!"These are the cheerful echoes of parliamentary homes in the older and better days of unostentatious entertaining, and those "pot luck" dinners often played an important part in political manœuvre. Sir George Trevelyan, whose early manhood was passed in the thick of parliamentary society, tells us, in a footnote to "The Ladies in Parliament," that in the season of 1866 there was much gossip over the fact of Lord Russell having entertained Mr. Bright at dinner, and that people were constantly—"Discussing whether Bright can scan and understand the linesAbout the Wooden Horse of Troy; and when and where he dines.Though gentlemen should blush to talk as if they cared a buttonBecause one night in Chesham Place he ate his slice of mutton."Quite apart from parliamentary strategy, impromptu entertaining in what was called "a friendly way" had its special uses in the social system. There is a delicious passage in "Lothair" describing that hero's initiation into an easier and more graceful society than that in which he had been reared: "He had been a guest at the occasional banquets of his uncle, but these were festivals of the Picts and Scots; rude plenty and coarse splendour, with noise instead of conversation, and a tumult of obstructive dependants, who impeded by their want of skill the very convenience which they were purposed to facilitate." An amazing sentence indeed, but like all Lord Beaconsfield's writings, picturesquely descriptive, and happily contrasted with the succeeding scene: "A table covered with flowers, bright with fanciful crystal, and porcelain that had belonged to Sovereigns who had given a name to its colour or its form. As for those present, all seemed grace and gentleness, from the radiant daughters of the house to the noiseless attendants who anticipated all his wants, and sometimes seemed to suggest his wishes."The mention of "Lothair" reminds people of my date that thirty years ago we knew a house justly famed for the excellent marriages which the daughters made. There banquets were unknown, and even dinners by invitation very rare. The father used to collect young men from Lord's, or the Lobby, or the Club, or whereverhe had been spending the afternoon. Servants were soon dismissed—"It is such a bore to have them staring at one"—and the daughters of the house waited on the guests. Here obviously were matrimonial openings not to be despised; and, even in families where there were no ulterior objects to be served, these free-and-easy entertainings went on from February to July. Short invitations, pleasant company, and genuine friendliness were the characteristics of these gatherings. Very often the dinner was carved on the table. One could ask for a second slice or another wing without feeling greedy, and the claret and amontillado were within the reach of every guest. This, I consider, was genuine hospitality, for it was natural, easy, and unostentatious.But now, according to all accounts, the spirit of entertaining is utterly changed. A dinner is not so much an opportunity of pleasing your friends as of airing your own magnificence; and ostentation, despicable in itself, is doubly odious because it is emulous. If A has a good cook, B must have a better. If C gave you ortolans stuffed with truffles, D must have truffles stuffed with ortolans. If the E's table is piled with strawberries in April, the F's must retaliate with orchids at a guinea a blossom. G is a little inclined to swagger about his wife's pearl necklace, and H is bound in honour to decorate Mrs. H with arivièrewhich belonged to the crown jewels of France.And, as with the food and the decorations, soalso with the company. Here, again, Emulous Ostentation carries all before it. Mr. Goldbug is a Yahoo, but he made his millions in South Africa and spends them in Park Lane. Lord Heath is the most abandoned bore in Christendom, but he is an authority at Newmarket. Lady Bellair has had a notoriously chequered career, but she plays bridge in exalted circles. As Lord Crewe sings of a similar enchantress—"From reflections we shrink;And of comment are chary;But her face issopink,And it don't seem to vary."However, she is unquestionably smart; and Goldbug is a useful man to know; and we are not going to be outdone by the Cashingtons, who got Heath to dine with them twice last year. So we invite our guests, not because we like them or admire them, for that in these cases is impossible; not—heaven knows—because they are beautiful or famous or witty; but because they are the right people to have in one's house, and we will have the right people or perish in the attempt.

HOSPITALITY

In my last chapter I was deploring the modern tendency of society to desert the country and cultivate London. And the reason why I deplore it is that all the educating influences of the Home are so infinitely weaker in the town than in the country. In a London home there is nothing to fascinate the eye. The contemplation of the mews and the chimney-pots through the back windows of the nursery will not elevate even the most impressible child. There is no mystery, no dreamland, no Enchanted Palace, no Bluebeard's Chamber, in a stucco mansion built by Cubitt or a palace of terracotta on the Cadogan estate. There can be no traditions of the past, no inspiring memories of virtuous ancestry, in a house which your father bought five years ago and of which the previous owners are not known to you even by name. "The Square" or "the Gardens" are sorry substitutes for the Park and the Pleasure-grounds, the Common and the Downs. Crossing-sweepers are a deserving folk, but you cannot cultivate those intimate relations with them which bind you to the lodge-keeper at home, or to the old women in the almshouses, or the octogenarianwaggoner who has driven your father's team ever since he was ten years old. St. Peter's, Eaton Square, or All Saints, Margaret Street, may be beautifully ornate, and the congregation what Lord Beaconsfield called "brisk and modish"; but they can never have the romantic charm of the country church where you were confirmed side by side with the keeper's son, or proposed to the vicar's daughter when you were wreathing holly round the lectern.

Then, again, as regards social relations with friends and neighbours. "An emulous ostentation has destroyed hospitality." This I believe is absolutely true, and it is one of the worst changes which I have seen. I have already spoken of hospitality as practised in the country. Now I will say a word about hospitality in London.

Of course rich people always gave banquets from time to time, and these were occasions when, in Lord Beaconsfield's drolly vulgar phrase, "the dinner was stately, as befits the high nobility." They were ceremonious observances, conducted on the constitutional principle of "cutlet for cutlet," and must always have been regarded by all concerned in them, whether as hosts or guests, in the light of duty rather than of pleasure. Twenty people woke that morning with the impression that something was to be gone through before bedtime, which they would be glad enough to escape. Each of the twenty went to bed that night more or less weary and ruffled, but sustainedby the sense that a social duty had been performed. Banquets, however, at the worst were only periodical events. Real hospitality was constant and informal.

"Come and dine to-night. Eight o'clock. Pot luck. Don't dress."

"My dear, I am going to bring back two or three men from the House. Don't put off dinner in case we are kept by a division."

"I am afraid I must be going back. I am only paired till eleven. Good-night, and so many thanks."

"Good-night; you will always find some dinner here on Government nights. Do look in again!"

These are the cheerful echoes of parliamentary homes in the older and better days of unostentatious entertaining, and those "pot luck" dinners often played an important part in political manœuvre. Sir George Trevelyan, whose early manhood was passed in the thick of parliamentary society, tells us, in a footnote to "The Ladies in Parliament," that in the season of 1866 there was much gossip over the fact of Lord Russell having entertained Mr. Bright at dinner, and that people were constantly—

"Discussing whether Bright can scan and understand the linesAbout the Wooden Horse of Troy; and when and where he dines.Though gentlemen should blush to talk as if they cared a buttonBecause one night in Chesham Place he ate his slice of mutton."

