sence of all serious
interest in life, which mark the leisure classes abroad, follow men
sometimes even to extreme old age. The successive changes of temperament
and taste which we mark at home have no correlatives abroad.
The foreigner inhabits at sixty the same sort of world he did at
six-and-twenty: he does not dance so much, but he lingers in the
ballroom, and he is just as keenly alive to all the little naughty talk
that amused him forty years ago, and folly as much interested to hear
that the world is just as false and as wicked as it used to be when he
was better able to contribute to its frailty and wickedness.

Not one of these men, with their padded pectorals and dyed whiskers,
will admit that they are of an age to require comfort. They are ardent
youths all of them, turning night into day as of old, and no more
sensible of fatigue from late hours, hot rooms, and dissipation, than
they were a quarter of a century back.

Can you fancy anything less clubable than a set of men like this? You
might as well set before me the stale bon-bons and sugar-plums of a
dessert for a dinner, as ask me to take such people for associates and
companions. The tone of everlasting trifling disgraces even idleness;
and these men contrive in their lives to reverse the laws of physics,
since it is by their very levity that they fall.

The humoristic temperament is the soul of Club-life. It is the keen
appreciation of others in all their varied moods and shades of feeling
that imparts the highest enjoyment to that strange democracy, the
Club; and foreigners are immensely deficient in this element. They are
infinitely readier, smarter, and wittier than Englishmen. They will hit
in an epigram what we would take an hour to embrace in an argument; but
for the racy pleasure of seeing how such a man will listen to this,
what such another will say to that, how far individuality, in fact, will
mould and fashion the news of the day, and assimilate its mental food
to its own digestive powers, there is nothing like the Englishman--and
especially the Englishman of the Club.

There is nothing like Major Pendennis to be found from Trolhatten
to Messina, and yet Pendennis is a class with us; and it is in
the nicely-blended selfishness and complaisance, the egotism and
obligingness, that we find the purest element of Club-life.

The Parisian are the best--far and away the best--of all foreign Clubs;
best in their style of "get-up," decoration, a