oward it was very much more engrossing. Thus, at a luncheon
party which I remember, a lady who had just reached London from Scotland
asked, by way of conversation, "What is going on to-night?" Lord
Houghton, who was one of the guests, answered, with all the gravity of a
judge summing up the evidence at a murder trial: "The only event of
to-night is the ball at Grosvenor House. There's nothing else worth
mentioning." "The ball of to-night," I heard him say on a similar
occasion, "will be Lady Harriet ----'s. That is sure to be good, for
Lady Harriet knows nobody, so she can't ask the wrong people, and her
list of invitations is in the hands of Augustus Savile." One of the
cleverest hostesses of that time, Lady G----, denounced to a friend the
impertinence of a "society paper" which had ventured to describe one of
her entertainments as "political"; and she had actually been to the
trouble of writing to inform the editor that her parties were
fashionable gatherings and not political menageries. The then Lord
Orford, a man of the highest literary culture, who professed to despise
society, and very rarely entered it, said that his own idea of real
happiness was "to go nowhere, and yet to be asked everywhere."

The seriousness with which society was taken, and the fear of its
judgments entertained even by many of its most conspicuous members, was
illustrated in a way now oddly belated by the celebrated "Lady A.," as
she was called, who occasionally lent her house in Hertford Street for
the month of August to her niece, Mrs. Marcus Hare. To this act of
kindness she attached one strict condition--namely, that the blinds of
the front windows should always be drawn down, lest anyone should
suspect that she--Lady A. herself--was guilty of remaining in London
when the fashionable season was over. A well-known social philosopher,
Lady E---- of T----, gave me in my early days an ultraserious lecture on
the principles by which a young man should be guided when beginning to
form acquaintances in a world like that of London. Her advice was almost
identical with that which, in Bulwer Lytton's novel, _Pelham_, is
administered to the hero by his mother. "You should be specially
careful," said Lady E---- to me, "as to people with whom you dine. Some
are remarkable for their _chefs_, some for the importance of their
company. There are all sorts of differences which a young man has to
learn. There are some evening parties," she said, "at which