Quite apart from parliamentary strategy, impromptu entertaining in what was called "a friendly way" had its special uses in the social system. There is a delicious passage in "Lothair" describing that hero's initiation into an easier and more graceful society than that in which he had been reared: "He had been a guest at the occasional banquets of his uncle, but these were festivals of the Picts and Scots; rude plenty and coarse splendour, with noise instead of conversation, and a tumult of obstructive dependants, who impeded by their want of skill the very convenience which they were purposed to facilitate." An amazing sentence indeed, but like all Lord Beaconsfield's writings, picturesquely descriptive, and happily contrasted with the succeeding scene: "A table covered with flowers, bright with fanciful crystal, and porcelain that had belonged to Sovereigns who had given a name to its colour or its form. As for those present, all seemed grace and gentleness, from the radiant daughters of the house to the noiseless attendants who anticipated all his wants, and sometimes seemed to suggest his wishes."

The mention of "Lothair" reminds people of my date that thirty years ago we knew a house justly famed for the excellent marriages which the daughters made. There banquets were unknown, and even dinners by invitation very rare. The father used to collect young men from Lord's, or the Lobby, or the Club, or whereverhe had been spending the afternoon. Servants were soon dismissed—"It is such a bore to have them staring at one"—and the daughters of the house waited on the guests. Here obviously were matrimonial openings not to be despised; and, even in families where there were no ulterior objects to be served, these free-and-easy entertainings went on from February to July. Short invitations, pleasant company, and genuine friendliness were the characteristics of these gatherings. Very often the dinner was carved on the table. One could ask for a second slice or another wing without feeling greedy, and the claret and amontillado were within the reach of every guest. This, I consider, was genuine hospitality, for it was natural, easy, and unostentatious.

But now, according to all accounts, the spirit of entertaining is utterly changed. A dinner is not so much an opportunity of pleasing your friends as of airing your own magnificence; and ostentation, despicable in itself, is doubly odious because it is emulous. If A has a good cook, B must have a better. If C gave you ortolans stuffed with truffles, D must have truffles stuffed with ortolans. If the E's table is piled with strawberries in April, the F's must retaliate with orchids at a guinea a blossom. G is a little inclined to swagger about his wife's pearl necklace, and H is bound in honour to decorate Mrs. H with arivièrewhich belonged to the crown jewels of France.

And, as with the food and the decorations, soalso with the company. Here, again, Emulous Ostentation carries all before it. Mr. Goldbug is a Yahoo, but he made his millions in South Africa and spends them in Park Lane. Lord Heath is the most abandoned bore in Christendom, but he is an authority at Newmarket. Lady Bellair has had a notoriously chequered career, but she plays bridge in exalted circles. As Lord Crewe sings of a similar enchantress—

"From reflections we shrink;And of comment are chary;

But her face issopink,And it don't seem to vary."

However, she is unquestionably smart; and Goldbug is a useful man to know; and we are not going to be outdone by the Cashingtons, who got Heath to dine with them twice last year. So we invite our guests, not because we like them or admire them, for that in these cases is impossible; not—heaven knows—because they are beautiful or famous or witty; but because they are the right people to have in one's house, and we will have the right people or perish in the attempt.

