so-called "fine people" are. Originality and power of intellect
belong to no class, but with information, cultivation, and the
mental advantages derived from education, "fine people" are perhaps
rather better endowed, as a class, than others. Their lavish means
for obtaining instruction, and their facilities for traveling, if
they are but moderately endowed by nature and moderately inclined
to profit by them, certainly enable them to see, hear, and know
more of the surface of things than others. This is, no doubt, a
merely superficial superiority; but I suppose that there are not
many people, and certainly no class of people, high, low, or of any
degree, who go much below surfaces.... If you knew how, long after
I have passed it, the color of a tuft of heather, or the smell of a
branch of honeysuckle by the roadside, haunts my imagination, and
how many suggestions of beauty and sensations of pleasure flow from
this small spring of memory, even after the lapse of weeks and
months, you would understand what I am going to say, which perhaps
may appear rather absurd without such a knowledge of my
impressions. I think I like fine places better than "fine people;"
but then one accepts, as it were, the latter for the former, and
the effect of the one, to a certain degree, affects one's
impressions of the other. A great ball at Devonshire House, for
instance, with its splendor, its brilliancy, its beauty, and
magnificence of all sorts, remains in one's mind with the
enchantment of a live chapter of the "Arabian Nights;" and I think
one's imagination is still more impressed with the fine residences
of "fine people" in the country, where historical and poetical
associations combine with all the refinements of luxurious
civilization and all the most exquisitely cultivated beauties of
nature to produce an effect which, to a certain degree, frames
their possessors to great advantage, and invests them with a charm
which is really not theirs; and if they are only tolerably in
harmony with the places where they live, they appear charming too.
I believe the pleasure and delight I take in the music, the lights,
the wreaths, and mirrors of a splendid ball-room, and the love I
have for the smooth lawns, bright waters, and lordly oaks of a fine
domain, would disgracefull