sense of the "inalienable" rights and comforts of the individual,
contrives to accommodate itself. I do not mean to say that usage in
England is always uncomfortable and arbitrary. On the contrary, few
strangers can be unfamiliar with that sensation (a most agreeable one)
which consists in perceiving in the excesses of a custom which has
struck us at first as a mere brutal invention, a reason existing in the
historic "good sense" of the English race. The sensation is frequent,
though in saying so I do not mean to imply that even superficially the
presumption is against the usages of English society. It is not, for
instance, necessarily against the custom of which I had it more
especially in mind to speak in writing these lines. The stranger in
London is forewarned that at Easter all the world goes out of town, and
that if he has no mind to be left as lonely as Marius on the ruins of
Carthage, he, too, had better make arrangements for a temporary absence.
It must be admitted that there is a sort of unexpectedness in this
vernal exodus of a body of people who, but a week before, were
apparently devoting much energy to settling down for the season. Half of
them have but lately come back from the country, where they have been
spending the winter, and they have just had time, it may be supposed, to
collect the scattered threads of town-life. Presently, however, the
threads are dropped and society is dispersed, as if it had taken a false
start. It departs as Holy Week draws to a close, and remains absent for
the following ten days. Where it goes is its own affair; a good deal of
it goes to Paris. Spending last winter in that city I remember how, when
I woke up on Easter Monday and looked out of my window, I found the
street covered, overnight, with a sort of snow-fall of disembarked
Britons. They made, for other people, an uncomfortable week of it. One's
customary table at the restaurant, one's habitual stall at the Theatre
Francais, one's usual fiacre on the cab-stand, were very apt to have
suffered pre-emption. I believe that the pilgrimage to Paris was this
year of the usual proportions: and you may be sure that people who did
not cross the Channel were not without invitations to quiet old places
in the country, where the pale, fresh primroses were beginning to light
up the dark turf and the purple bloom of the bare tree-mosses to be
freckled here and there with verdure. In England country-life is the
obverse of the medal,