XLVIIIOSTENTATIONIt is many a long year since I saw the inside of a ballroom, but by all accounts very much the same change has come over the spirit of ball-giving as of dinner-giving. Here again the "Emulous Ostentation" which I have described is the enemy. When I first grew up, there were infinitely more balls than now. From Easter till August there were at least two every night, and a hostess counted herself lucky if she had only one rival to contend with. Between 11p.m.and 2a.m.Grosvenor Place was blocked by the opposing streams of carriages going from Mayfair to Belgravia, and from Belgravia to Mayfair. There were three or four really great Houses—"Houses" with a capital H—such as Grosvenor House, Stafford House, Dudley House, and Montagu House—where a ball could scarcely help being an event—or, as Pennialinus would say, "a function." But, putting these on one side, the great mass of hostesses contrived to give excellent balls, where every one went and every one enjoyed themselves, with very little fuss and no ostentation. The drawing-room of an ordinary house in Belgraviaor Grosvenor Square made a perfectly sufficient ballroom. A good floor, a good band, and plenty of light, were the only essentials of success. Decoration was represented by such quaint devices as pink muslin on the banisters, or green festoons dependent from the chandelier. A good supper was an additional merit; and, if the host produced his best champagne, he was held in just esteem by dancing men. But yet I well remember a cold supper at a ball which the present King and Queen attended, in 1881, and no one grumbled, though perhaps the young bloods thought it a little old-fashioned. The essence of a good ball was not expense or display or overwhelming preparation, but the certainty that you would meet your friends. Boys and girls danced, and married women looked on, or only stole a waltz when their juniors were at supper. In those days a ball was really a merry-making.Nowadays I gather from theMorning Postthat balls are comparatively rare events, but what they lack in frequency they make up in ostentation. As to the sums which the Heits and the Heims, the Le Beers and the De Porters, lavish on one night's entertainment I hear statistical accounts which not only outrage economy but stagger credibility. Here again the rushing flood of ill-gotten gold has overflowed its banks, and polluted the "crystal river of unreproved enjoyment."There is yet another form of entertainmentwhich Emulous Ostentation has destroyed. A few years ago there still were women in London who could hold a "salon." Of these gatherings the principal attraction was the hostess, and, in a secondary degree, the agreeableness of the people whom she could gather round her. Of fuss and finery, decoration and display, there was absolutely nothing. A typical instance of what I mean will perhaps recur to the memory of some who read this chapter. Picture to yourself two not very large and rather dingy rooms. The furniture is dark and old-fashioned—mahogany and rosewood, with here and there a good cabinet or a French armchair. No prettiness of lace and china; no flowers; and not very much light. Books everywhere, some good engravings, a comfortable sofa, and a tray of tea and coffee. That was all. It is difficult to conceive a less ostentatious or a more economical mode of entertaining; yet the lady who presided over that "salon" had been for fifty years one of the most celebrated women in Europe; had been embraced by Napoleon; had flirted with the Allied Sovereigns; had been described by Byron; had discussed scholarship with Grote, and statecraft with Metternich; had sate to Lawrence, and caballed with Antonelli. Even in old age and decrepitude she opened her rooms to her friends every evening in the year, and never, even in the depths of September, found her court deserted. Certainly it was a social triumph, and one hasonly to compare it with the scene in the stockbroker's saloon—the blaze of electric light, the jungle of flowers, the furniture from Sinclair's, the pictures from Christie's—and to contrast the assembled guests. Instead of celebrities, notorieties—woman at once under-dressed and over-dressed; men with cent. per cent. written deep in every line of their expressive countenances; and, at the centre of the throng, a hostess in a diamond crown, who conducts her correspondence by telegraph, because her spelling is a little shaky and mistakes in telegrams are charitably attributed to the clerks.One of the worst properties of Emulous Ostentation is that it naturally affects its victims with an insatiable thirst for money. If Mrs. Tymmyns in Onslow Gardens is to have as good a dinner, and as smart a victoria, and as large a tiara, as her friend Mrs. Goldbug in Park Lane, it is obvious that Mr. Tymmyns must find the money somehow. Who wills the end wills the means; and, if social exigencies demand a larger outlay, the Tymmynses cannot afford to be too scrupulous about their method of providing for it. I suppose it is this consideration which makes us just now a nation of gamblers, whereas our more respectable but less adventurous fathers were well content to be a nation of shopkeepers.Of course, in all ages there has been a gambling clique in society; but in old days it kept itself, as the saying is, to itself. Of necessity it alwayswas on the look-out for neophytes to initiate and to pillage, but the non-gambling majority of society regarded the gambling minority with horror; and a man who palpably meant to make money out of a visit to a country house would probably have been requested to withdraw. "Order a fly for Mr. L. at eleven o'clock," said old Lord Crewe to the butler when a guest had committed a social atrocity under his roof. "Thank you, Lord Crewe," said Mr. L., "but not for me. I am not going to-day." "Oh yes, you are," responded the host, and secreted himself in his private apartments till the offender had been duly extruded. Similar justice would, I think, have been dealt out to a gambler who rooked the young and the inexperienced. Not so to-day; the pigeon, however unfledged and tender, is the appointed prey of the rook, and the venerable bird who does the plucking is entirely undeterred by any considerations of pity, shame, or fear. "Is he any good?" is a question which circulates round the Board of Green Cloth whenever a new face fresh from Oxford or Sandhurst is noted in the social throng. "Oh yes, he's all right; I know his people," may be the cheerful response; or else, in a very different note, "No, he hasn't got a feather to fly with." Fortunate is the youth on whom this disparaging verdict is pronounced, for in that case he may escape the benevolent attentions of the"Many-wintered crowThat leads the gambling rookery home."But even impecuniosity does not always protect the inexperienced. A lady who had lived for some years in the country returned to London not long ago, and, enumerating the social changes which she had observed, she said, "People seem to marry on £500 a year and yet have diamond tiaras." It was, perhaps, a too hasty generalization, but an instance in point immediately recurred to my recollection. A young couple had married with no other means of subsistence than smartness, good looks, and pleasant manners. After a prolonged tour round the country houses of their innumerable friends, they settled down at Woolwich. "Why Woolwich?" was the natural enquiry; and the reason, when at length it came to light, was highly characteristic of the age. It appeared that these kind young people used to give nice little evening parties, invite the "Gentlemen Cadets" from Woolwich Academy, and make them play cards for money. The device of setting up housekeeping on the pocket-money of babes and sucklings is thoroughly symptomatic of our decadence. Emulous Ostentation makes every one want more money than he has, and at the same time drugs all scruples of conscience as to the method of obtaining it.

OSTENTATION

It is many a long year since I saw the inside of a ballroom, but by all accounts very much the same change has come over the spirit of ball-giving as of dinner-giving. Here again the "Emulous Ostentation" which I have described is the enemy. When I first grew up, there were infinitely more balls than now. From Easter till August there were at least two every night, and a hostess counted herself lucky if she had only one rival to contend with. Between 11p.m.and 2a.m.Grosvenor Place was blocked by the opposing streams of carriages going from Mayfair to Belgravia, and from Belgravia to Mayfair. There were three or four really great Houses—"Houses" with a capital H—such as Grosvenor House, Stafford House, Dudley House, and Montagu House—where a ball could scarcely help being an event—or, as Pennialinus would say, "a function." But, putting these on one side, the great mass of hostesses contrived to give excellent balls, where every one went and every one enjoyed themselves, with very little fuss and no ostentation. The drawing-room of an ordinary house in Belgraviaor Grosvenor Square made a perfectly sufficient ballroom. A good floor, a good band, and plenty of light, were the only essentials of success. Decoration was represented by such quaint devices as pink muslin on the banisters, or green festoons dependent from the chandelier. A good supper was an additional merit; and, if the host produced his best champagne, he was held in just esteem by dancing men. But yet I well remember a cold supper at a ball which the present King and Queen attended, in 1881, and no one grumbled, though perhaps the young bloods thought it a little old-fashioned. The essence of a good ball was not expense or display or overwhelming preparation, but the certainty that you would meet your friends. Boys and girls danced, and married women looked on, or only stole a waltz when their juniors were at supper. In those days a ball was really a merry-making.

Nowadays I gather from theMorning Postthat balls are comparatively rare events, but what they lack in frequency they make up in ostentation. As to the sums which the Heits and the Heims, the Le Beers and the De Porters, lavish on one night's entertainment I hear statistical accounts which not only outrage economy but stagger credibility. Here again the rushing flood of ill-gotten gold has overflowed its banks, and polluted the "crystal river of unreproved enjoyment."

There is yet another form of entertainmentwhich Emulous Ostentation has destroyed. A few years ago there still were women in London who could hold a "salon." Of these gatherings the principal attraction was the hostess, and, in a secondary degree, the agreeableness of the people whom she could gather round her. Of fuss and finery, decoration and display, there was absolutely nothing. A typical instance of what I mean will perhaps recur to the memory of some who read this chapter. Picture to yourself two not very large and rather dingy rooms. The furniture is dark and old-fashioned—mahogany and rosewood, with here and there a good cabinet or a French armchair. No prettiness of lace and china; no flowers; and not very much light. Books everywhere, some good engravings, a comfortable sofa, and a tray of tea and coffee. That was all. It is difficult to conceive a less ostentatious or a more economical mode of entertaining; yet the lady who presided over that "salon" had been for fifty years one of the most celebrated women in Europe; had been embraced by Napoleon; had flirted with the Allied Sovereigns; had been described by Byron; had discussed scholarship with Grote, and statecraft with Metternich; had sate to Lawrence, and caballed with Antonelli. Even in old age and decrepitude she opened her rooms to her friends every evening in the year, and never, even in the depths of September, found her court deserted. Certainly it was a social triumph, and one hasonly to compare it with the scene in the stockbroker's saloon—the blaze of electric light, the jungle of flowers, the furniture from Sinclair's, the pictures from Christie's—and to contrast the assembled guests. Instead of celebrities, notorieties—woman at once under-dressed and over-dressed; men with cent. per cent. written deep in every line of their expressive countenances; and, at the centre of the throng, a hostess in a diamond crown, who conducts her correspondence by telegraph, because her spelling is a little shaky and mistakes in telegrams are charitably attributed to the clerks.

