sources of misery: a man suffers, and is tempted to throw down the ugly choking apparatus, when he is sure that it can be done secretly. On the one side constraint, on the other hypocrisy--these are the two vices of English civilization; and it was these which Byron, with his poet's discernment and his combative instincts, attacked. He had seen them from the first; true artists are perspicacious: it is in this that they outstrip us; we judge from hearsay and formulas, like cockneys; they, like eccentric beings, from accomplished facts, and things: at twenty-two he perceived the tedium born of constraint desolating all high life: "There stands the noble hostess, nor shall sink With the three-thousandth curtsy;... Saloon, room, hall, o'erflow beyond their brink, And long the latest of arrivals halts, 'Midst royal dukes and dames condemn'd to climb, And gain an inch of staircase at a time."[202] He wrote also: "He (the Count) ought to have been in the country during the hunting season, with 'a select party of distinguished guests,' as the papers term it. He ought to have seen the gentlemen after dinner (on the hunting days), and the soirée ensuing thereupon--and the women looking as if they had hunted, or rather been hunted; and I could have wished that he had been at a dinner in town, which I recollect at Lord C----'s--small, but select, and composed of the most amusing people. The dessert was hardly on the table, when, out of twelve, I counted five asleep."[203] As for the morals of the upper classes, this is what he says: "Went to my box at Covent Garden to-night.... Casting my eyes round the house, in the next box to me, and the next, and the next, were the most distinguished old and young Babylonians of quality.... It was as if the house had been divided between your public and your understood courtesans;--but the intriguantes much outnumbered the regular mercenaries. Now, where lay the difference between Pauline and her mother,... and Lady---- and daughter? except that the two last may enter Carlton and any other house, and the two first are limited to the Opera and b-- house. How I do delight in observing life as it really is!--and myself, after all, the worst of any!"[204] Decorum and debauchery; moral hypocrites, "_qui mettent leurs vertus en mettant leurs gants blancs_";[205] an oligarchy which, to preserve its places and its sinecures, ravages Europe, preys on Ireland, and excites the people by making use of the grand words, virtue, Christianity, and liberty: there was truth in all these invectives.[206] It is only thirty years since the ascendancy of the middle class diminished the privileges and corruptions of the great; but at that time hard words could with justice be thrown at their heads. Byron said, quoting from Voltaire: