g age, called
poetry.

Geoffrey Ripon had come to his last legs. And he was one of the few
aristocrats of his generation who had ever (metaphorically speaking)
had any legs worth considering. When O'Donovan Rourke had been President
of the British Republic, that good-natured Irishman, who had been at
school with Ripon's father, had given him a position in the legation at
Paris; but when the Radicals overthrew Rourke's government, Ripon lost
his place. And Ripon could not but think it hard that he, Geoffrey
Ripon, by all right and law Earl of Brompton, Viscount Mapledurham in
the peerage of Ireland, etc., etc., should that afternoon have been
fined ten shillings and costs for poaching on what had been his own
domain.

His great-uncle looked down upon him with that exasperating equanimity
that only a canvas immortality can give--his great-uncle who fell on the
field of Tel-el-Kebir, dead as if the Arab bullet had sped from a
worthier foe, in the days when England had a foreign policy and could
spare her soldiers from the coast defence. And his grandfather, who
smirked from another coroneted frame behind him, had been a great leader
in the Liberal party under Gladstone, Lord Liverpool, the grand old man
who stole Beaconsfield's thunder to guard the Suez Canal, that road to
India which he, like another Moses, had made for their proud legions
through the Red Sea.

And now Ripon was living in his porter's lodge, all that was still his
of the great Ripon estates, with his empty title left him, minus the
robes and coronet no longer worn; and his King, George the Fifth, an
exile, wandering with his semblance of a court in foreign lands.

The world moves quickly as it grows older, with an accelerated velocity,
like that of a falling stone; and it is hard for us of the present day
to picture the England of King Albert Edward. The restlessness and
poverty of the masses; the agitations in Ireland, feebly, blindly
protesting with dynamite and other rude weapons against foreign
oppression; the shameful monopoly of land, the social haughtiness of the
titled classes, the luxury and profligacy of the court--perhaps even at
the opening of our story, poor England was hardly worse off. But then
came the change. Gradually the bone and sinew of the country sought
refuge in emigration. The titled classes, after mortgage upon mortgage
of their valueless land, were forced to break their entails to sell
their estates. And at last, when the g