One of the worst properties of Emulous Ostentation is that it naturally affects its victims with an insatiable thirst for money. If Mrs. Tymmyns in Onslow Gardens is to have as good a dinner, and as smart a victoria, and as large a tiara, as her friend Mrs. Goldbug in Park Lane, it is obvious that Mr. Tymmyns must find the money somehow. Who wills the end wills the means; and, if social exigencies demand a larger outlay, the Tymmynses cannot afford to be too scrupulous about their method of providing for it. I suppose it is this consideration which makes us just now a nation of gamblers, whereas our more respectable but less adventurous fathers were well content to be a nation of shopkeepers.

Of course, in all ages there has been a gambling clique in society; but in old days it kept itself, as the saying is, to itself. Of necessity it alwayswas on the look-out for neophytes to initiate and to pillage, but the non-gambling majority of society regarded the gambling minority with horror; and a man who palpably meant to make money out of a visit to a country house would probably have been requested to withdraw. "Order a fly for Mr. L. at eleven o'clock," said old Lord Crewe to the butler when a guest had committed a social atrocity under his roof. "Thank you, Lord Crewe," said Mr. L., "but not for me. I am not going to-day." "Oh yes, you are," responded the host, and secreted himself in his private apartments till the offender had been duly extruded. Similar justice would, I think, have been dealt out to a gambler who rooked the young and the inexperienced. Not so to-day; the pigeon, however unfledged and tender, is the appointed prey of the rook, and the venerable bird who does the plucking is entirely undeterred by any considerations of pity, shame, or fear. "Is he any good?" is a question which circulates round the Board of Green Cloth whenever a new face fresh from Oxford or Sandhurst is noted in the social throng. "Oh yes, he's all right; I know his people," may be the cheerful response; or else, in a very different note, "No, he hasn't got a feather to fly with." Fortunate is the youth on whom this disparaging verdict is pronounced, for in that case he may escape the benevolent attentions of the

"Many-wintered crow

That leads the gambling rookery home."

But even impecuniosity does not always protect the inexperienced. A lady who had lived for some years in the country returned to London not long ago, and, enumerating the social changes which she had observed, she said, "People seem to marry on £500 a year and yet have diamond tiaras." It was, perhaps, a too hasty generalization, but an instance in point immediately recurred to my recollection. A young couple had married with no other means of subsistence than smartness, good looks, and pleasant manners. After a prolonged tour round the country houses of their innumerable friends, they settled down at Woolwich. "Why Woolwich?" was the natural enquiry; and the reason, when at length it came to light, was highly characteristic of the age. It appeared that these kind young people used to give nice little evening parties, invite the "Gentlemen Cadets" from Woolwich Academy, and make them play cards for money. The device of setting up housekeeping on the pocket-money of babes and sucklings is thoroughly symptomatic of our decadence. Emulous Ostentation makes every one want more money than he has, and at the same time drugs all scruples of conscience as to the method of obtaining it.

