that my natural temperament had
something in common with that of Mrs. Rogers. "My spirit" (and my body
too) had been "wounded" by Oxford, and the country acted as both a
poultice and a tonic. But my social instinct was always strong, and
could not be permanently content with "a lodge in the vast wilderness"
of Woburn Park, or dwell for ever in the "boundless contiguity of shade"
which obliterates the line between Beds and Bucks.

I was very careful to observe the doctor's prescription of total
idleness, but I found it was quite as easily obeyed in London as in the
country. For three or four months then, of every year, I forsook the
Home which just now I praised so lavishly, and applied myself,
circumspectly indeed but with keen enjoyment, to the pleasures of the
town.

"_One look back_"--What was London like in those distant days, which
lie, say, between 1876 and 1886?

Structurally and visibly, it was a much uglier place than now. The
immeasurable wastes of Belgravian stucco; the "Baker Streets and Harley
Streets and Wimpole Streets, resembling each other like a large family
of plain children, with Portland Place and Portman Square for their
respectable parents,"[21] were still unbroken by the red brick and
terra-cotta, white stone and green tiles, of our more aesthetic age. The
flower-beds in the Parks were less brilliant, for that "Grand old
gardener," Mr. Harcourt, to whom we are so much indebted, was still at
Eton. Piccadilly had not been widened. The Arches at Hyde Park Corner
had not been re-arranged. Glorious Whitehall was half occupied by shabby
shops; and labyrinths of slums covered the sites of Kingsway and
Shaftesbury Avenue.

But, though London is now a much prettier place than it was then, I
doubt if it is as socially magnificent. The divinity which hedged Queen
Victoria invested her occasional visits to her Capital with a glamour
which it is difficult to explain to those who never felt it. Of beauty,
stature, splendour, and other fancied attributes of Queenship, there was
none; but there was a dignity which can neither be described nor
imitated; and, when her subjects knelt to kiss her hand at Drawing
Room, or Levee, or Investiture, they felt a kind of sacred awe which no
other presence could inspire.

It was, of course, one of the elements of Queen Victoria's mysterious
power, that she was so seldom seen in London. In the early days of her
widowhood she had resigned the command of Society into othe