not, however, so ignorant as might
have been inferred at that time from my somewhat desperate financial
condition.

I had, to begin with, a sort of backstairs knowledge; for in my teens I
struggled for life in the office of an Irish gentleman who acted as land
agent and private banker for many persons of distinction. Now it is
possible for a London author to dine out in the highest circles for
twenty years without learning as much about the human frailties of his
hosts as the family solicitor or (in Ireland) the family land agent
learns in twenty days; and some of this knowledge inevitably reaches his
clerks, especially the clerk who keeps the cash, which was my particular
department. He learns, if capable of the lesson, that the aristocratic
profession has as few geniuses as any other profession; so that if you
want a peerage of more than, say, half a dozen members, you must fill it
up with many common persons, and even with some deplorably mean ones.
For "service is no inheritance" either in the kitchen or the House of
Lords; and the case presented by Mr. Barrie in his play of The Admirable
Crichton, where the butler is the man of quality, and his master, the
Earl, the man of rank, is no fantasy, but a quite common occurrence, and
indeed to some extent an inevitable one, because the English are
extremely particular in selecting their butlers, whilst they do not
select their barons at all, taking them as the accident of birth sends
them. The consequences include much ironic comedy. For instance, we have
in England a curious belief in first rate people, meaning all the people
we do not know; and this consoles us for the undeniable secondrateness
of the people we do know, besides saving the credit of aristocracy as an
institution. The unmet aristocrat is devoutly believed in; but he is
always round the corner, never at hand. That _the_ smart set exists;
that there is above and beyond that smart set a class so blue of blood
and exquisite in nature that it looks down even on the King with haughty
condescension; that scepticism on these points is one of the stigmata of
plebeian baseness: all these imaginings are so common here that they
constitute the real popular sociology of England as much as an unlimited
credulity as to vaccination constitutes the real popular science of
England. It is, of course, a timid superstition. A British peer or
peeress who happens by chance to be genuinely noble is just as isolated
at court as