XLIXPRINCIPLE AND PREJUDICEMr. J. A. Froude once told me that he did not in the least mind the accusation which was brought against him (certainly not without reason) of being prejudiced. "A good stiff prejudice," he said, "is a very useful thing. It is like a rusty weathercock. It will yield to a strong and long-continued blast of conviction, but it does not veer round and round in compliance with every shifting current of opinion."What Mr. Froude expressed other people felt, though perhaps they would not have cared to avow it so honestly.One of the most notable changes which I have seen is the decay of prejudice. In old days people felt strongly and spoke strongly, and acted as they spoke. In every controversy they were absolutely certain that they were right and that the other side was wrong, and they did not mince their words when they expressed their opinions.The first Lord Leicester of the present creation (1775-1844) told my father (1807-1894) that, when he was a boy, his grandfather had taken him on his knee and said, "Now, my dear Tom, whateverelse you do in life, mind you never trust a Tory;" and Lord Leicester added, "I never have, and, by George, I never will." On the other hand, when Dr. Longley, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, did homage on his appointment to the see of Ripon, King William IV. said, "Bishop of Ripon, I charge you, as you shall answer before Almighty God, that you never by word or deed give encouragement to those d—— d Whigs, who would upset the Church of England."John Keble, the gentle saint of the Tractarian movement, when he saw the Whigs preparing to attack the property of the Church, proclaimed that the time had come when "scoundrels should be called scoundrels." And the Tractarians had no monopoly of vigorous invective, for, when their famous "Tract XC." incurred the censure of an Evangelical dean, he urbanely remarked that "he would be sorry to trust the author of that tract with his purse."Macaulay, on the morning after a vital division, in which the Whigs had saved their places by seventy-nine votes, wrote triumphantly to his sister—"So hang the dirty Tories, and let them starve and pine,And hurrah! for the majority of glorious seventy-nine."The same cordial partisan wrote of a political opponent that he was "a bad, a very bad, man; a disgrace to politics and to literature;" and, of an acquaintance who had offended him socially,"his powers gone; his spite immortal—a dead nettle."The great and good Lord Shaftesbury, repudiating the theology of "Ecce Homo," pronounced it "the most pestilential book ever vomited from the jaws of Hell;" and, dividing his political favours with admirable impartiality, he denounced "the brazen faces, low insults, and accursed effrontery" of the Radicals; declared that Mr. Gladstone's "public life had long been an effort to retain his principles and yet not lose his position;" and dismissed Lord Beaconsfield as "a leper, without principle, without feeling, without regard to anything, human or divine, beyond his personal ambition." In the same spirit of hearty prejudice, Bishop Wilberforce deplored the political exigencies which had driven his friend Gladstone into "the foul arms of the Whigs." In the opposite camp was ranged a lady, well remembered in the inner circles of Whiggery, who never would enter a four-wheeled cab until she had elicited from the driver that hewas nota Puseyite andwasa Whig."Mamma," asked a little girl of Whig parentage, who from her cradle had heard nothing but denunciation of her father's political opponents, "are Tories born wicked, or do they grow wicked afterwards?" And her mother judiciously replied, "My dear, they are born wicked and grow worse."But alas! they are "gone down to Hades,even many stalwart sons of heroes,"—with King William at their head, and Lord Shaftesbury and Lord Leicester, and Keble and Macaulay and Froude in his wake—men who knew what they believed, and, knowing it, were not ashamed to avow it, and saw little to praise or like in the adherents of a contrary opinion.They are gone, and we are left—an unprejudiced, but an invertebrate and a flaccid, generation. No one seems to believe anything very firmly. No one has the slightest notion of putting himself to any inconvenience for his belief. No one dreams of disliking or distrusting a political or religious opponent, or of treating difference of opinion as a line of social cleavage.In old days, King Leopold of Belgium told Bishop Wilberforce that "the only position for a Church was to say, 'Believe this or you are damned.'" To-day nothing in religion is regarded as unquestionably true. When the late Archbishop Benson first became acquainted with society in London, he asked, in shocked amazement, "What do these people believe?"—and no very satisfactory answer was forthcoming. If society has any religious beliefs (and this is more than questionable), it holds them with the loosest grasp, and is on the easiest terms of intercourse with every other belief and unbelief. The most fashionable teachers of religion have one eye nervously fixed on the ever-shifting currents of negation, talk plausibly about puttingthe Faith in its proper relation with modern thought, and toil panting in the wake of science; only to find each fresh theory exploded just at the moment when they have managed to apprehend it.We used to be taught in our nurseries that, when "Old Daddy Longlegs wouldn't say his prayers," it was our duty to "Take him by the left leg and throw him downstairs;" and the student of folklore will be pleased to observe in this ditty the immemorial inclination of mankind to punish people who will not square their religion with ours. The spirit of religious persecution dies hard, but the decay of prejudice has sapped its strength. It does not thrive in the atmosphere of modern indifferentism, and admirable ladies who believe that Ritualists ride donkeys on Palm Sunday and sacrifice lambs on Good Friday find it difficult to revive the cry of "No Popery" with any practical effect.The decay of prejudice in the sphere of politics is even more remarkable than in that of religion. In old days, political agreement was a strong and a constraining bond. When people saw a clear right and wrong in politics, they governed their private as well as their public life accordingly. People who held the same political beliefs lived and died together. In society and hospitality, in work and recreation, in journalism and literature—even in such seemingly indifferent matters as art and the drama—they were closely and permanently associated.Eton was supposed to cherish a romantic affection for the Stuarts, and therefore to be a fit training place for sucking Tories; Harrow had always been Hanoverian, and therefore attracted little Whigs to its Hill. Oxford, with its Caroline theology and Jacobite tradition, was the Tory university; Cambridge was the nursing-mother of Whigs, until Edinburgh, under the influence of Jeffrey and Brougham, tore her babes from her breast. In society you must choose between the Duchess of Devonshire and the Duchess of Gordon, or, in a later generation, between Lady Holland and Lady Jersey. In clubland the width of St. James's Street marked a dividing line of abysmal depth; and to this day "Grillon's" remains the memorial of an attempt, then unique, to bring politicians of opposite sides together in social intercourse. On the one side stood Scott—where Burke had stood before him—the Guardian Angel of Monarchy and Aristocracy: on the other were Shelley and Byron, and (till they turned their coats) the emancipated singers of Freedom and Humanity. The two political parties had even their favourite actors, and the Tories swore by Kemble while the Whigs roared for Kean.Then, as now, the Tories were a wealthy, powerful, and highly-organized confederacy. The Whigs were notoriously a family party. From John, Lord Gower, who died in 1754, and was the great-great-great-grandfather of the present Duke of Sutherland, descend all the Gowers,Levesons, Howards, Cavendishes, Grosvenors, Harcourts, and Russells who walk on the face of the earth. It is a goodly company. Well might Thackeray exclaim, "I'm not a Whig; but oh, how I should like to be one!"Lord Beaconsfield described in "Coningsby" how the Radical manufacturer, sending his boy to Eton, charged him to form no intimacies with his father's hereditary foes. This may have been a flight of fancy; but certainly, when a lad was going to Oxford or Cambridge, his parents and family friends would warn him against entering into friendships with the other side. The University Clubs which he joined and the votes which he gave at the Union were watched with anxious care. He was early initiated into the political society to which his father belonged. Extraneous intimacies were regarded with the most suspicious anxiety. Mothers did all they knew to make their darlings acquainted with daughters of families whose political faith was pure, and I have myself learned, by not remote tradition, the indignant horror which pervaded a great Whig family when the heir-presumptive to its honours married the daughter of a Tory Lord Chamberlain. "That girl will ruin the politics of the family and undo the work of two hundred years" was the prophecy; and I have seen it fulfilled.

PRINCIPLE AND PREJUDICE

Mr. J. A. Froude once told me that he did not in the least mind the accusation which was brought against him (certainly not without reason) of being prejudiced. "A good stiff prejudice," he said, "is a very useful thing. It is like a rusty weathercock. It will yield to a strong and long-continued blast of conviction, but it does not veer round and round in compliance with every shifting current of opinion."

What Mr. Froude expressed other people felt, though perhaps they would not have cared to avow it so honestly.

One of the most notable changes which I have seen is the decay of prejudice. In old days people felt strongly and spoke strongly, and acted as they spoke. In every controversy they were absolutely certain that they were right and that the other side was wrong, and they did not mince their words when they expressed their opinions.

The first Lord Leicester of the present creation (1775-1844) told my father (1807-1894) that, when he was a boy, his grandfather had taken him on his knee and said, "Now, my dear Tom, whateverelse you do in life, mind you never trust a Tory;" and Lord Leicester added, "I never have, and, by George, I never will." On the other hand, when Dr. Longley, afterwards Archbishop of Canterbury, did homage on his appointment to the see of Ripon, King William IV. said, "Bishop of Ripon, I charge you, as you shall answer before Almighty God, that you never by word or deed give encouragement to those d—— d Whigs, who would upset the Church of England."

John Keble, the gentle saint of the Tractarian movement, when he saw the Whigs preparing to attack the property of the Church, proclaimed that the time had come when "scoundrels should be called scoundrels." And the Tractarians had no monopoly of vigorous invective, for, when their famous "Tract XC." incurred the censure of an Evangelical dean, he urbanely remarked that "he would be sorry to trust the author of that tract with his purse."

Macaulay, on the morning after a vital division, in which the Whigs had saved their places by seventy-nine votes, wrote triumphantly to his sister—

"So hang the dirty Tories, and let them starve and pine,And hurrah! for the majority of glorious seventy-nine."

The same cordial partisan wrote of a political opponent that he was "a bad, a very bad, man; a disgrace to politics and to literature;" and, of an acquaintance who had offended him socially,"his powers gone; his spite immortal—a dead nettle."

