he Theatre--The Lake--Divided Attraction
--Infallible Safety

CHAPTER XVII
Horse-Taming--Love in Dilemma--Injunctions--Sonorous Vases

CHAPTER XVIII
Lectures--The Power of Public Opinion--A New
Order of Chivalry

CHAPTER XIX
A Symposium--Transatlantic Tendencies
--After-Dinner Lectures--Education

CHAPTER XX
Algernon and Morgana--Opportunity and Repentance
--The Forest in Winter

CHAPTER XXI
Skating--Pas de deux on the Ice--Congeniality
--Flints among Bones

CHAPTER XXII
The Seven against Thebes--A Soliloquy on Christmas

CHAPTER XXIII
The two Quadrilles--Pope's Ombre--Poetical Truth to
Nature--Cleopatra

CHAPTER XXIV
Progress of Sympathy--Love's Injunctions--Orlando
Innamorato

CHAPTER XXV
Harry and Dorothy

CHAPTER XXVI
Doubts and Questions

CHAPTER XXVII
Love in Memory

CHAPTER XXVIII
Aristophanes in London

CHAPTER XXIX
The Bald Venus--Inez de Castro--The Unity of Love

CHAPTER XXX
A Captive Knight--Richard and Alice

CHAPTER XXXI
A Twelfth-Night Ball--Pantopragmatic Cookery
--Modern Vandalism--A Bowl of Punch

CHAPTER XXXII
Hopes and Fears--Compensations in Life--Athenian
Comedy--Madeira and Music--Confidences

CHAPTER XXXIII
The Conquest of Thebes

CHAPTER XXXIV
Christmas Tales--Classical Tales of Wonder--The
Host's Ghost--A Tale of a Shadow--A Tale of
a Bogle--The Legend of St. Laura

CHAPTER XXXV
Rejected Suitors--Conclusion

GRYLL GRANGE

Opinion governs all mankind,
Like the blind leading of the blind:--
And like the world, men's jobbemoles
Turn round upon their ears the poles,
And what they're confidently told
By no sense else can be controll'd.

In the following pages the New Forest is always mentioned as if it were
still unenclosed. This is the only state in which the Author has been
acquainted with it. Since its enclosure, he has never seen it, and
purposes never to do so.

The mottoes are sometimes specially apposite to the chapters to which
they are prefixed; but more frequently to the general scope, or, to
borrow a musical term, the _motivo_ of the _operetta_.

CHAPTER I

MISNOMERS

Ego sic semper et ubique vixi, ut ultimam quamque lucem,
taraquam non redituram, consumerem.--Petronius Arbiter.

Always and everywhere I have so lived, that I might consume
the passing light as if it were not to return.

'Palestine soup!' said the Reverend Doctor