The society of those days still retained much of the Regency’s tinsel. It glittered far more than it shone. Society was not then quite the Dresden china shop with porcelain figures of beaux and boxers, of topers and bull-dogs, of satyrs and nymphs, of city swains and simpering shepherdesses, that it had been ten or fifteen years before. Byron, with his savage sincerity, may be said to have dashed that smooth farrago to fragments. But it remained a society of veneer and affectation. It was a less natural age than our own, with fewer ideals and less outward movement. It was a more boisterous age than our own; public opinion exercised far less pressure. It was at once a coarser, a more sentimental and a more romantic, if a more bombastic age than ours. There still lingered the curiosity of Dr. Johnson’s age for the tittle-tattle of voyagers and the curiosities of barbarism. But it was not in the main a more material age, or, under the surface, a much more selfish one. Sympathy was local then. “The people were only half born.” It was, however, certainly a generation far more fastidious and exclusive; and at the same time it was certainly more appreciative of genius. You could then appeal to the few where you cannot now appeal to the many; for the few then had neither the narrowness of the _bourgeoisie_ nor the unlimited appetite of the million. “The invention,” smiles Disraeli so early as in his mock-classical squib, _The Infernal Marriage_, “by Jupiter of an aristocratic immortality, as a reward for a well-spent life on earth, appears to me to have been a very ingenious idea. It really is a reward very stimulative of good conduct before we shuffle off this mortal coil, and remarkably contrasts with the democracy of the damned. The Elysians, with a splendid climate, a teeming soil, and a nation made on purpose to wait upon them, of course enjoyed themselves very much.... The Elysians, indeed, being highly refined and gifted ... were naturally a very liberal-minded race and very capable of appreciating every kind of excellence. If a gnome, or a sylph, therefore, in any way distinguished themselves, ... aye! indeed, if the poor devils could do nothing better than write a poem or a novel, they were sure to be noticed by the Elysians, who always bowed to them as they passed by, and sometimes, indeed, even admitted them into their circles.”