The great and good Lord Shaftesbury, repudiating the theology of "Ecce Homo," pronounced it "the most pestilential book ever vomited from the jaws of Hell;" and, dividing his political favours with admirable impartiality, he denounced "the brazen faces, low insults, and accursed effrontery" of the Radicals; declared that Mr. Gladstone's "public life had long been an effort to retain his principles and yet not lose his position;" and dismissed Lord Beaconsfield as "a leper, without principle, without feeling, without regard to anything, human or divine, beyond his personal ambition." In the same spirit of hearty prejudice, Bishop Wilberforce deplored the political exigencies which had driven his friend Gladstone into "the foul arms of the Whigs." In the opposite camp was ranged a lady, well remembered in the inner circles of Whiggery, who never would enter a four-wheeled cab until she had elicited from the driver that hewas nota Puseyite andwasa Whig.

"Mamma," asked a little girl of Whig parentage, who from her cradle had heard nothing but denunciation of her father's political opponents, "are Tories born wicked, or do they grow wicked afterwards?" And her mother judiciously replied, "My dear, they are born wicked and grow worse."

But alas! they are "gone down to Hades,even many stalwart sons of heroes,"—with King William at their head, and Lord Shaftesbury and Lord Leicester, and Keble and Macaulay and Froude in his wake—men who knew what they believed, and, knowing it, were not ashamed to avow it, and saw little to praise or like in the adherents of a contrary opinion.

They are gone, and we are left—an unprejudiced, but an invertebrate and a flaccid, generation. No one seems to believe anything very firmly. No one has the slightest notion of putting himself to any inconvenience for his belief. No one dreams of disliking or distrusting a political or religious opponent, or of treating difference of opinion as a line of social cleavage.

In old days, King Leopold of Belgium told Bishop Wilberforce that "the only position for a Church was to say, 'Believe this or you are damned.'" To-day nothing in religion is regarded as unquestionably true. When the late Archbishop Benson first became acquainted with society in London, he asked, in shocked amazement, "What do these people believe?"—and no very satisfactory answer was forthcoming. If society has any religious beliefs (and this is more than questionable), it holds them with the loosest grasp, and is on the easiest terms of intercourse with every other belief and unbelief. The most fashionable teachers of religion have one eye nervously fixed on the ever-shifting currents of negation, talk plausibly about puttingthe Faith in its proper relation with modern thought, and toil panting in the wake of science; only to find each fresh theory exploded just at the moment when they have managed to apprehend it.

We used to be taught in our nurseries that, when "Old Daddy Longlegs wouldn't say his prayers," it was our duty to "Take him by the left leg and throw him downstairs;" and the student of folklore will be pleased to observe in this ditty the immemorial inclination of mankind to punish people who will not square their religion with ours. The spirit of religious persecution dies hard, but the decay of prejudice has sapped its strength. It does not thrive in the atmosphere of modern indifferentism, and admirable ladies who believe that Ritualists ride donkeys on Palm Sunday and sacrifice lambs on Good Friday find it difficult to revive the cry of "No Popery" with any practical effect.

The decay of prejudice in the sphere of politics is even more remarkable than in that of religion. In old days, political agreement was a strong and a constraining bond. When people saw a clear right and wrong in politics, they governed their private as well as their public life accordingly. People who held the same political beliefs lived and died together. In society and hospitality, in work and recreation, in journalism and literature—even in such seemingly indifferent matters as art and the drama—they were closely and permanently associated.

Eton was supposed to cherish a romantic affection for the Stuarts, and therefore to be a fit training place for sucking Tories; Harrow had always been Hanoverian, and therefore attracted little Whigs to its Hill. Oxford, with its Caroline theology and Jacobite tradition, was the Tory university; Cambridge was the nursing-mother of Whigs, until Edinburgh, under the influence of Jeffrey and Brougham, tore her babes from her breast. In society you must choose between the Duchess of Devonshire and the Duchess of Gordon, or, in a later generation, between Lady Holland and Lady Jersey. In clubland the width of St. James's Street marked a dividing line of abysmal depth; and to this day "Grillon's" remains the memorial of an attempt, then unique, to bring politicians of opposite sides together in social intercourse. On the one side stood Scott—where Burke had stood before him—the Guardian Angel of Monarchy and Aristocracy: on the other were Shelley and Byron, and (till they turned their coats) the emancipated singers of Freedom and Humanity. The two political parties had even their favourite actors, and the Tories swore by Kemble while the Whigs roared for Kean.

Then, as now, the Tories were a wealthy, powerful, and highly-organized confederacy. The Whigs were notoriously a family party. From John, Lord Gower, who died in 1754, and was the great-great-great-grandfather of the present Duke of Sutherland, descend all the Gowers,Levesons, Howards, Cavendishes, Grosvenors, Harcourts, and Russells who walk on the face of the earth. It is a goodly company. Well might Thackeray exclaim, "I'm not a Whig; but oh, how I should like to be one!"

Lord Beaconsfield described in "Coningsby" how the Radical manufacturer, sending his boy to Eton, charged him to form no intimacies with his father's hereditary foes. This may have been a flight of fancy; but certainly, when a lad was going to Oxford or Cambridge, his parents and family friends would warn him against entering into friendships with the other side. The University Clubs which he joined and the votes which he gave at the Union were watched with anxious care. He was early initiated into the political society to which his father belonged. Extraneous intimacies were regarded with the most suspicious anxiety. Mothers did all they knew to make their darlings acquainted with daughters of families whose political faith was pure, and I have myself learned, by not remote tradition, the indignant horror which pervaded a great Whig family when the heir-presumptive to its honours married the daughter of a Tory Lord Chamberlain. "That girl will ruin the politics of the family and undo the work of two hundred years" was the prophecy; and I have seen it fulfilled.

