of a century, what a
silent revolution has been working! how it has separated us from old times
and manners! How it has changed men themselves! I can see old gentlemen
now among us, of perfect good breeding, of quiet lives, with venerable
grey heads, fondling their grandchildren; and look at them, and wonder at
what they were once. That gentleman of the grand old school, when he was
in the 10th Hussars, and dined at the prince's table, would fall under it
night after night. Night after night, that gentleman sat at Brookes's or
Raggett's over the dice. If, in the petulance of play or drink, that
gentleman spoke a sharp word to his neighbour, he and the other would
infallibly go out and try to shoot each other the next morning. That
gentleman would drive his friend Richmond the black boxer down to Moulsey,
and hold his coat, and shout and swear, and hurrah with delight, whilst
the black man was beating Dutch Sam the Jew. That gentleman would take a
manly pleasure in pulling his own coat off, and thrashing a bargeman in a
street row. That gentleman has been in a watchhouse. That gentleman, so
exquisitely polite with ladies in a drawing-room, so loftily courteous, if
he talked now as he used among men in his youth, would swear so as to make
your hair stand on end. I met lately a very old German gentleman, who had
served in our army at the beginning of the century. Since then he has
lived on his own estate, but rarely meeting with an Englishman, whose
language--the language of fifty years ago that is--he possesses perfectly.
When this highly bred old man began to speak English to me, almost every
other word he uttered was an oath: as they used it (they swore dreadfully
in Flanders) with the Duke of York before Valenciennes, or at Carlton
House over the supper and cards. Read Byron's letters. So accustomed is
the young man to oaths that he employs them even in writing to his
friends, and swears by the post. Read his account of the doings of young
men at Cambridge, of the ribald professors, one of whom "could pour out
Greek like a drunken helot", and whose excesses surpassed even those of
the young men. Read Matthews's description of the boyish lordling's
housekeeping at Newstead, the skull-cup passed round, the monks' dresses
from the masquerade warehouse, in which the young scapegraces used to sit
until daylight, chanting appropriate songs round their wine. "We come to
breakfast at two or three o'clock," Matthews says. "There