yourself tolerably well, always with the proviso that things English
could be suitable to the foreigner. And certainly, in the 1850's, the
English commanded living conditions more desirable, on the whole, than
Americans did. They understood comfort, as distinct from luxury--a pitch
of civilization to which we are even now but just attaining. There
was not then, and until the millennium there will probably never be,
anything else in the world which so ministered to physical ease and
general satisfaction as did the conditions of life among the English
upper classes. Kublai Khan, in Xanadu, never devised a pleasure-dome so
alluring to mere human nature-especially the English variety of it--as
was afforded by an English nobleman's country-seat. Tennyson's Palace
of Art is very good in poetry, but in real life the most imaginative and
energetic real-estate dealer could not have got so good a price for it
as would gladly have been paid for the dwelling of, for example,
the Duke of Westminster. "How many gardeners have you got?" asked an
American Minister of the duke of the period, after meeting a fresh
gardener, during a long afternoon stroll through the grounds, at each
new turn of the path. "Oh, I don't know--I fancy about forty," replied
the duke, somewhat taken aback by this demand for precise information
concerning the facts of his own establishment, which, until that moment,
he probably supposed had been attended to by Providence. And really,
the machinery of life in such a place is so hidden, it is so nearly
automatic, that one might easily believe it to be operated according to
some law of nature. The servants are (or were) so well trained, they did
their jobs so well, that you were conscious only of their being done;
you never saw them a-doing. The thought happened to cross your mind, of
a morning, that you would like to take a drive at eleven o'clock; you
were not aware that you had mentioned the matter; but at eleven o'clock
the carriage was, somehow, at the door. At dinner, the dishes appeared
and disappeared, the courses succeeded one another, invisibly, or as if
by mere fiat of the will; you must be very wide-awake to catch a footman
or butler meddling with the matter. You went up to the bedroom to change
your dress; you came down with it changed; but only by an effort could
you recall the fact that a viewless but supremely efficient valet had
been concerned in the transaction. The coal fire in the grate needed