Whatever tends to make the Home beautiful, attractive, romantic--to associate it with the ideas of pure pleasure and high duty--to connect it not only with all that was happiest, but also with all that was best, in early years--whatever fulfils these purposes purifies the fountain of national life. A home, to be perfectly a home, should "incorporate tradition, and prolong the reign of the dead." It should animate those who dwell in it to virtue and beneficence, by reminding them of what others did, who went before them in the same place, and lived amid the same surroundings. Thank God, such a home was mine. FOOTNOTES: [19] Henry Scott Holland. [20] Anna Maria, Duchess of Bedford, died in 1857. VII LONDON "O'er royal London, in luxuriant May, While lamps yet twinkled, dawning crept the day. Home from the hell the pale-eyed gamester steals; Home from the ball flash jaded Beauty's wheels; From fields suburban rolls the early cart; As rests the Revel, so awakes the Mart." _The New Timon_. When I was penning, in the last chapter, my perfectly sincere praises of the country, an incongruous reminiscence suddenly froze the genial current of my soul. Something, I know not what, reminded me of the occasion when Mrs. Bardell and her friends made their memorable expedition to the "Spaniards Tea-Gardens" at Hampstead. "How sweet the country is, to be sure!" sighed Mrs. Rogers; "I almost wish I lived in it always." To this Mr. Raddle, full of sympathy, rejoined: "For lone people as have got nobody to care for them, or as have been hurt in their mind, or that sort of thing, the country is all very well. The country for a wounded spirit, they say." But the general verdict of the company was that Mrs. Rogers was "a great deal too lively and sought-after, to be content with the country"; and, on second thoughts, the lady herself acquiesced. I feel that my natural temperament had something in common with that of Mrs. Rogers. "My spirit" (and my body too) had been "wounded" by Oxford, and the country acted as both a poultice and a tonic. But my social instinct was always strong, and could not be permanently content with "a lodge in the vast wilderness" of Woburn Park, or dwell for ever in the "boundless contiguity of shade" which obliterates the line between Beds and Bucks. I was very careful to observe the doctor's prescription of total idleness, but I found it was quite as easily obeyed in London as in the country. For three or four months then, of every year, I forsook the Home which just now I praised so lavishly, and applied myself, circumspectly indeed but with keen enjoyment, to the pleasures of the town. "_One look back_"--What was London like in those distant days, which lie, say, between 1876 and 1886?