lied that no guests were received who were
not known to the landlord either personally or through fit credentials.
Claridge's, until it was rebuilt, was an establishment of this
description. An unknown and unaccredited stranger could, by the mere
chance latchkey of wealth, no more obtain access to such hotels as these
than he could make himself to-day a member of some exclusive club by
placing the amount of the entrance fee in the hands of the hall porter.

But society, as it was in this relatively recent past, did not differ
from that of to-day merely in the fact of having been absolutely less
numerous and of less multifarious origin. It differed in the effects
which a mere restriction of numbers, coupled with inherited wealth and a
general similarity of antecedents, has on the quality of social
intercourse itself. In societies which are small, and yet at the same
time wealthy enough to secure for their members as a whole a monopoly of
varied experience, and invest them with a corporate power which cannot
be similarly concentrated in any other cohesive class, these members are
provided, like the believers in some esoteric religion, with subtle
similarities of tastes, behavior, and judgment, together with daily
opportunities of observing how far, and in what particulars, individuals
belonging to their class conform or do not conform to them. These are
constant provocations to refinements of mutual criticism which give life
and conversation a zest not attainable otherwise. Finally a society
which is small enough to possess such common standards, and whose
position is so well established as to pervade it with a sense that no
standards are superior to its own, tends to make manners perfectly
simple and natural which could otherwise be approached only by
conscious effort or affectation.

The result of such conditions, in so far as they prevailed in London
when London life became first familiar to myself, was that society, in
the narrower sense of the word, was taken in a spirit more serious than
that which it excites to-day. To say nothing of ambitious hostesses who
vied with one another in the entertainment of guests whose very names
had a ring of importance when printed in the _Morning Post_, society
was, even for men of conspicuous talent--such, for example, as Lord
Houghton, Augustus Savile, and Hayward--a matter as serious as politics,
or any war not of the first importance. To men like Christopher Sykes
and Kenneth H