CHAPTER XIX A Symposium--Transatlantic Tendencies --After-Dinner Lectures--Education CHAPTER XX Algernon and Morgana--Opportunity and Repentance --The Forest in Winter CHAPTER XXI Skating--Pas de deux on the Ice--Congeniality --Flints among Bones CHAPTER XXII The Seven against Thebes--A Soliloquy on Christmas CHAPTER XXIII The two Quadrilles--Pope's Ombre--Poetical Truth to Nature--Cleopatra CHAPTER XXIV Progress of Sympathy--Love's Injunctions--Orlando Innamorato CHAPTER XXV Harry and Dorothy CHAPTER XXVI Doubts and Questions CHAPTER XXVII Love in Memory CHAPTER XXVIII Aristophanes in London CHAPTER XXIX The Bald Venus--Inez de Castro--The Unity of Love CHAPTER XXX A Captive Knight--Richard and Alice CHAPTER XXXI A Twelfth-Night Ball--Pantopragmatic Cookery --Modern Vandalism--A Bowl of Punch CHAPTER XXXII Hopes and Fears--Compensations in Life--Athenian Comedy--Madeira and Music--Confidences CHAPTER XXXIII The Conquest of Thebes CHAPTER XXXIV Christmas Tales--Classical Tales of Wonder--The Host's Ghost--A Tale of a Shadow--A Tale of a Bogle--The Legend of St. Laura CHAPTER XXXV Rejected Suitors--Conclusion GRYLL GRANGE Opinion governs all mankind, Like the blind leading of the blind:-- And like the world, men's jobbemoles Turn round upon their ears the poles, And what they're confidently told By no sense else can be controll'd. In the following pages the New Forest is always mentioned as if it were still unenclosed. This is the only state in which the Author has been acquainted with it. Since its enclosure, he has never seen it, and purposes never to do so. The mottoes are sometimes specially apposite to the chapters to which they are prefixed; but more frequently to the general scope, or, to borrow a musical term, the _motivo_ of the _operetta_. CHAPTER I MISNOMERS Ego sic semper et ubique vixi, ut ultimam quamque lucem, taraquam non redituram, consumerem.--Petronius Arbiter. Always and everywhere I have so lived, that I might consume the passing light as if it were not to return. 'Palestine soup!' said the Reverend Doctor Opimian, dining with his friend Squire Gryll; 'a curiously complicated misnomer. We have an excellent old vegetable, the artichoke, of which we eat the head; we have another of subsequent introduction, of which we eat the root, and which we also call artichoke, because it resembles the first in flavour, although, _me judice_, a very inferior affair. This last is a species of the helianthus, or sunflower genus of the _Syngenesia frustranea_ class of plants. It is therefore a girasol, or turn-to-the-sun. From this girasol we have made Jerusalem, and from the Jerusalem artichoke we make Palestine soup.' _Mr. Gryll._ A very good thing, doctor. _The Rev. Dr. Opimian._ A very good thing; but a palpable misnomer.