AW

E have to glance over sixty years in as many minutes. To read the mere catalogue of characters who figured during that long pe

riod would occupy our allotted time, and we should have all text and no sermon. England has to undergo the revolt of the American colonies; to submit to defeat and separation; to shake under the volcano of the French Revolution; to grapple and fight for the life with her gigantic enemy Napoleon; to gasp and rally after that tremendous struggle. The old society, with its courtly splendors, has to pass away; generations of statesmen to rise and disappear; Pitt to follow Chatham to the tomb; the memory of Rodney and Wolfe to be superseded by Nelson's and Wellington's glory; the old poets who unite us to Queen Anne's time to sink into their graves; Johnson to die, and Scott and Byron to arise; Garrick to delight the world with his dazzling dramatic genius, and Kean to leap on the stage and take possession of the astonished theatre. Steam has to be invented; kings to be beheaded, banished, deposed, restored; Napoleon to be but an episode; and George III. is to be alive through all these varied changes, to accompany his people

through all these revolutions of thought, government, society, to survive out of the old world into ours.

66 That

When I first saw England she was in mourning for the young Princess Charlotte, the hope of the empire. I came from India as a child, and our ship touched at an island on the way home, where my black servant took me a long walk over rocks and hills until we reached a garden where we saw a man walking. is he," said the black man, "that is Bonaparte. He eats three sheep every day, and all the little children he can lay hands on!" There were people in the British dominions besides that poor Calcutta servingman with an equal horror of the Corsican ogre.

now.

With the same childish attendant I remember peeping through the colonnade at Carlton House, and seeing the abode of the great Prince Regent. I can see yet the Guards pacing before the gates of the place. The place? What place? The palace exists no more than the palace of Nebuchadnezzar. It is but a name Where be the sentries who used to salute as the royal chariots drove in and out? The chariots, with the kings inside, have driven to the realms of Pluto; the tall Guards have marched into darkness, and the echoes of their drums are rolling in Hades. Where the palace once stood a hundred little children are paddling up and down the steps to St. James's Park. A score of grave gentlemen are taking their tea at the Athenæum Club; as many grisly warriors are garrisoning the United Service Club opposite. Pall Mall is the great social Exchange of London now, of news, of politics, of scandal, of rumor, lish forum, so to speak, where men discuss the last dispatch from the Crimea, the last speech of Lord

the mart

the Eng

All

Derby, the next move of Lord John. And, now and then, to a few antiquarians, whose thoughts are with the past rather than with the present, it is a memorial of old times and old people, and Pall Mall is our Palmyra. Look! About this spot Tom of Ten Thousand was killed by Königsmarck's gang. In that great red house Gainsborough lived, and Culloden Cumberland, George III.'s uncle. Yonder is Sarah Marlborough's palace, just as it stood when that termagant occupied it. At 25 Walter Scott used to live; at the house now No. 79, and occupied by the Society for the Propagation of the Gospel in Foreign Parts, resided Mrs. Eleanor Gwynn, comedian. How often has Queen Caroline's chair issued from under yonder arch! the men of the Georges have passed up and down the street. It has seen Walpole's chariot and Chatham's sedan; and Fox, Gibbon, Sheridan, on their way to Brookes's; and stately William Pitt stalking on the arm of Dundas; and Hanger and Tom Sheridan reeling out of Raggett's; and Byron limping into Wattier's; and Swift striding out of Bury Street; and Mr. Addison and Dick Steele both, perhaps, a little the better for liquor; and the Prince of Wales and the Duke of York clattering over the pavement; and Johnson counting the posts along the streets, after dawdling before Dodsley's window; and Horry Walpole hobbling into his carriage, with a gimcrack just bought out at Christie's; and George Selwyn sauntering into White's.

In the published letters to George Selwyn we get a mass of correspondence by no means so brilliant and witty as Walpole's, or so bitter and bright as Hervey's, but as interesting, and even more descriptive of the time, because the letters are the work of many hands.

and more

You hear more voices speaking, as it were, natural than Horace's dandified treble and Sporus's malignant whisper. As one reads the Selwyn letters,

-

- as one looks at Reynolds's noble pictures illustrative of those magnificent times and voluptuous people, one almost hears the voice of the dead past; the laughter and the chorus; the toast called over the brimming cups; the shout at the race-course or the gaming-table; the merry joke frankly spoken to the laughing fine lady. How fine those ladies were, those ladies who heard and spoke such coarse jokes! How grand those gentlemen!

I fancy that peculiar product of the past, the fine gentleman, has almost vanished off the face of the earth, and is disappearing like the beaver or the Red Indian. We can't have fine gentlemen any more, because we can't have the society in which they lived. The people will not obey; the parasites will not be as obsequious as formerly; children do not go down on their knees to beg their parents' blessing; chaplains do not say grace and retire before the pudding; servants do not say your honor and your worship at every moment; tradesmen do not stand hat in hand as the gentleman passes; authors do not wait for hours in gentlemen's anterooms with a fulsome dedication, for which they hope to get five guineas from his lordship. In the days when there were fine gentlemen, Mr. Secretary Pitt's under-secretaries did not dare to sit down before him; but Mr. Pitt, in his turn, went down on his gouty knees to George II.; and when George III. spoke a few kind words to him Lord Chatham burst into tears of reverential joy and gratitude; so awful was the idea of the monarch, and so great the distinctions of rank.

Fancy Lord John Russel or Lord Palmerston on their knees while the sovereign was reading a dispatch, or beginning to cry because Prince Albert said something civil!

At the accession of George III. the patricians were yet at the height of their good fortune. Society recognized their superiority, which they themselves pretty calmly took for granted. They inherited not only titles and estates and seats in the House of Peers, but seats in the House of Commons. There were a multitude of government places, and not merely these, but bribes of actual five-hundred-pound notes, which members of the House took not much shame in assuming. Fox went into Parliament at twenty; Pitt was just of age; his father not much older. It was the good time for patricians. Small blame to them if they took and enjoyed, and over-enjoyed, the prizes of politics, the pleasures of social life.

In these letters to Selwyn we are made acquainted with a whole society of these defunct fine gentlemen, and can watch with a curious interest a life which the novel-writers of that time, I think, have scarce touched upon. To Smollett, to Fielding even, a lord was a lord a gorgeous being with a blue ribbon, a coroneted chair, and an immense star on his bosom, to whom commoners paid reverence. Richardson, a man of humbler birth than either of the above two, owned that he was ignorant regarding the manners of the aristocracy, and besought Mrs. Donnellan, a lady who had lived in the great world, to examine a volume of Sir Charles Grandison, and point out any errors which she might see in this particular. Mrs. Donnellan found so many faults that Richardson changed color,