LCULTUREOne of the social changes which most impresses me is the decay of intellectual cultivation. This may sound paradoxical in an age which habitually talks so much about Education and Culture; but I am persuaded that it is true. Dilettantism is universal, and a smattering of erudition, infinitely more offensive than honest and manly ignorance, has usurped the place which was formerly occupied by genuine and liberal learning. My own view of the subject is probably tinged by the fact that I was born a Whig and brought up in a Whiggish society; for the Whigs were rather specially the allies of learning, and made it a point of honour to know, though never to parade, the best that has been thought and written. Very likely they had no monopoly of culture, and the Tories were just as well-informed. But a man "belongs to his belongings," and one can only describe what one has seen; and here the contrast between Past and Present is palpable enough. I am not now thinking of professed scholars and students, such as Lord Stanhope and Sir Charles Bunbury, or of professed blue-stockings, such asBarbarina Lady Dacre and Georgiana Lady Chatterton; but of ordinary men and women of good family and good position, who had received the usual education of their class and had profited by it.Mr. Gladstone used to say that, in his schooldays at Eton, it was possible to learn much or to learn nothing, but it was not possible to learn superficially. And one saw the same in afterlife. What people professed to know they knew. The affectation of culture was despised; and ignorance, where it existed, was honestly confessed. For example, every one knew Italian, but no one pretended to know German. I remember men who had never been to a University but had passed straight from a Public School to a Cavalry Regiment or the House of Commons, and who yet could quote Horace as easily as the present generation quotes Kipling. These people inherited the traditions of Mrs. Montagu, who "vindicated the genius of Shakespeare against the calumnies of Voltaire," and they knew the greatest poet of all time with an absolute ease and familiarity. They did not trouble themselves about various readings and corrupt texts and difficult passages. They had nothing in common with that true father of all Shakespearean criticism, Mr. Curdle in "Nicholas Nickleby," who had written a treatise on the question whether Juliet's nurse's husband was really "a merry man" or whether it was merelyhis widow's affectionate partiality that induced her so to report him. But they knew the whole mass of the plays with a wide and generous intimacy; their speech was saturated with the immortal diction, and Hamlet's speculations were their nearest approach to metaphysics.Broadly speaking, all educated people knew the English poets down to the end of the eighteenth century. Byron and Moore were enjoyed with a sort of furtive and fearful pleasure; and Wordsworth was tolerated. Every one knew Scott's novels by heart, and had his or her favourite heroine and hero.Then, again, all educated people knew history in a broad and comprehensive way. They did not concern themselves about ethnological theories, influences of race and climate and geography, streams of tendency, and the operation of unseen laws; but they knew all about the great people and the great events of time. They were conversant with all that was concrete and ascertainable; and they took sides as eagerly and as definitely in the strifes of Yorkist and Lancastrian, Protestant and Papist, Roundhead and Cavalier, as in the controversies over the Reform Bill or the Repeal of the Corn Laws.Then, again, all educated people knew the laws of architecture and of painting; and, though it must be confessed that in these respects their views were not very original, still they were founded on first-hand knowledge of famousmodels, and, though conventional, were never ignorant.But it will be said that all this represents no very overwhelming mass of culture, and that, if these were all the accomplishments which the last generation had to boast of, their successors have no reason to dread comparison.Well, I expressly said that I was not describing learned or even exceptionally well-read people, but merely the general level of educated society; and that level is, I am persuaded, infinitely lower than it was in former generations. Of course there are instances to the contrary which perplex and disturb the public judgment, and give rise to the delusion that this is a learned age. Thus we have in society and politics such scholars as Lord Milner and Mr. Asquith and Mr. Herbert Paul; but then there have always been some scholars in public life, so there is nothing remarkable in the persistence of the type; whereas, on the other hand, the system of smattering and top-dressing which pervades Universities and Public Schools produces an ever-increasing crop of gentlemen who, like Mr. Riley in "The Mill on the Floss," have brought away with them from Oxford or Cambridge a general sense of knowing Latin, though their comprehension of any particular Latin is not ready.It is, I believe, generally admitted that we speak French less fluently and less idiomatically than our fathers. The "barbarous neglect" of Italian,which used to rouse Mr. Gladstone's indignation, is now complete; and an even superstitious respect for the German language is accompanied by a curious ignorance of German literature. I remember an excellent picture inPunchwhich depicted that ideal representative of skin-deep culture—the Rev. Robert Elsmere—on his knees before the sceptical squire, saying, "Pray, pray, don't mention the name of another German writer, or I shall have to resign my living."Then, again, as regards women; of whom, quite as much as of men, I was thinking when I described the culture of bygone society. Here and there we see startling instances of erudition which throw a reflected and undeserved glory upon the undistinguished average. Thus we have seen a lady Senior Wrangler and a lady Senior Classic, and I myself have the honour of knowing a sweet girl-graduate with golden hair, who got two Firsts at Oxford.The face of the earth is covered with Girls' High Schools, and Women's Colleges standing where they ought not. I am told, but do not know, that girl-undergraduates are permitted to witness physiological experiments in the torture-dens of science; and a complete emancipation in the matter of reading has introduced women to regions of thought and feeling which in old days were the peculiar domain of men. The results are not far to seek.One lady boldly takes the field with an assaulton Christianity, and her apparatus of belated criticism and second-hand learning sets all society agape. Another fills a novel with morbid pathology, slays the villain by heart-disease, or makes the heroine interesting with phthisis; and people, forgetting Mr. Casaubon and Clifford Gray, exclaim, "How marvellous! This is, indeed, original research." A third, a fourth, and a fifth devote themselves to the task of readjusting the relation of the sexes, and fill their passionate volumes with seduction and lubricity. And here, again, just because our mothers did not traffic in these wares, the undiscerning public thinks that it has discovered a new vein of real though unsavoury learning, and ladies say, "It is not exactly a pleasant book, but one cannot help admiring the power."Now I submit that these abnormalities are no substitute for decent and reasonable culture. Pedantry is not learning; and a vast deal of specialism, "mugged-up," as boys say, at the British Museum and the London Library, may co-exist with a profound ignorance of all that is really worth knowing. It sounds very intellectual to theorize about the authorship of the Fourth Gospel, and to scoff at St. John's "senile iterations and contorted metaphysics"; but, when a clergyman read St. Paul's eulogy on Charity instead of the address at the end of a wedding, one of his hearers said, "How very appropriate that was! Where did you get it from?"We can all patter about the traces of Bacon's influence in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," and ransack our family histories for the original of "Mr. W. H." But, when "Cymbeline" was put on the stage, society was startled to find that the title-rôle was not a woman's. A year or two ago some excellent scenes from Jane Austen's novels were given in a Belgravian drawing-room, and a lady of the highest notoriety, enthusiastically praising the performance, enquired who was the author of the dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood, and whether he had written anything else.I have known in these later years a judge who had never seen the view from Richmond Hill; a publicist who had never heard of Lord Althorp; and an authoress who did not know the name of Izaak Walton. But probably the most typical illustration of modern culture was the reply of a lady who had been enthusing over the Wagnerian Cycle, and, when I asked her to tell me quite honestly, as between old friends, if she really enjoyed it, replied, "Oh yes! I think one likes Wagner—doesn't one?"

CULTURE

One of the social changes which most impresses me is the decay of intellectual cultivation. This may sound paradoxical in an age which habitually talks so much about Education and Culture; but I am persuaded that it is true. Dilettantism is universal, and a smattering of erudition, infinitely more offensive than honest and manly ignorance, has usurped the place which was formerly occupied by genuine and liberal learning. My own view of the subject is probably tinged by the fact that I was born a Whig and brought up in a Whiggish society; for the Whigs were rather specially the allies of learning, and made it a point of honour to know, though never to parade, the best that has been thought and written. Very likely they had no monopoly of culture, and the Tories were just as well-informed. But a man "belongs to his belongings," and one can only describe what one has seen; and here the contrast between Past and Present is palpable enough. I am not now thinking of professed scholars and students, such as Lord Stanhope and Sir Charles Bunbury, or of professed blue-stockings, such asBarbarina Lady Dacre and Georgiana Lady Chatterton; but of ordinary men and women of good family and good position, who had received the usual education of their class and had profited by it.

