nd dimly to
apprehend that the young men laughed at him. Such melancholy musings
must come across many a Pall Mall philosopher. The men, thinks he,
are not such as they used to be in his time: the old grand manner and
courtly grace of life are gone: what is Castlewood House and the present
Castlewood, compared to the magnificence of the old mansion and owner?
The late lord came to London with four postchaises and sixteen horses:
all the North Road hurried out to look at his cavalcade: the people in
London streets even stopped as his procession passed them. The present
lord travels with five bagmen in a railway carriage, and sneaks away
from the station, smoking a cigar in a brougham. The late lord in autumn
filled Castlewood with company, who drank claret till midnight: the
present man buries himself in a hut on a Scotch mountain, and passes
November in two or three closets in an entresol at Paris, where his
amusements are a dinner at a cafe and a box at a little theatre. What a
contrast there is between his Lady Lorraine, the Regent's Lady Lorraine,
and her little ladyship of the present era! He figures to himself the
first, beautiful, gorgeous, magnificent in diamonds and velvets,
daring in rouge, the wits of the world (the old wits, the old polished
gentlemen--not the canaille of to-day with their language of the
cabstand, and their coats smelling of smoke) bowing at her feet; and
then thinks of to-day's Lady Lorraine--a little woman in a black silk
gown, like a governess, who talks astronomy, and labouring classes,
and emigration, and the deuce knows what, and lurks to church at eight
o'clock in the morning. Abbots-Lorraine, that used to be the noblest
house in the county, is turned into a monastery--a regular La Trappe.
They don't drink two glasses of wine after dinner, and every other man
at table is a country curate, with a white neckcloth, whose talk is
about Polly Higson's progress at school, or widow Watkins's lumbago.
"And the other young men, those lounging guardsmen and great lazy
dandies--sprawling over sofas and billiard-tables, and stealing off to
smoke pipes in each other's bedrooms, caring for nothing, reverencing
nothing, not even an old gentleman who has known their fathers and their
betters, not even a pretty woman--what a difference there is between
these men, who poison the very turnips and stubble-fields with their
tobacco, and the gentlemen of our time!" thinks the Major; "the breed
is gone--ther