, which can
easily be penetrated. Speaking quite apart from politics, one may say
that the British aristocracy year by year makes itself cheaper and
cheaper, losing thereby its title to existence. The city clerk can do
better than Dick Swiveller, and decorate his bed-sitting room with a
photographic gallery of _decolletees_ duchesses, and bare-legged ladies
of noble family, and he is able to obtain a vast amount of information,
part of it quite accurate, concerning their doings.

Yet, even when we get far higher than the city clerk, and reach the
fashionable playwright, to say nothing of the dramatic critic, there are
mysteries unexplorable. There is a Lhassa in Mayfair, our efforts to
attain which are Burked.

A big Bohemian, sporting "smart-set," Anglo-American, South African
millionaire society exists which has in it a good many people
acknowledged by Debrett, and this it is quite easy to enter. There are a
score or so of peers, and twice the number of peeresses, as well as
smaller fry, possessing titles by birth or marriage, with whom it is not
difficult, and not always desirable, to become acquainted. The real
aristocracy looks askance at them. When we see pictures of these, or
studies on the French stage of the titled _faiseurs_, or
_rastaquoueres_, we know that they may be correct, and indeed the
figures in them have become to such an extent despecialised that we can
judge of the truthfulness of the study by the simple process of assuming
that they do not possess any titles at all.

Still, there remains a world beyond, where, to some extent at least,
manners and ideas are different from those of the upper-middle-class, or
the middle-middle-class, to whichever it may be that our craft belongs.
People will recollect Thackeray's remarks concerning the impossibility
of getting to know the real domestic life of your French friends;
whether his words are well founded or not, they illustrate the essential
unknowability to the outsider of some of the great noble and even
untitled county families of the land. It is said that there still exist
some great ladies who have not cheapened themselves by allowing their
photographs to be published in the sixpenny papers. Yet our dramatists,
or some at least, seem to think that a play is vulgar unless amongst the
_dramatis personae_ one can find a lord or two.

Perhaps indolence is their excuse. You call a character the Duke of
Smithfield, and thereby save yourself much trouble