'tigers'
swung behind cabriolets; women said, 'La!' and owned no property; there
were manners in the land, and pigsties for the poor; unhappy devils
were hanged for little crimes, and Dickens had but just begun to write.
Well-nigh two generations had slipped by--of steamboats, railways,
telegraphs, bicycles, electric light, telephones, and now these
motorcars--of such accumulated wealth, that eight per cent. had become
three, and Forsytes were numbered by the thousand! Morals had changed,
manners had changed, men had become monkeys twice-removed, God had
become Mammon--Mammon so respectable as to deceive himself: Sixty-four
years that favoured property, and had made the upper middle class;
buttressed, chiselled, polished it, till it was almost indistinguishable
in manners, morals, speech, appearance, habit, and soul from the
nobility. An epoch which had gilded individual liberty so that if a man
had money, he was free in law and fact, and if he had not money he was
free in law and not in fact. An era which had canonised hypocrisy, so
that to seem to be respectable was to be. A great Age, whose transmuting
influence nothing had escaped save the nature of man and the nature of
the Universe.

And to witness the passing of this Age, London--its pet and fancy--was
pouring forth her citizens through every gate into Hyde Park, hub of
Victorianism, happy hunting-ground of Forsytes. Under the grey heavens,
whose drizzle just kept off, the dark concourse gathered to see the
show. The 'good old' Queen, full of years and virtue, had emerged
from her seclusion for the last time to make a London holiday. From
Houndsditch, Acton, Ealing, Hampstead, Islington, and Bethnal Green;
from Hackney, Hornsey, Leytonstone, Battersea, and Fulham; and from
those green pastures where Forsytes flourish--Mayfair and Kensington,
St. James' and Belgravia, Bayswater and Chelsea and the Regent's Park,
the people swarmed down on to the roads where death would presently pass
with dusky pomp and pageantry. Never again would a Queen reign so long,
or people have a chance to see so much history buried for their money.
A pity the war dragged on, and that the Wreath of Victory could not
be laid upon her coffin! All else would be there to follow and
commemorate--soldiers, sailors, foreign princes, half-masted bunting,
tolling bells, and above all the surging, great, dark-coated crowd, with
perhaps a simple sadness here and there deep in hearts beneath black
c