oncentrated around him all the light part of the high world of London,
and London concentrated around it all the light part of the high world
of England. The Court was the focus where everything fascinating
gathered, and where everything exciting centred. Whitehall was an
unequalled club, with female society of a very clever and sharp sort
superadded. All this, as we know, is now altered. Buckingham Palace is
as unlike a club as any place is likely to be. The Court is a separate
part, which stands aloof from the rest of the London world, and which
has but slender relations with the more amusing part of it. The first
two Georges were men ignorant of English, and wholly unfit to guide and
lead English society. They both preferred one or two German ladies of
bad character to all else in London. George III. had no social vices,
but he had no social pleasures. He was a family man, and a man of
business, and sincerely preferred a leg of mutton and turnips after a
good day's work, to the best fashion and the most exciting talk. In
consequence, society in London, though still in form under the
domination of a Court, assumed in fact its natural and oligarchical
structure. It, too, has become an "upper ten thousand"; it is no more
monarchical in fact than the society of New York. Great ladies give the
tone to it with little reference to the particular Court world. The
peculiarly masculine world of the clubs and their neighbourhood has no
more to do in daily life with Buckingham Palace than with the
Tuileries. Formal ceremonies of presentation and attendance are
retained. The names of levee and drawing-room still sustain the memory
of the time when the king's bed-chamber and the queen's "withdrawing
room" were the centres of London life, but they no longer make a part
of social enjoyment: they are a sort of ritual in which nowadays almost
every decent person can if he likes take part. Even Court balls, where
pleasure is at least supposed to be possible, are lost in a London
July. Careful observers have long perceived this, but it was made
palpable to every one by the death of the Prince Consort. Since then
the Court has been always in a state of suspended animation, and for a
time it was quite annihilated. But everything went on as usual. A few
people who had no daughters and little money made it an excuse to give
fewer parties, and if very poor, stayed in the country, but upon the
whole the difference was not perceptible. The queen