oghly River, to which I have already referred,
is only one example of the universal disappearance of the picturesque.
In twenty-five years' time, every one will be living in a
drab-coloured, utilitarian world, from which most of the beauty and
every scrap of local colour will have been successfully eliminated. I
am lucky in having seen some of it.

I have also witnessed great changes in social habits. I do not refer so
much to the removal of the rigid lines of demarcation formerly
prevailing in English Society, as to the disappearance of certain
accepted standards. For instance, in my young days the possibility of
appearing in Piccadilly in anything but a high hat and a tail coat was
unthinkable, as was the idea of sitting down to dinner in anything but
a white tie. Modern usage has common sense distinctly on its side.
Again, in my youth the old drinking customs lingered, especially at the
Universities. Though personally I have never been able to extract the
faintest gratification from the undue consumption of alcohol, my
friends do not seem to have invariably shared my tastes. I am certain
of one thing: it is to the cigarette that the temperate habits of the
twentieth century are due. Nicotine knocked port and claret out in the
second round. The acclimatisation of the cigarette in England only
dates from the "seventies." As a child I remember that the only form of
tobacco indulged in by the people that I knew was the cigar. A
cigarette was considered an effeminate foreign importation; a pipe was
unspeakably vulgar.

In my mother's young days before her marriage, the old hard-drinking
habits of the Regency and of the eighteenth century still persisted. At
Woburn Abbey it was the custom for the trusted old family butler to
make his nightly report to my grandmother in the drawing-room. "The
gentlemen have had a good deal to-night; it might be as well for the
young ladies to retire," or "The gentlemen have had very little
to-night," was announced according to circumstances by this faithful
family retainer. Should the young girls be packed off upstairs, they
liked standing on an upper gallery of the staircase to watch the
shouting, riotous crowd issuing from the dining-room. My father very
rarely touched wine, and I believe that it was the fact that he, then
an Oxford undergraduate, was the only sober young man amongst the rowdy
troop of roysterers that first drew my mother to him, though he had
already proposed marriage