, Birch, and many
more. Those breakfast parties were then quite a new institution to me,
and it is curious how entirely they have gone out of fashion, though
Sir Harry Inglis, Member for Oxford, Gladstone, Member for Oxford,
Monckton Milnes (afterwards Lord Houghton), kept them up to the last,
while in Oxford they survived perhaps longer than anywhere else. They
had one great advantage, people came to them quite fresh in the
morning; but they broke too much into the day, particularly when, as
at Oxford, they ended with beer, champagne, and cigars, as was
sometimes the case in undergraduates' rooms.

How I was able to swim in that new stream, I can hardly understand
even now. I had been quite unaccustomed to this kind of society, and
was ignorant of its simplest rules. Bunsen, however, was never put out
by my gaucheries, but gave me friendly hints in feeling my way through
what seemed to me a perfect labyrinth. He told me that I had offended
people by not returning their calls, or not leaving a card after
having dined with them, paying the so-called digestion-visit to them.
How should I know? Nobody had ever told me, and I thought it obtrusive
to call. Nor did I know that in England to touch fish with a knife, or
to help yourself to potatoes with a fork, was as fatal as to drop or
put in an _h_. Nor did I ever understand why to cut crisp pastry on
your plate with a knife was worse manners than to divide it with a
fork, often scattering it over your plate and possibly over the
table-cloth. I must confess also that fish-knives always seemed to me
more civilized than forks in dividing fish, but fish-knives did not
exist when I first came to England. The really interesting side of all
this is to watch how customs change--come in and go out--and by what a
slow and imperceptible process they are discarded. Let us hope it is
by the survival of the fittest. When I first went to Oxford everybody
took wine with his neighbours, now it is only at such conservative
colleges as my own--All Souls--that the old custom still survives. But
then we have not even given up wax candles yet, and we look upon gas
as a most objectionable innovation.

Another great difficulty I had was in writing letters and addressing
my friends properly as Sir, or Mr. Smith, or Smith. I was told that
the rule was very simple and that you addressed everybody exactly as
they addressed you. What was the consequence? When I received an
invitation to dine with the