Mr. Gladstone used to say that, in his schooldays at Eton, it was possible to learn much or to learn nothing, but it was not possible to learn superficially. And one saw the same in afterlife. What people professed to know they knew. The affectation of culture was despised; and ignorance, where it existed, was honestly confessed. For example, every one knew Italian, but no one pretended to know German. I remember men who had never been to a University but had passed straight from a Public School to a Cavalry Regiment or the House of Commons, and who yet could quote Horace as easily as the present generation quotes Kipling. These people inherited the traditions of Mrs. Montagu, who "vindicated the genius of Shakespeare against the calumnies of Voltaire," and they knew the greatest poet of all time with an absolute ease and familiarity. They did not trouble themselves about various readings and corrupt texts and difficult passages. They had nothing in common with that true father of all Shakespearean criticism, Mr. Curdle in "Nicholas Nickleby," who had written a treatise on the question whether Juliet's nurse's husband was really "a merry man" or whether it was merelyhis widow's affectionate partiality that induced her so to report him. But they knew the whole mass of the plays with a wide and generous intimacy; their speech was saturated with the immortal diction, and Hamlet's speculations were their nearest approach to metaphysics.

Broadly speaking, all educated people knew the English poets down to the end of the eighteenth century. Byron and Moore were enjoyed with a sort of furtive and fearful pleasure; and Wordsworth was tolerated. Every one knew Scott's novels by heart, and had his or her favourite heroine and hero.

Then, again, all educated people knew history in a broad and comprehensive way. They did not concern themselves about ethnological theories, influences of race and climate and geography, streams of tendency, and the operation of unseen laws; but they knew all about the great people and the great events of time. They were conversant with all that was concrete and ascertainable; and they took sides as eagerly and as definitely in the strifes of Yorkist and Lancastrian, Protestant and Papist, Roundhead and Cavalier, as in the controversies over the Reform Bill or the Repeal of the Corn Laws.

Then, again, all educated people knew the laws of architecture and of painting; and, though it must be confessed that in these respects their views were not very original, still they were founded on first-hand knowledge of famousmodels, and, though conventional, were never ignorant.

But it will be said that all this represents no very overwhelming mass of culture, and that, if these were all the accomplishments which the last generation had to boast of, their successors have no reason to dread comparison.

Well, I expressly said that I was not describing learned or even exceptionally well-read people, but merely the general level of educated society; and that level is, I am persuaded, infinitely lower than it was in former generations. Of course there are instances to the contrary which perplex and disturb the public judgment, and give rise to the delusion that this is a learned age. Thus we have in society and politics such scholars as Lord Milner and Mr. Asquith and Mr. Herbert Paul; but then there have always been some scholars in public life, so there is nothing remarkable in the persistence of the type; whereas, on the other hand, the system of smattering and top-dressing which pervades Universities and Public Schools produces an ever-increasing crop of gentlemen who, like Mr. Riley in "The Mill on the Floss," have brought away with them from Oxford or Cambridge a general sense of knowing Latin, though their comprehension of any particular Latin is not ready.

It is, I believe, generally admitted that we speak French less fluently and less idiomatically than our fathers. The "barbarous neglect" of Italian,which used to rouse Mr. Gladstone's indignation, is now complete; and an even superstitious respect for the German language is accompanied by a curious ignorance of German literature. I remember an excellent picture inPunchwhich depicted that ideal representative of skin-deep culture—the Rev. Robert Elsmere—on his knees before the sceptical squire, saying, "Pray, pray, don't mention the name of another German writer, or I shall have to resign my living."

Then, again, as regards women; of whom, quite as much as of men, I was thinking when I described the culture of bygone society. Here and there we see startling instances of erudition which throw a reflected and undeserved glory upon the undistinguished average. Thus we have seen a lady Senior Wrangler and a lady Senior Classic, and I myself have the honour of knowing a sweet girl-graduate with golden hair, who got two Firsts at Oxford.

The face of the earth is covered with Girls' High Schools, and Women's Colleges standing where they ought not. I am told, but do not know, that girl-undergraduates are permitted to witness physiological experiments in the torture-dens of science; and a complete emancipation in the matter of reading has introduced women to regions of thought and feeling which in old days were the peculiar domain of men. The results are not far to seek.

One lady boldly takes the field with an assaulton Christianity, and her apparatus of belated criticism and second-hand learning sets all society agape. Another fills a novel with morbid pathology, slays the villain by heart-disease, or makes the heroine interesting with phthisis; and people, forgetting Mr. Casaubon and Clifford Gray, exclaim, "How marvellous! This is, indeed, original research." A third, a fourth, and a fifth devote themselves to the task of readjusting the relation of the sexes, and fill their passionate volumes with seduction and lubricity. And here, again, just because our mothers did not traffic in these wares, the undiscerning public thinks that it has discovered a new vein of real though unsavoury learning, and ladies say, "It is not exactly a pleasant book, but one cannot help admiring the power."

Now I submit that these abnormalities are no substitute for decent and reasonable culture. Pedantry is not learning; and a vast deal of specialism, "mugged-up," as boys say, at the British Museum and the London Library, may co-exist with a profound ignorance of all that is really worth knowing. It sounds very intellectual to theorize about the authorship of the Fourth Gospel, and to scoff at St. John's "senile iterations and contorted metaphysics"; but, when a clergyman read St. Paul's eulogy on Charity instead of the address at the end of a wedding, one of his hearers said, "How very appropriate that was! Where did you get it from?"

We can all patter about the traces of Bacon's influence in "The Merry Wives of Windsor," and ransack our family histories for the original of "Mr. W. H." But, when "Cymbeline" was put on the stage, society was startled to find that the title-rôle was not a woman's. A year or two ago some excellent scenes from Jane Austen's novels were given in a Belgravian drawing-room, and a lady of the highest notoriety, enthusiastically praising the performance, enquired who was the author of the dialogue between Mr. and Mrs. John Dashwood, and whether he had written anything else.

I have known in these later years a judge who had never seen the view from Richmond Hill; a publicist who had never heard of Lord Althorp; and an authoress who did not know the name of Izaak Walton. But probably the most typical illustration of modern culture was the reply of a lady who had been enthusing over the Wagnerian Cycle, and, when I asked her to tell me quite honestly, as between old friends, if she really enjoyed it, replied, "Oh yes! I think one likes Wagner—doesn't one?"

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